“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he says hoarsely. “I don’t know why you’re doing this, but we mustn’t.”
“Come on.” I give him a little tug and he follows me into the bedroom and I finally let go and turn to face him. I feel a looseness in my innards as I look up at his face, a warmth at my crotch. “Kay. Sam. Whoever you are. I love you.”
I freeze, my eyes wide as I see his pupils dilate and he looks puzzled: I realize he didn’t hear me! “The magic phrase, Sam.” And I realize that I mean it. This isn’t the stinger-ampoule side effect of Jen’s malice, it’s something more profound. “What you said to me the other day, I’m saying it right back to you.” His expression clears. “Come here.”
He looks confused, now. “But if we—”
“No buts.” I reach over to him and tug at the knot on his necktie. It unclips from his collar, and I fumble at the top button. He chews his upper lip, and I can feel him trembling under my fingers, warm and immensely solid and reassuring. I take a step closer until I’m leaning up against him, and I feel through his clothes that he’s as excited as I am. “I want you, Sam, Kay. I don’t want to have any barriers between us, it hurts too much. I’ve nearly lost you twice now, I’m not going to lose you again.”
His hands on my shoulders, huge and powerful. His breath on my cheek. “I’m afraid this isn’t going to work, Reeve.”
“Life’s frightening.” I get another button undone, then I look up to see his face above me, and I stop. I was about to stretch up to kiss him, but something about his expression isn’t right. “What is it?”
“What’s wrong with you?” he hisses. “This isn’t like you, Reeve, what’s happening?”
“I’m doing what I should have done last week.” I wrap my arms around him and lean my forehead against his shoulder. But he’s started a train of thought going, running on rails right through my lust simple: “I’ve had a bad experience. It put a lot of things into a new perspective, Sam. You ever had one of those? Done something stupid and crazy and maybe a bit evil and only realized afterward that you’d jeopardized everything you ever cared about? Been there, done that—more than once—most recently the day before yesterday, and I don’t want to be defined by my mistakes. So I’m walking away from them. I want us to work, I don’t want to—”
“Reeve, stop it. Stop this. You’re scaring me.”
Huh? I pull back and stare at him, offended. It’s like a bucket of ice water in the face.
“This isn’t you speaking, is it?” he asks. He sounds certain.
“Yes it is!” I insist.
“Really?” He looks skeptical. “You wouldn’t have thrown yourself at me like this last week.”
“Yes I would! In a moment, if I wasn’t so conflicted.” Then what he’s trying to tell me without actually saying it in so many words sinks in, and I jam one hand across my mouth to keep from screaming in frustration.
“So you’re not conflicted now,” he says, gently leading me over toward the bed and pushing me down on the edge of it, sitting next to me so we’re shoulder to shoulder. “But you were conflicted when you went into the hospital, Reeve. You’ve been conflicted as long as I’ve known you. So you’ll pardon my momentary suspicion when, the moment you get home, you throw yourself at me? After swearing off sex entirely just a week ago.”
It’s there in front of me, a yawning abyss of my own making, no longer avoidable since Dr. Hanta applied her fixative. I am stuck with the me that I have become, unable to restore that which is missing. “I’m not who I was a week ago,” I say tightly. “She fixed the memory leakage, for one thing. And I’ve acquired a restored sense of my own mortality from somewhere I don’t want to talk about, except it’s not anything that they did to me. I think.” But a cynical corner of my mind says, You said “I love you,” didn’t you? Last time you did that, your CY-hack was triggered. Someone’s tweaked your netlink, haven’t they?
The cold horror that steals over you when you wake up unsure whether you died in the night has just stroked its bony hand along my spine. Somewhere between the cooling puddle of blood in the library basement and Dr. Hanta’s sly consent, I seem to have lost something. Sam’s right, old-me wouldn’t be doing this. Old-me would be scared of different things, and rightly so—and I’m still scared of Fiore and Yourdon, and I still want out of their perverse managed society, but we’re on board a MASucker, and I know what that means.
“I still want you,” I tell him. Although a worm of doubt adds, “I’m just not sure I want you for the same reasons I wanted you last week.”
“They’ve gotten to you.”
I laugh shakily. “They got to me a long time ago. I just didn’t notice until now.” I clutch at him, but as much from terror as lust. “Why are you here, Kay? Why did you sign up for the experiment?”
“I followed you.”
“Bullshit!” I can see it now. “That’s not enough. And don’t tell me it was to get away from your time with the ice ghouls. Why did you go there? What were you running away from?”
Sam is silent and unresponsive for a while. “If I tell you, you’ll probably hate me.”
“So?” I see an opportunity. Shuffling up onto the bed I pull my legs up under my dress and sit cross-legged with my hands in my lap. “If I listen to your story and I don’t hate you afterward, will you let me fuck you?”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with—”
“Let me be the judge of my motives, Sam.” Even if they’re contaminated. “You keep trying to second-guess me. It’s getting to be a bad habit. Before, I didn’t want to sleep with you for reasons that made sense at the time. Then when the reasons no longer apply, you say I’m acting out of character. You don’t give me credit for being able to change of my own volition.”
He shakes his head.
“Have you any idea how insulting that is?”
“That’s not what I meant—”
“I am capable of change, that’s why I’m here!” I draw a deep breath. “I’m not who I was during the war, Sam, or before it, or even after it. I’m who I am now, which is the end product of all those other people becoming one another. They can put you into the dark ages, but they can’t put the dark ages into you, not short of truncating your life expectancy to about three gigasecs or erasing so many memories you might as well be . . .” I trail off. I’ve got a strange feeling that I just realized something vitally important, but I’m not sure what.
He looks at me oddly. “You’ll hate me,” he says. “I did terrible things.”
“So?” I shrug. “I did bad things, too. People out there wanted to kill me, Sam. I thought it was something to do with a mission I was on and had accidentally erased, but now I’m not so sure; maybe they were just after me because of, well, one of the people I used to be. A person who fought in the war. A combatant.”
He rocks back and forth thoughtfully. “Nobody here but us war criminals,” he says.
It is very interesting to discover that the phrase “my blood runs cold” actually reflects a physical sensation. It is much less pleasant to do so while sitting next to someone you love unconditionally and currently can’t share a room with without needing a change of underwear, and who’s just triggered that sensation in your head. And it’s even worse when you realize that what he said applies to you, too. “Nobody here but us monsters,” I say, trying to be flippant. “Or amnesiacs haunted by the ghosts of their past lives.”
“Has it occurred to you that YFH-Polity might be very convenient for a certain type of person?” Sam asks slowly.
I’m getting impatient. “Are you going to lay me down on this bed and have sex with me after you finish lecturing me to death?”
He turns a funny color. “If we both still want to.”
If we both still want to. Well, I guess you just have to work with what you’ve got. “I’m all ears,” I say.
He shudders. “Don’t say that.”
“Well it’s”—not literally—“true. Sort of.”
<
br /> “Where were you when the war broke out?” he asks.
Oops. I didn’t expect him to ask that. Revealing that kind of thing would be a big no-no under normal circumstances—a breach of operational security that could allow an opponent to work out exactly who you are and thereby figure out all sorts of useful things about you, enough to endanger you operationally, because virtually everything you ever did in public is stored in a database somewhere. But—we’re in the guts of a MASucker, and if I’m not mistaken, there’s only one data channel in or out, and Sam isn’t part of the cabal, and I reckon the current risk of our being eavesdropped on is low. Nor are these normal circumstances.
“I was aboard a MASucker, interviewing the crew,” I admit. “We were cut off for more than a gig after the net went down.” Sam makes a thoughtful noise. “Your turn,” I prompt, trying to change the subject.
“I was an auditor.” Sam is silent again. “That’s why they drafted me.”
“They?”
“The Solipsist Nation: Third Unforgivable Thoughtcrime Battalion, to be precise. They were doing a search and sweep for unsecured memory temples through the disconnected segment I was stranded in, less than a hundred kilosecs after Curious Yellow cut loose. I’d already been censored and compromised, and they just grabbed me and added me to their distributed denial of consciousness array. I spent the next couple of megs scrambling graveyards beyond retrieval, then they got around to actually in-processing me and assigned me to erasing archive trails.”
Ugh. And I thought what I did in the Linebarger Cats was ugly? I must shiver or give some other cue because Sam pulls away from me slightly. “What clades did the Solipsist Nation align with?” I ask, trying to distract him.
“What clades?” He shakes his head. “It was us against everyone, Reeve. You think anybody in their right minds would ally themselves with an aggressively solipsistic borganism?”
“But you”—I force myself to lean closer as I ask; he’s tense and unhappy—“you were just a component, weren’t you?”
He shakes his head. “I had some degree of autonomy, by the time the war ended the Nation had taken to investing us with a modicum of free will. I was . . . well. Before the war, I looked pretty much the way you do right now. The Nation upgraded me, turned me into a combat ogre—and put me on occupation duty. You know what they called us? Rape machines. If you want to break someone’s will to resist, you can go via the brain, but if the netlink’s been fried by EMP, you have to get physical. They gave us penises with backward-facing spines, you know that? We did . . . terrible things. Eventually we were overrun—my segment was overrun—by a consortium of enemies, and they offlined us and when I woke up I was back to being me again, but a me with memories and a large chunk of the Nation wedged in my head. I spent half a meg in my cell disbelieving in the walls and floor before I realized that they had to exist for the same reason I had to exist. And while I was part of the Nation I did things.” Deep breath. “Things that left me ashamed to be human. Or male.”
“Yeah, but.” I stall. “You weren’t yourself. Right?”
“I wish I could believe that.” He sounds forlorn. “I wouldn’t do that kind of thing now, but then—I remember believing in what I was doing. That was part of why I did the ice ghoul thing, I didn’t want to be part of a species that could dream something like the Solipsist Nation into existence. I wanted—we wanted—to think every thought in the human phase-space. Do you know what it’s like to be hungry and always eating and never full? Solipsist Nation wrecked memory temples out of spite because they contained thoughts we hadn’t originated. And I contributed to that. I enthusiastically optimized the processes. I did it because I wanted to.” He takes a deep breath. “I killed people, Reeve. I killed people permanently.”
“Then we’re not so different.”
“You?” He stares. “But you said you’d . . .”
“I started the war on a MASucker; I didn’t stay there.” I take a deep breath, because I don’t think I can dodge this one. “I volunteered. Joined the Linebarger Cats, combat operations. Spent nearly a gigasec being an armored regiment. Ended up in Psyops.”
“Well.” His voice is shaky. “I didn’t expect that.”
“What proportion of the people here do you think fought in the wars?”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“People who were there don’t want to remember it. Almost as soon as we’d got a local cease-fire established, people were slinking off to the surgeon-confessors.”
“Yes.” He pauses. “But Reeve, I’m a monster. There are things in my head—even after excision—that I don’t like to visit. You don’t want to get too close to me.”
“Sam.” I shift toward him. “I’m . . . There are things I tried to bury, too. I could say the same. Do you care?”
“What, about what you did?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Well, then.” It’s my turn to sound shaky. “What I said earlier stands. A bargain, and you agreed to it, hmm?”
He shrinks away. “I didn’t know.”
I swallow to try and clear my dry mouth. “I don’t mean right now,” I say. To my surprise, I mean it. “But I still want you, just as soon as you get used to the idea that I want you and I’m still me. You don’t have to project your hatred of what you were forced to do onto me. And besides, I didn’t see any barbs on your cock the other night.”
“But you’ve changed too much!” He bursts out, like an iced-over air valve finally cutting loose. “Since Dr. Hanta saw you. Before that, you were you: You were moody and thoughtful, you were cynical, you were funny—I don’t have the words for it. Whatever she did, it’s changed you, Reeve. You’d refuse to do something just because it was expected of you; now you’re trying to make me fuck you! Do you really want to get trapped in YFH for the foreseeable future? Trapped and pregnant, too?”
I think about it for a moment. “What’s the problem?” Hanta is a more than conscientious doctor, and I’m confident I can survive a pregnancy—after all, every female mammal in my family tree did it before me, didn’t they? How bad can it be?
“Reeve.” Now he’s looking at me as if I’ve morphed into battle-form, sprouting spikes and guns and armor before his eyes. I giggle. It’s like he’s seen a ghost! “What have they done to you?”
“Offered me a way out of having been a monster.” I lean toward him hopefully. “Give me a kiss?”
DESPITE my best planning, we do not make love in the end.
In fact, when I finish the cleaning up and come to bed, Sam gets up and, with sleepy dignity, insists he’s sleeping alone.
I am so angry and frustrated that I could cry. My problem is easily defined—it’s the solution that eludes me. It’s not that I’ve changed a lot, but—with or without Hanta’s prompting—I’ve decided to take some time out of struggling, and the outward manifestation looks like a huge switch. Sam simply hasn’t caught up with me yet. It’s very disturbing to be around someone who seems to have inverted all their values and beliefs, and I know if it was Sam who’d been in hospital and come home glassy-eyed and different, I’d be incredibly upset. But I wish he wouldn’t project his anxiety onto me—I’m all right, in fact I’m better than I’ve been at any time since I first woke up in the custody of the surgeon-confessors.
Yes, there’s a problem here: Fiore and Yourdon are doing something very dubious with a serialized copy of Curious Yellow, they’ve figured out a way to defeat the security patch in everyone’s implants; and they seem to be researching how to use social control rules installed via CY to create an emergent dictatorship. But—and this is the important question—why should I care? Haven’t I been through enough already? I don’t have to let myself be tortured by my own memories; I’ve already nearly killed myself trying to do what Sanni and the others in Security Cell Blue wanted. I’ve done my duty, and failed. And now . . .
My dirty little secret is that while I was in hospital I realized that I could
give up. I’ve got Sam. I’ve got a job that has the potential to be as interesting as I want it to be. I can settle down and be happy here for a while, even though the amenities are primitive and some of the neighbors are not to my taste. Even dictatorships need to provide the vast majority of their citizens with a comfortable everyday life. I don’t have to keep fighting, and if I give up the struggle for a while, they’ll leave me alone. I can always go back to it later. Nobody will scream if I stop, except maybe Sam, and he’ll adapt to the new me eventually.
All of which is great in theory, but it doesn’t help when I’m crying myself to sleep, alone.
16
Suspense
THE next day is Friday. I wake up late, and by the time I get downstairs, Sam has already gone to work. I feel drained, enervated by the aftereffects of my infection and the stupid climbing attempt, so I don’t do much. I end up spending most of the day shuttling between the bedroom and the kitchen, catching up on my reading and drinking cups of weak tea. When Sam comes home—really late, and he’s already eaten at the steak diner in town and had a glass or three of wine—I demand to know where he’s been, and he clams up. Neither of us wants to back down, so we end up not talking.
On Saturday I come downstairs in time to find him putting the lawn mower away. “You’ll need to tidy up in the garage,” he says by way of greeting.
“Why?” I ask.
“I need to stash some stuff.”
“Uh-huh. What stuff?”
“I’m going out. See you later.”
He means it—ten minutes after that he’s gone, off in a taxi to who knows where. And it’s our most significant communication in two days.
I kick myself for being stupid. Stupid is the watchword of the day. So I go into the garage and look for stuff to throw out. It’s a scrapyard of unfinished projects, but I think the welding gear can go, and the half-finished crossbow, and most of the other junk I’ve been tinkering with under the mistaken idea that what I need to escape from is where I am, rather than who I am. Some bits are missing anyway; I guess Sam’s already made a start on clearing it out to make room for his golf clubs or whatever. So I heap my stuff in one corner and pull a tarpaulin over it. Out of sight, out of mind, out of garage, that’s what I say.
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