“You sound just like Roy,” Augustine said. We all laughed, with relief as much as anything else, but I thought how strange it was—and how pleasant—to find him still alive in the most important ways. I drank my tea and listened to the wind gathering strength outside for another autumn blow.
“So, Ajay,” Lula said, leaning forwards to put her empty cup on the table, “how's the bike business these days?”
After we had finished the tea, Ajay took the others through to the bicycle shop to show them around. I sat on the sofa for a few more minutes of blissful ignorance and listened to the happy sound of their voices together: the three people in the world I most dearly loved. They were discussing the remarkable staying power of the design itself, which was still the most popular form of local transport.
“Ah, here it is,” Augustine was saying in schoolboyish glee, “the first mass production object that turned ordinary human beings into cyborgs.”
Lula laughed and there was the soft burr of a spinning freewheel. “No changes to the basic design since the addition of the chain drivetrain. It's one of the great designs, a real piece of evolution. A species in its own right. Stable, nonsentient, individually variable…occasional teratology.”
“The unicycle and the tricycle?” Augustine guessed, naming the mutant diversions from the norm, the equivalent of the two-headed calf.
“Not forgetting the tandem,” Ajay said.
Engineers. All my life I've been surrounded by engineers of one sort or another. I suppose psychology could be seen as a kind of engineering, too. At least, I've sometimes tried to see it that way, just to make myself fit the mould. And I can admire a gasket as much as the next person, but true engineers never lose that spark of exhilaration.
They were clearly going to be in there for some time. I took myself off to my room to find out what Roy had thought fit to send me through the medium of Jane's clipper.
The cut surface of my nail was rough as I touched it with my thumb while climbing the stairs. She must have cut a binary series into the blades and relied on my nail being even enough not to screw up the sequence. I took my overnight bag with me so they would think I was unpacking. In my room was the only multi-interface port in the house. Ajay shared my father's dislike of access points being located anywhere they did not absolutely have to be.
“Like being spied upon every minute,” he used to say, always sitting with his back to them. Dad wanted work to be at work and home to be a little hideaway from the world. Looking at my panel, I felt the usual stab of guilt for insisting it be left there beside my broadcast wall unit. It looked like a badly fitted light switch, the scratches in the wallpaper, which had been made the day it was installed, still there—as were the rose bedspread, the velvet curtains, and the faded inkstains where I had once drawn spaceships bombing a planet outpost on the expensive damask. The broadcast wall—which occupied the top half of the wall opposite the bed—was showing my favourite girlhood scene of an uneventful day in the life of some horses in a hilly field. The field was bordered with dry-stone walls and the sky was always blue in daylight, starlit at night. The palomino, the black, and the Appaloosa wandered about. Their movements were directed by the small horse-behaviour program I had made in my second year at Berwick. It was faulty and the black tended to become caught in a loop of fly-stamping, but the house noticed it after a while and jolted the code.
On the far wall, looking over the street, the window was open and a faint smell of gardenias filled the air. The house had recognized me and set my preferences as soon as I walked in the door. It did not know that those preferences had changed. I leant against the wall for a moment, touched by its loyalty, blindness, ignorance. Now I knew why I stayed away so much. In my memory I could revisit the past as if it were the present, but coming here was the present with the past half-lost inside it, visibly decaying and untouchable.
The screen for example. It was the same screen I had used to hack past my parents' ban on late-night viewing, which had shown me the miracle of Buster Crabbe whirling crazily into the clouds in a gold cigar. The grand opus of 1938 and ’39, which I hadn't even known Roy had looked at in his life—if those messages in the HughIes were from Roy. Maybe they were independent, and from Nine itself.
I activated the multi-interface panel before I got too maudlin. It came to life and chuntered through a little routine to connect itself to the network and OptiNet. I got it to do a high-resolution scan on the end of my finger and asked it to decode whatever had been cut into my nail.
There was a delay as the scan was analysed and the type of code determined. The network showed me some goldfish to while away the time, wittily putting them into my horse pond on the wall. I waited. Thumps came from downstairs, indicating a trip to the toilet and a revisiting of the kitchen. Someone put on some music.
The fish vanished down an invisible plughole, and the words of the great wisdom of Roy Croft spiralled up into their place and wavered deep within the green water.
Find the Source.
I didn't know what I had expected, but I knew that wasn't it.
Dumbfounded and almost shaking with something like apoplexy, I sent a stream of instructions via my implant to eradicate the transaction. I sent a brief call out to Peaches, but she was out of contact, quite rightly. I wanted to ask her if she had any idea what “the Source” might be. I also had wanted someone to say “That goddamned ROY!” to, several times. Trust him to send something as useless as that. As irritating. Finally I turned over and flung myself into the duvet, thumping my arms and legs up and down and screaming into the soft mass. When I ran out of steam, I couldn't figure out if I was crying or laughing. After a while I got up to fix my face before going downstairs, turned to shut off the interface panel, and was surprised to see the hologram unit struggling into life. The tiny wall-mounted projector, old enough to be almost antique, issued an ultrafine water mist into the air and beamed a black and white figure onto the rumpled bed.
The hologram was so grey it seemed to suck all the colour out of the room.
“Hi, Nine,” I said, recognizing her. “Dressing up as Marlene Dietrich now?”
Marlene waved one of her narrow little hands. “Ant a few others,” she said airily. She was wearing the dressing gown and black stockings outfit from The Blue Angel, that fantasy of prewar Germanic decadence. “I come to say, perhaps I should remove your code transaction from the security copies like it never existed? Perhaps you are not yet understanding this little charade of mine either, hey? But Roy always told me how much you enjoyed the cryptic little game. But you needn't worry. I only play when it matter.” She lifted a cigarette in a long holder to her black-lipsticked mouth and gave a husky, brittle laugh, pencil eyebrows looped in twin inverted smiles. “Oh, dat Roy, such a joker.”
Marlene swung one of her feet in a flounce of amusement at my scowl and vanished.
No matter how much I tried I could not establish any link up to the OptiNet orbital site. As if Roy's idiocy were not sufficient, now Nine had decided to have a go as well. I damned them both to hell. Stuff his stupid message. I wasn't going to do a thing about it. All four of us went out to dinner in the city and I didn't mention any of it once, and after that I had difficulties of another kind to deal with.
As usual at the end of the day, spending a few minutes lying awake before sleep, the most naggingly insoluble problems revolved before my mind's eye in a teasing mobile. Occasionally something twirled into view, but was just as likely to show some new and appalling angle of impenetrability. I watched the empty message, the emptier funeral, and the peculiarity of Nine's holograms revolve: Russian roulette with ideas. At the same time I was aware of Augustine in the bathroom next door. The air-towel whispered. Water sloshed, stopped. A toothbrush was plied.
Instead of feeling bright and expectant—as lovers we were never red hot, but always comforting, occasionally passionate—I felt insular. Vague ideas of how raunchy I might have been expected to be flitted about and made me resentful and guilty.
Not for the first time, I wondered if it would be better for both of us if I just finished the whole thing. We saw each other very seldom and although sometimes it was fun to play strangers, I was in no mood for it now. I hoped that he would feel the same, and knew I would be so disappointed if he were not passionate about me still. Stupid and insecure—that's what being a woman seems to mean to me, I was sorry to repeatedly discover. And the thought of actually severing the link produced a loneliness so tearing that, as usual, I put it to the back of my mind.
I watched him emerge from the bathroom and cross the threshold, closing the door behind him. The light was very dim once the door was closed and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust. His silhouette put his washkit onto the dresser, and the gleam of the nightlight shone in grey planes on his half-wet skin. He looked more muscular than I remembered, I thought, shuffling backwards in the little bed to make room, and shivering with the cold of the sheet. At his wrists and on his pelvic bone waterdrops glittered like jewels.
A colder shiver ran through me. I sat up suddenly.
Not water. Metal. The tiny points of orange light were anchored in the reflection of receptor ports, located at the major neural junctions. I saw them all suddenly. Horrid surgical squares bitten into the soft skin at the base of his neck, in the middle of his back, at the backs of his knees. The skin around the largest ones was still puffy and bruised. The growth in his size was not muscle after all, but neural extensions from the interface ports burrowed between his ordinary muscle fibres to connect their contractions to the information processors just below the skin at the jack points.
“What have you done?” I said, my voice barely making a whisper. I knew already.
It was obvious he had decided to go ahead with direct research into his suits. We had talked it over a few months ago, and I thought I had persuaded him out of it. The technology was new and undisciplined, largely undocumented.
He turned around and had the grace to look guilty. One hand touched the twin motes on his other wrist in a tentative way. “It's the only way…” he began.
“Bullshit!” I hissed. “You could have run the suit on a simulator. You could have got some stupid soldier volunteer to do it if you have to have a real human being.” And then I saw the look in his eye and I knew that he was already intimate with it, had worn it as a second skin, closer than close. “I don't believe this. Bastard! Why didn't you tell me?”
He sat on the edge of the bed and I kicked at him from under the covers, but I was out of shape and it was a blow which didn't even connect. “I was going to tell you,” he said, “but I knew you didn't want me to do it…I thought that if I showed you, and you didn't know before that, you'd see it was all right, I was still fine. I thought you could accept it.”
“It?” I said. “So what is it? Does it talk to you in Korean? Does it make you feel big and important, huh? Like Superman? Are you a real man in that—thing? Larger than life? A hero? Is that how it makes you? Are you happy now?”
“Anjuli…” he began.
“Don't touch me!” I smacked his hand away where he had been about to put it on my shoulder. “You cheat! You liar!”
He put his hands in his lap and sat bowed and chastened. My own hands were clutched together under my chin, like paws. In that instant of contact I had felt that his skin would transfer the memory of it, an alien contagion, directly into my mind. I was also ashamed of myself, that I could turn into this hopeless hysteric, worse than the shrinking bit-parts for weak women in films where they had almost no reason, but could only leap and scratch and react like miserable, tortured cats. For the first time ever I actually realized how it must feel to be like that. I had to escape before it went on long enough to mean something.
“I'm sorry,” I said. “I just thought we'd decided…you'd agreed you wouldn't.”
“Well, I had to,” he said. “They upgraded it to Security Class One. It's only me and Billingham and you and the AIs that even know the suits exist. And how else am I supposed to make them function?” But his face, when he looked up, was excited, just brimming over with the concealed outburst which would tell me all I did not want to know about the bewitching thing.
I knew that I ought to let him tell me, should nod and sympathize and share it, let his enthusiasm for work be his apology, and then over the next few months we could get back to an understanding. “Well,” I said, “then I guess your hand was forced. But that doesn't make it a reason not to tell me. You never said a thing. You could have told me. I would have tried to change my mind, maybe.”
“But not now?”
I shook my head.
“Julie, this isn't reasonable!” he almost shouted with frustration. For him, not being reasonable was akin to a crime against humanity. “If you could have understood then, you can understand it now!”
“You didn't give me a chance; that's what I don't understand!” I snarled, startled at how good it felt to really let rip at him, the vehemence with which the words flew. “Am I so predictable that you already know my mind before me? That makes me feel just great. I can just be put down and picked up like that goddamned suit, told what to think, how to think it. You can go fuck yourself if you think I'm going to stand for that kind of crap.”
“This is not about you!” he yelled, shaking the bed with his anger. “It was science—just a necessary procedure. I wanted time to tell you about it properly.”
“It is about the fact that you don't take me seriously enough to tell me the truth yourself, but have to wait until I find it out. You didn't tell me. You let me discover it like finding some stupid letter in your trouser pocket. All that time you played me false and you didn't care. That isn't science. That's just control and dependence. Go to hell.”
He sat, mouth thin and set, but curling with the beginnings of comprehension. “You're jealous.”
“Oh,” I said, not so much a word as an exclamation of irritation and helplessness in the face of the truth. For a moment I wanted to fly into a fury at the thought of letting go the anger which had been so satisfying and short-lived. Then sense came back and it fled. I had to laugh. “Oh yes,” I said, “I am. But why didn't you know sooner?”
“I'm just slow,” he said and smiled sheepishly.
He put his legs up and leant against the wall beside me, our shoulders touching. I leant my head down towards his shoulder and felt the bony weight of his skull rest against mine. “This is as close as we ever really get,” I said. “That stupid suit. It has it all. But, now I think about it, I wonder if we would like each other at all if we were let loose in one another's heads.”
“How would we keep any secrets?” he said and pressed his foot against mine.
“We're both cold,” I said, referring to our feet.
“Not cold,” he said, “just at a distance.”
As we fell asleep I let myself touch the outline of his midspinal port. My little finger slid into its skin-warm hard shell. A half inch down, the hermetic gate remained shut. I pressed against it and a fragment of poetry rose into my mind, a bit of Maya Angelou: The caged bird sings with a powerful trill, of things unknown but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom. In my mind's eye I saw the lonely face of Marlene Dietrich. “Oh, dat Roy,” she'd said.
I should get my hands on that diary. I should try to do something before it was too late.
Tears ran from my eyes and trickled on down to my mouth.
I slept restlessly and dreamt of biomechanoids, their heavy saurian skins scaled with metal, their movements resolute and perfect with measured direction. They were giants and I was tiny as a flea, more likely to be crushed under their wheels and feet than eaten, but they seemed to have no purpose greater than to terrify and eventually I was bored with fear and woke. Awake in the early morning, I spied on the ports at Augustine's neck. Nobody made biomechanoid solutions these days. It's something of a dead end, an anorak technology. It was undeveloped, hard to do, high on wastage of
materials, expensive, and rarely as efficient as any other solution. It wasn't elegant, and ethically in an unpleasant grey area most people don't like to think about. But Augustine's baby, in theory, had a kind of elegance. It was a war mek, developed by the Chinese as a method of producing a great and efficient army at short notice: a viable smart-armour which interfaced directly with the host and with its fellow units to produce a hive mind capable of waging war all on its own. Intelligent and semisentient, it was alarmingly in excess of their expectations, deemed a failure and junked very quickly after initial field tests. Augustine was determined to resurrect it. He had the same bug as Roy. The lure of creating something that powerful, and controlling it, was just too fascinating to resist.
In the morning I put my arms around him and said, “Let's go to the lab, big ol' bear. I want to see this thing for myself.”
And it pleased him; it really pleased him so much he almost skipped across the room, smiling and talking because his worlds were united again. I felt like my heart could break.
Augustine's lab was located in the large subterranean complex at Montane Development's Skipton site, north of Bradford. A neat line of white-bladed wind turbines and a small satellite dish were the only marks in the green landscape as we turned in from the main road. A small uncut block of limestone with the Company name on it sat next to the track leading into the car park, but no clues as to what business they might be in. Montane was a research institute, owned and funded out of OptiNet's R&D budget. A quick review of conversations I had had about it with Augustine recalled to mind that this site was devoted to biotechnical work and had been scaled down in recent years. Major projects had gone elsewhere, into prestigious new developments in South America where the Company's local presence had been low and needed a boost. Here in Skipton only the most contentious and long-term research remained to be pondered without commercial pressure.
The taxi's wheels crunched forlornly on the weedy gravel of the lot as it turned around to let us off.
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