“None of that is yours?” was the first question Sargent asked her.
Clair shook her head. That was true, apart from some minor scrapes. She pointed at the dupe, still trussed up on the other soldier like a grisly backpack. “All theirs.”
“You want to interrogate him?” Sargent asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Take a long, hard look at Nobody, the Cashiles had said. Besides, he might be able to tell her where her mother was.
“He could know where Wallace is hiding” was what she said. That excuse would fly better with the PKs.
“All right. You’ll have to be quick, though.”
Clair’s lenses had returned to normal the moment her helmet had come off. A request from Sargent appeared in her infield.
She opened the chat.
“We were going to leave as soon as you got here,” the peacekeeper said, so the dupe wouldn’t hear her, “but if we take the dupe with us he’ll just explode like the other one.”
“We’re evacuating via d-mat?”
“Yes, and we don’t want the dupes to know that we have that capacity.”
“Did you find out where the dupes are coming from? Or the transmitter?”
“No.”
“That’s another reason to talk to him, then,” she said, even as her heart sank. She had come out of the battle with no transmitter and nothing to use as a lever against the dupes—but nothing to connect the explosions to Q, either, and she wasn’t unhappy about that last detail. This was her last chance to salvage something from this mess.
“Where do you want to do this?” asked Sargent, looking up at the dupe on the soldier’s back.
“The crow’s nest is as good as anywhere.”
“All right. Do you want to get changed first?”
Desperately. Jesse was hovering like the now superfluous drone, and his expression made her anxious. She pulled up a view from the drone’s forward camera in order to see exactly what she looked like. She barely recognized herself. Her hair was still tucked into the black undersuit, and her face and hands were black with dried blood. She looked wild and desperate.
Fine with her. They needed to evacuate soon so she could get as far away from the dupes as possible. Perhaps the way she looked would encourage her captive to talk quickly.
[41]
* * *
THE ONLY PERSON in the crow’s nest was PK Forest, who they interrupted in midpace. He acknowledged Clair with a nod but no welcoming expression. They all had more important things to worry about than what their faces were showing.
Clair’s lenses went completely blank, indicating that the room was now Faraday shielded.
“Set him down over here,” she told the soldiers. They did so and stayed nearby to intervene if needed. Sargent kept a pistol at the ready as Clair stepped in and squatted in front of the dupe, forcing herself to get close to him even though every instinct screamed at her to go in exactly the opposite direction. His was the face of terror and despair. It had chased her to the ends of the Earth. It haunted her waking dreams.
“Be careful,” said Jesse. He was staying well away from the man who had stolen the body of his father, staring at it with undisguised loathing.
She reached out and tugged the gag away.
“You wanted to talk to me,” she said to Nobody.
“The feeling is mutual, I know,” he said, and again she detected a faint hint of an accent she had heard before. Like the others, he was neither armed nor armored. His skin was pale and there were feverish circles around his eyes. He slumped to one side as though barely able to sit upright.
He had a bullet wound to the shoulder. Clair considered RADICAL’s rejuvenator, but dismissed it. There might not be time, and he didn’t need to talk for long. Just long enough.
“So let’s trade,” she said. “What did you do with my mother?”
He didn’t look up. “I had nothing to do with that.”
“That’s what the other dupes said.”
“Do you believe them over me?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because my interest is in you, not your mother. Can’t you tell?”
He raised his head and stared at her with one blue eye, one red eye.
She held his gaze, matching his stubbornness with some of her own.
“Do you always try to kill the people who interest you?”
“You’re the one who got away.”
“Give me a real answer.”
“How about the same one a different way? Death is a gift that can be given but never stolen. It belongs to the dying, and is lost with them.”
“What is that?” asked Jesse. “A riddle?”
Nobody turned his cryptic gaze on him. “I will only talk to Clair.”
Jesse didn’t looked away. “So talk properly. We haven’t got all day.”
Nobody sighed and turned back to Clair.
“Everyone asks me who I am. That annoying boy of yours did; they all do—except you. You asked me who I was. And I realized that I was unhappy with the answer. I am a hollow man, condemned to repeat the same experiences over and over again. Different bodies, but the same mind—different circumstances, but the same fate. We’re plucked from the void and return to the void no wiser, communicating with each other from mouth to ear, repeating the same words, sharing the same archives, believing we have the same memories but knowing that each of us is slightly different, growing further apart from each other the moment we step out into the world until the moment we leave it. . . .” He raised his bound hands to touch his bloody eye, his bruised temple, injuries that had belonged to the original Dylan Linwood when he had been forcibly scanned. “You showed me that life with neither endings nor beginnings isn’t life at all. It’s just . . . persistence.”
This she could accept, although how he got from there to trying to kill her remained impenetrable. “And you’re punishing me for that?”
He shook his head. She didn’t think it was a negative, and his next words confirmed that.
“Trade. Tell me why you asked who I was. What makes you different from everyone else?”
She rocked back on her heels, clutching her knees tightly to her chest.
“I don’t want to be different.”
“But you are.”
“I bet there are plenty of other people who would ask the same question if you gave them the chance.”
He shrugged. “No one did until now. You’re either different from everyone else, or you had a reason. Which is it?”
She had avoided thinking back to that terrible moment in California, when she had thought she was about to die. The truth was, though, that so many terrible things had happened to her since then that it didn’t seem so bad anymore.
“At first I was trying to distract you,” she said. “You hesitated when I asked you how long you live in each body. I thought I was getting to you. And I was, wasn’t I? That was when you told me you were Nobody.”
“Not me,” he said. “The one who died. I have only the record of his words.”
Clair understood what he was saying. The dupe in California had been killed. This dupe was another one, created just hours ago to attack the seastead. But he knew what had happened to that earlier version of himself, and he clearly suffered from the same psychological angst.
“He took his death with him,” she said.
“Yes. He is the lucky one.”
“And you’re trying to give me a death in return? Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” They were back to this question.
“Because you deserve it.”
“What have I done to deserve dying?”
“You’ve lived,” he said in a voice that was almost a hiss, “and you have so much life ahead of you. You are new, Clair. You can be anyone. I . . . I am no one, Nobody, persisting through a series of brief and violent lives that I experience only secondhand. I would like to be like you, but the best I can do is
make myself in your image—or you in my image, metaphorically. You don’t deserve that. Kinder, I think, to give you that which I crave most of all and be done with it. You would understand, were you me.”
Clair tried to fathom what lay at the heart of this grim, accusatory confession.
“You’re killing me because you want to die?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you just kill yourself instead, like Mallory?”
“Because unlike her I know it will make no difference.”
“Is that because Wallace keeps bringing you both back or—”
“Let’s talk about Charlie,” he interrupted her, slapping one blood-slick hand against his thigh. “Who is he and how is he important?”
“He’s not important,” she said.
“Tell me who he is.”
“Just my old toy clown. Why?”
He looked downcast. His hand slid to rest on the floor.
“I-who-was-you asked you about him. I didn’t know why. Now I understand. Charlie was a host memory. Toys mean nothing to this me.”
Clair had to cast her mind back to New York to know what he was talking about. Her dupe, the one who had exploded, was the one who had brought up Charlie. She had almost lost Charlie as a child, but what did it matter now?
The lesson that young Clair Hill had learned that day was that the world wasn’t permanent. Anything could be fabbed and re-created at any moment, without mattering in the slightest. That was what happened to people, after all, when they moved from place to place via d-mat. There were gaps between here and there, lost and found, that were intriguing to contemplate, in the same way it was intriguing to wonder what happened to Clair Hill when she fell asleep every night. Was she the same person when she woke up, even though she had stopped being for a while? No one in their right mind thought so, and no one worried about d-mat gaps either.
Charlie says hello, the dupe had told her in New York. The impermanent, replaceable Charlie, whose loss she had ultimately borne by accepting the world she lived in, gaps and all. Was Nobody implying that he lived in the gaps, with Charlie and every other impermanent thing?
There were more important questions.
“My turn,” she said. “Where are you coming from? Every hour there are more of you. How do I make you stop?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. I know how to call more of myself into being—there are code words, easily spoken, and many bodies to choose from—but no one ever told me how to stop it from happening. Until you work out how to do that, my fate lies in this world with you.”
She couldn’t decide if his expression was now beatific or spiteful, or another complex mixture.
“Tell me where Wallace is, then. Who’s ‘the Boss’ if it’s not him?”
“I don’t know where he is. That was two questions, by the way. Why do you want to find him so badly?”
“To stop him, of course. To stop all of you.”
“What makes you think stopping him will stop me? I’m bigger than him now. Bigger than all the other dupes put together. That’s why they’re afraid of me. Nothing can stop me, unless I want to be stopped.”
“I thought you said you wanted to die.”
“I did,” he said. “You know that phrase, being of two minds about something? That’s exactly how how I feel, multiplied by . . . however many there are of me at this point.”
Perhaps he smiled at that, but his lips were so thin and white that Clair couldn’t tell. His eyelids were drooping. Clair could tell just by looking at him that there wasn’t long left.
“What do the other dupes want?” she asked.
“The same thing they’ve always wanted. What do you want?”
“For everything to go back the way it was, of course.”
“Is that even possible now, Clair?”
Devin had raised that point on the way to Antarctica. If she wasn’t fighting for the world she had known, why was she fighting at all?
“My turn,” she said. “Why do the other dupes think I know something important?”
“Because you do.”
“Is it about Q?”
He tut-tutted. “Why haven’t you asked me what it’ll take to make me stop fighting you?”
“I don’t know. Will you do that?”
“Maybe. If you answer one question honestly.”
“I’ve answered all of them honestly so far.”
“Really? Sometimes I forget how young you are.” He exhaled sharply. “Only the very young . . . and the dying . . . have no time to lie.”
“Answer my question, then. Will you stop fighting me?”
“Perhaps . . . if you tell me my real name.”
“What? I don’t know what that is.” She looked up at Forest and Sargent. They shook their heads. “None of us do.”
“Nonetheless . . . that’s what it will take. I’ll stop fighting you, and you can work out how to kill me. If I have to go, I’ll go as the person I was, and not before.”
“All right,” she said, figuring she had nothing to lose. “I’ll find your name, and the rest. I promise you.”
“Don’t promise me,” he said irritably. “Promise the me you’re going to tell, who you haven’t met yet. He probably doesn’t even exist right now. He’ll come out of a fabber sooner or later, not knowing that he’s the one who will change everything. . . .”
His eyes were slipping shut. His slump had become even more pronounced.
“Hey,” she said, poking his uninjured shoulder. “You’re not going anywhere just yet, not without telling me what you dupes think I know.”
“It’s my question, Clair,” he said, his voice little more than a mumble. “And it is this: what did you see?”
“Where? When?”
“What did you see, Clair, in the stars . . . what did you see?”
[42]
* * *
NOBODY SLIPPED OVER and Clair caught him, propping him gently upright even as she resisted the urge to shake him to get the answers she needed.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Tell me more.”
He didn’t respond.
“No riddles, remember?”
Sargent was at her side, reaching past her to check the dupe’s vital signs. Only then did Clair realize that he wasn’t breathing.
She sagged back into a sitting position as Sargent did what she could. Jesse came to stand behind her, hands on her shoulders, not seeming to mind the crusted blood there. His father’s blood.
“Well, that told us nothing,” he said, “except that Nobody is one fucked-up dude.”
She shook her head, not disagreeing with his diagnosis but suspecting that Nobody had actually told her a great deal. The Cashiles, too, in their elliptical way. She just had to work out what it was.
“He’s dead,” said Sargent, stepping away and wiping her hands on the thighs of her armor. “Let’s get rid of the corpse before it springs any nasty surprises on us.”
One of the soldiers stepped forward, scooping up the body as though it were a doll, and the other followed him out of the crow’s nest. When they and the body were gone, Clair’s lenses came back to life. She felt like closing her eyes and sinking into blackness, but she couldn’t do that yet. Not until she was sure they were safe. Those who were left.
I’m so sorry, Mom, she thought with a heavy heart. If both factions of dupes were telling the truth, that meant there was a third group acting against her—and she had no idea who they could be.
“I’m out of ideas,” she said, leaning back into Jesse’s ready embrace, his chest pressed solidly against her back. “I guess we can evacuate now.”
“Yes.” The answer came over a chat she hadn’t even known was open. Devin and Trevin were part of the conversation from elsewhere in the seastead. “Preparing for breakup.”
“Breakup?” Clair echoed.
Sargent helped her to her feet. “The seastead is compar
tmentalized. Seal the bulkheads, and whole sections act as giant booths. RADICAL can take what’s inside of them and then remake all the bulkheads and everything so it won’t look like anything’s gone anywhere. It’ll be like the Marie Celeste, only bigger. It’ll delay the dupes while they work out what happened.”
“How is the data going to get out? I thought we were cut off.”
“From the Air, yes,” said Devin. “But we are connected to the powersat grid. The beam powering the seastead is intense enough to cover any transmissions going up to orbit. We’ll come back to ground using the same trick. No one will be able to track us.”
“We’ll only get away with it once, though,” said Sargent.
“And it sets a dangerous precedent,” said Forest. “The powersat grid is not protected against this kind of exploitation. It will need to be.”
“Yes, well, you can look into that on the other side.” Devin sounded unrepentant. “Unless you have a better plan to get out of this mess?”
“I do not.”
“Where will we go?” Clair asked.
“That’s the question,” said Trevin. “Anywhere that has a powersat receiver, heavy cargo booths, and a d-mat network that we can hack into—i.e., pretty much any city anywhere. But the dupes will track the signal eventually, so it has to be somewhere defensible, or somewhere that can be abandoned at a moment’s notice. Our best suggestion is now sunk, or might well be soon, so over to you guys.”
There was silence. Sargent glanced at Forest, and Clair knew that they were communicating silently, perhaps considering options. OneEarth was bound to have all sorts of strongholds, but would they let RADICAL in? And were they secure enough to keep the dupes out? OneEarth was required by law to be transparent when it came to things like this, so every weakness of every redoubt could be easily exploited by the dupes, as in Crystal City.
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