Zona Libre: 20 Mar 48.
Even shunted through an organic interface, an Emergent as vast as Cohen left a wide wake in streamspace.
Li found him in the Zona Libre, at a back table in a place called the 5th Column. She had to flash ID to get past the bouncers, and when she finally convinced them to let her in, she thought at first she’d come to the wrong place. Then someone called her name, and she looked over and saw Roland’s coppery curls gleaming against the oxblood velvet of a long banquette that curved along the shadowy back wall.
“I need to talk to you,” she said, sliding onto the empty place beside him. “Now.”
He smiled—an open, uncomplicated smile that was a million light-years away from any look that had ever crossed Cohen’s face. “Sorry,” Roland said. “I’m just the hired help.”
“Where’s Cohen, then?”
“He stepped out for a moment. Drop him a line and let him know you’re here.”
“No, I’ll just wait.”
“Okay.” Roland shrugged. “He’ll figure it out soon enough. And he won’t be gone long anyway; dinner’s waiting.”
Li followed Roland’s glance and saw pale creamy butter over ice, bread rolls as crisp and brown as chickens’ eggs, an open wine bottle with a French label. Two waiters hovered expectantly in the wings, waiting for the sign to serve the next course.
Roland offered Li wine, though he himself drank nothing. He gamely made small talk with her, but Li got the distinct impression that he thought she was some kind of not very interesting old person. For her part, she watched Roland with bemused embarrassment. What had she seen in him? He was nothing, except for those golden eyes. A cookie-cutter college boy with pretty hair. Barely worth looking twice at.
She glanced around the big room, keeping half an ear on Roland’s chatter. The place wasn’t really a nightclub; more of a fancy restaurant with live music. All velvet and carefully pressed linen and carefully dressed customers. Everything plush, flash, top-shelf. The guests all laughed a little too often and talked a little too loud, as if they had come there in order to be seen and were determined to get their money’s worth. The women wore smart dresses, programmed to cling to the right curves and camouflage the wrong curves. A few people wore formal jumpsuits—Corps brass or officers off rich merchant ships who couldn’t quite get out of the habit of low-g clothing—but Li’s Security Council black fatigues were out-of-place enough to make people stare.
The stage lights came up. Someone tapped a glass for silence, and the crowd hushed reluctantly. A live band walked onto the stage, went through the usual tuning-up ritual, and launched into a song that everyone but Li seemed to have heard before.
The singer was a woman. Small, vaguely familiar-looking, with a headful of black cowlicks and heavy-framed glasses that could only, in these days of cheap genework, be vanity. She was good; good enough that several songs had gone by before Li remembered to check the time and wonder what the hell Cohen was doing.
She took out a cigarette, and Roland leapt to light it for her. He’d probably be helping her across the street next. She smoked the cigarette down slowly while the singer’s smoky voice wound around them, talking about failed love affairs, lonely roads, new beginnings.
“I thought that was you,” Cohen murmured just beside her.
When she turned around Roland was gone. His wide-open face had turned into a shadowy territory of shifting planes and angles, fleeting expressions. His long-fingered hands rested on the table with inhuman stillness. Even the golden eyes now seemed dark, dangerous, deeper than oceans.
“Christ,” Li said. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?” he asked, and smiled slyly. “Oh, you mean my animal magnetism and natural charisma?” The smile turned into a full-blown grin. “Don’t be too hard on Roland. After all, he’s all of twenty-three. When I was that age, I lived in a government-subsidized lab with bad lighting, couldn’t put two sentences together, and played chess twenty-four hours a day. A game which, I might add, you couldn’t get me to play now for anything—” He stopped and smiled up at the ceiling. “Well… almost anything.”
He unfolded Li’s napkin with a flourish and handed it to her. “So,” he said, refilling her wineglass, “to what do I owe this exceptional and unexpected happiness? Are you here for the pleasure of my company, or do you just need something?”
“What I need,” Li said, “is advice.”
“And you shall have it. After you’ve had dinner with me. Deal?”
“Deal,” Li said, but when the waiter handed her the menu, she quickly realized two things. First, there were no prices on it. Second, even though it was written in plain Spanish, she’d never heard of half the foods it listed.
“Huh,” she said, accessing her hard files, trying to figure out what horse’s feet were and whether a girolle was a bird or a mushroom.
“The oysters are excellent,” Cohen suggested.
“Fine.” She shut the menu. “Oysters.”
Cohen gave the order and leaned back, arms crossed. “Now then,” he said as calmly as if they were discussing the season’s gallery openings, “what’s so urgent that you have to hunt me down and interrupt a good meal to talk about it? Would it be foolish to imagine that it’s not unrelated to your little tête-à-tête with Korchow this morning?”
Li choked on her wine and coughed into her napkin. “Still spying on me, are we?” she asked when she could speak again.
“Don’t be snitty, darling. Technically, it’s Nguyen I’m spying on, not you. And anyway, it’s how I’m written. Naturally nosy. Neither of us can fight our code, can we?”
Li narrowed her eyes at that but said nothing.
“Oh dear,” Cohen said. “Here comes your thunderous, we’ll-deal-with-this-later look. Have some more wine. And tell me how you like it.”
Li took another sip of wine, still staring at Cohen unsmilingly over the rim of her glass.
“Well?” he asked, leaning forward.
“It’s good.”
“Good? That’s all you can say? I might as well pour it into the gutter.”
“You gave it to me,” Li pointed out.
“The more fool I.”
“Why were you spying on—”
“Madame’s oysters,” the waiter said, leaning over Li’s shoulder to set an immense plate before her. She looked down at it while the waiter served Cohen’s dish. Twelve fist-sized oysters glistened nakedly up at her under the spotlights.
“Are they dead yet?” she asked.
“They won’t feel a thing,” Cohen told her. “And do try to chew before you swallow. You’d be a much happier person if you just concentrated on your food properly.”
The oysters were fantastic, of course. Everything Cohen had ever fed her was fantastic. They tasted of salt and iodine and deep clear water. The taste of the sea, she supposed, though she had never seen a sea. She ate two plates of them, firmly repressing any thought of what they must be costing Cohen, and even in streamspace she felt stuffed.
“So,” she said when Cohen had finished his dessert and the waiters had brought coffee and pâte de fruits and elaborate petits fours. “Now can I ask why you’re spying on Nguyen?”
“You can ask,” he answered with a silken smile.
“It’s still about Metz, isn’t it?”
“If you know so much, why come to me?”
Li looked across the table at him, and he met her stare with bland equanimity.
“What happened to trusting each other?” she asked.
“I trust you completely. I always have. In this case, however, the question isn’t whether I trust you, but whether I trust everyone who has clearance to download your hard files.”
“Which brings us back to Nguyen. And Metz.”
“The thing about Helen,” Cohen said, carrying on as smoothly as if Li hadn’t spoken, “is that she uses people. It’s her job to use people. It’s what she is. You put yourself in mortal danger if you allow yourself to forget
that.”
“Funny. She said the same thing about you.”
“Helen,” Cohen said firmly, “does not understand me nearly as well as she thinks she does.” He stopped and gave Li a shocked look. “You don’t believe her, do you?”
“I don’t know who to believe.”
Cohen looked down at his plate and smiled a tight little smile that was far too old to belong on Roland’s soft face. “Well,” he said, to no one in particular. “So.”
“Don’t guilt me,” Li said. “Nguyen’s earned my trust. You’ve earned… the opposite.”
“Helen does a very difficult job,” Cohen said after an uncomfortable pause. “And she does it very well. But she’s a technician, really. People are tools to her. You are one of her tools. I’m another—albeit a powerful tool that she knows can turn around and bite her if she doesn’t handle it carefully. But in the end, it’s the same. She has a job to do. She opens up her toolbox and pulls out the best tool for the job. If it breaks, that’s too bad, of course. But she can always get the Secretariat to buy her a new one.”
“Why do you work for her, if that’s what you think?”
He grinned. “The party favors, darling. Now tell me about Korchow.”
And she did, in spite of Metz and Helen’s warning and the voice inside her that whispered she was risking what she couldn’t afford to lose. She told him everything. Just like she always did.
“May I smoke?” Cohen asked when she’d finished.
She nodded, and he spent the next forty seconds choosing, cutting, and lighting a hand-rolled cigar with minute concentration.
“Nice lighter,” Li said.
“You like it? I found it in the back of a drawer yesterday. Must have been sitting in there since… well, before you were born, probably.” He flipped it open again, blinked at the blue flame, and handed it to Li to look at. “Present from my second husband. He had exceptionally good taste for a mathematician. Most of them shouldn’t be allowed to dress themselves.”
Li figured she was supposed to laugh at that, so she did, and then set the lighter on the table between them.
“So,” Cohen said, toying with the lighter, “have I ever told you the story of the Affair of the Queen’s Necklace?”
“The queen’s what?”
“ L’affaire du collier de la reine.” He sounded shocked. “Don’t humans teach history in those schools of theirs anymore?”
“Slept through it.”
Cohen sniffed delicately. Li had seen an old flat film once about French aristocrats on Earth. The men had all worn embroidered waistcoats and used snuff instead of cigarettes. Cohen’s gesture reminded her of the well-bred, dainty sniffs with which those long-dead aristocrats had taken their tobacco.
“Well,” he said, “here’s the short version. Try to stay awake for it. The place is Paris. The time, the eve of the Revolution. The players, the king, the queen, the Cardinal de Rohan. Rumor has it that the cardinal was also the queen’s lover… but I’m sure that had nothing at all to do with how things ended up for the poor fellow.
“In any case, our story begins with the arrival of a mysterious Jew. It’s always a Jew, you know. I could say more about that, but I think we can postpone a discussion of the roots of European anti-Semitism to a later date. In any case, my coreligionist arrived bearing princely treasure. To wit, one fantastically expensive diamond necklace of scandalously uncertain origin. No sooner had the queen seen this necklace than she knew she had to have it. Negotiations began. Eventually the queen and the Jew agreed on a rather substantial price. Two-thirds of the gross national product of France, to be precise.”
Li choked on her wine. “For a piece of jewelry? That’s ridiculous!”
“Mmm.” Cohen looked amused. “I seem to recall you spending a good six months’ pay on a certain original-issue hand-rebuilt Beretta, O Parsimonious One. What did you call it? Sweet?”
“That’s different,” Li protested. “Professional equipment.”
He puffed on his cigar, grinning. “Well, just think of diamond necklaces as professional equipment for queens.”
She snorted.
“Quite. Anyway, the queen asked the king to buy the necklace for her. The king must have shared your opinion about the value of diamond necklaces; he said no.”
“And thus the tale ends. Not much of a story, Cohen.”
“Don’t tease,” he said, smirking at her. “As you know—or would know if you had ever applied your considerable intelligence to anything but wreaking high-tech havoc—queens in those days didn’t have much practice in taking no for an answer. Thus, the queen decided to go behind her husband’s back.”
“Go where behind his back?” Li asked. “Why didn’t she just buy it on her own credit if she wanted it so much?”
Cohen blinked, momentarily at a loss. “Right,” he said. “Um, we’ll discuss women’s rights and sexism when we have that talk about anti-Semitism, shall we?” He looked suspiciously at her. “Unless you’re pulling my leg.”
Li grinned. “Easy target.”
“Not nice, my dear,” Cohen said. But his smile took the sting out of it, and Roland’s long-lashed eyes sparkled with laughter.
This was one of those nights when Cohen was all there, Li realized. Really on. As always at these times, she felt she was at the blazing heart of a sun, basking in the heat of the AI’s personality, unable to remember the doubts and the shadows.
“Well, finish the story,” she said. She pulled out a cigarette and leaned in for Cohen to light it. “And make sure someone gets shot soon. You expect me to stay awake, you’d better play to the cheap seats.”
Cohen’s smile widened. “You’re in fine form tonight. So where was I? Ah, yes. It’s not clear whether the queen asked first or the cardinal offered first. But in the end, he agreed to buy the necklace for her on the understanding that she would repay him, covertly of course, with tax money.
“The rest of the story is brief and sordid. The upshot of it was that before the queen even got a chance to wear the infamous necklace it was stolen.”
“By who?”
“By whom, my love. No one knows. No one ever found out. But the die was already cast, even before the court case and the scandal sheets. For the cardinal, it was the end of everything. He lost his fortune, his credibility, and, worst of all, the patronage of his king. All for a necklace that the queen never got to wear and no one could pay him for.”
Li waited for Cohen to go on, but he didn’t. “So what’s your point?” she asked finally.
“Helen has asked you to produce something for her. Sharifi’s dataset, maybe. Maybe something else, something she thinks may fall into her hands once she has the data. If she’s asking you, it can only be because she can’t ask the General Assembly—or worse, because she’s already asked and gotten the wrong answer. Be careful what you pay for her little bauble. And make sure you’re not the one caught out in the cold when the bill comes due.”
Li felt her carefree mood slipping away. She dropped her head into her hands and scrubbed at her face with numb, cold fingers. “You’re telling me to steer clear of something I can’t see,” she said. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“You can’t,” Cohen said. He sounded particularly gentle; but maybe it was just the timbre of Roland’s young voice she was hearing. “Just don’t wait until you hear the surf on the rocks to start turning the ship, that’s all. In the meantime, find out who the players are, what they want—and how far they’ll go to get it.”
“That’s your advice?” she said, head still in her hands. “I could have gotten more out of a damn fortune cookie!”
“You could always resign,” Cohen said softly.
Li took her hands from her face and looked up at him. “Quit, you mean.” She felt a flush rising in her cheeks. “I don’t quit.”
Cohen put a hand over one of hers, held it there lightly. “I’m not saying you should,” he told her. “Just that you can, if things get bad. I’ll he
lp. It’s there for the asking. Anything.”
Anything. Meaning money, of course. And taking it would make her no different than any of his other hangers-on.
“I’ve got it taken care of, if it comes to that,” she said awkwardly—and lying through her teeth, too. “And there’s other jobs out there. Security. Planetary militia. But… thanks, I guess.”
They sat for a moment, he with his hand still set lightly on hers, not quite looking at each other.
“You come here much?” Li asked, slipping her hand out from under his and scanning the room around them.
“Occasionally.”
“It’s ridiculous, you know. Everyone here’s ridiculous.”
“I know.”
“I guess you’re going to tell me that’s why you like it. Or… what was it? That I lack an existential sense of the absurd?”
He smiled. “Would I say such a thing?”
“You just enjoy watching people make fools of themselves, don’t you?” She spoke jokingly, but she suddenly felt a prickling urge to pick a fight with him.
He leaned back, responding to the feeling behind her words rather than the words themselves. “I make a fool of myself ten times a minute,” he said. “Fifty times a minute when you’re in the room. It’s called being alive, Catherine.”
“Right. You’re just the average guy, going about your average life. Just with a few billion times the processing speed.”
“Something like that.”
She snorted. “And this is how you use it? Forgive me if I’m not impressed.”
He shrugged. “I can’t help wanting to be around people. It’s the way I’m written.”
“So change it. Change your code. I would. I’d get shut of Nguyen and Sharifi and all this pathetic bullshit in a second if I could.”
“You just say that because you know you can’t. Now stop fussing and listen to this song. It’s a good one.”
The singer was still onstage, finishing out a set with a bittersweet country song. It was a good song, the kind of song that could have been written yesterday or three hundred years ago. “She write that?” Li asked, nodding across the room toward the spotlit figure.
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