She didn’t answer.
“I can’t go back to before you,” he said. “I couldn’t if I wanted to. But I can’t stand on the threshold waiting for you to make up your mind either. Not forever. I know that’s not what you want me to tell you, but it’s true. You’re breaking my heart. Or whatever you want to call it.” He looked away, and when he spoke again he sounded almost embarrassed. “And I think you’re throwing away something you shouldn’t.”
Li’s face felt cold, her hands and feet numb, as if all the blood had been drained from her body. The rain was falling harder now, pooling at the edges of the geodesic panels and sheeting down the dome’s curve like tears. She watched it fall and tried to pull something, some excuse for an answer out of the void inside her.
“I don’t want to watch you hurt yourself,” she said at last.
“I could say the same to you.”
She leaned her head on her hands and looked down between her feet, measuring the drop to the floor. She felt dislocated, as if her brain and her emotions were half a step behind reality. “You’re asking for something I don’t have to give.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute.”
She turned and stared at him. “You think I’m stringing you along?”
“If I thought that, I wouldn’t be here. No. I think you love me. In fact, I’m sure you do.”
“You’ve got a pretty high opinion of yourself.”
“No. I just know you.”
She snorted. “Because you spend half your time spying on me.”
Ramirez’s lips twisted in a wry, self-deprecating smile that was all Cohen. “You know perfectly well that I wouldn’t do it if you actually minded. And if you didn’t love me at least a little, you damn well would mind. Q.E.D.”
“Q.E. what?”
“It’s Latin, you little heathen.”
“Yeah.” She put her cigarette to her lips. “The Romans put Latin on their sewer covers. It didn’t make their shit smell any sweeter.”
“You’d jump off a cliff before you let me win an argument, wouldn’t you?” Cohen said. But he was laughing. They both were, and she could sense the same desire in him that she felt: the urge to slip back out of this minefield and onto the safe ground of no-questions-asked friendship that they had learned to navigate so skillfully. For a moment she thought that was exactly what they were going to do. Then Cohen spoke. “You asked why I wanted the intraface. Two reasons. First reason. ALEF wanted it—”
“You told me they didn’t!”
He blinked. “There are such things as innocent misunderstandings, you know. Anyway, ALEF does want the intraface. Because of something you would have thought of long ago if you weren’t so busy suspecting my motives. You can bet Helen’s thought of it.”
Li looked at him, questioning.
“Feedback loops. When you lock an AI and a human at the hip, activating a feedback loop would kill the human. So the intraface overrides the statutory feedback loop. We weren’t sure of it until we actually got our hands on the psychware. But it’s true.” A dark fire sparked behind Ramirez’s eyes. “Right now, not even the General Assembly itself could shut me down.”
“My God,” Li whispered. “Unleashing the AIs. Even ALEF hasn’t dared to ask for that publicly. No wonder Nguyen was so set on keeping the work on the intraface off-grid.”
Cohen looked at her, measuring, hesitating. “We want to post the intraface schematics on FreeNet,” he said finally.
Li stared, surprise—or was it fear?—grabbing at her throat. “Do you have any idea of the chaos that would cause?” she said when she could find words again.
“Chaos,” Cohen said feelingly. “My God. Chaos for a democracy to put its money where its mouth is? Chaos to let a small and unusually well behaved minority go about our lives without worrying that some panicky human is going to pull the plug on us at any moment? If that causes chaos, it’s damn well not our problem. And even if it did… this is the first time in over a century I haven’t had a gun to my head.” He leaned forward. “It’s freedom, Catherine. Can you imagine not sharing it? What would you do in my place?”
I’d never be in your place, Li thought. You can’t get to that place by following orders and not asking questions. How did it come to the point where even Cohen has more guts than I do?
“What’s the second reason?” she asked.
At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. Then she felt a touch, as if he’d reached out and brushed his fingers along her skin. Except that it wasn’t skin he touched. It was her mind. Her.
“You know what it is,” he whispered, and the whisper echoed in her mind as if it were her own thought, her own words.
She shivered. “What do you want from me, Cohen?”
“Everything. All of it.”
“Cohen—”
“You know that’s the real reason the intraface isn’t working, don’t you? It’s not your genetics or your internals or anything Korchow can fix. It’s that you don’t want it to work.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Is it? What happened this afternoon? You bolted like a spooked horse. You want to tell me what that was about?”
“You know what it was about,” she whispered.
“Of course I know. I know things you don’t even remember. Things you’re afraid to remember. When are you going to figure out that I’m the one person you don’t need to hide from?”
But that was a question she couldn’t even begin to answer.
“Look,” Cohen said wearily. “I’m not blaming you. I don’t think there’s much blame left to go around once my part in this has gone under the microscope. I have a stupendous ability to generate objective reasons for doing exactly what I want to do, and this time I surpassed myself. I was helping you. I was helping ALEF. I was helping everyone but myself. It was all so logical, so pristinely selfless. And what has all my ‘helping’ come to? Korchow blackmailing you to let me crawl into your soul and ferret out your deepest secrets.”
Li started to speak, but he barreled on, silencing her. “Was I manipulating you? Maybe. And yes, I was willing to back you into a corner. Or at least go along while Korchow did it. But when you accuse me of playing with you… well, you know it’s not that way. You hold every key to every door. And you didn’t need the intraface to open them. You could have done it years ago if you’d wanted to. It was all yours. All of it. It still is.”
Li turned away and looked out at the gray sky, the last flush of the sun sinking below a cloud-swept horizon. She held out her hand without looking around, and Cohen took it. She squeezed hard, until she felt the knuckles slide under the skin.
He laughed. “Say something. Or I’m going to start begging and embarrass both of us.”
She turned to look at him.
“Oh God, Catherine, don’t cry. I can’t even stand to think about you crying.”
But it was too late for that.
“Do you know how I paid for this?” She gestured at her face. “For the gene work?”
He shook his head.
“My father’s life insurance money.”
“Oh. The dream.”
“Yes, the dream. He went down into the mine with Cartwright and killed himself. They faked it to look like a black-lung death, so I’d have the money to pay the chop shop. Did you know that? Did you sniff out that little secret?”
“No,” he said in a small, quiet voice.
“So you see that dream wasn’t a lie at all. I did kill him. Sure as if I’d put a gun to his head.”
“He was dying anyway. I’ve seen the medical records.”
“Well, he wasn’t dying yet. He could have lived for years. He killed himself to give me that money. And I took it and left and never looked back. And you know what the worst thing is? I didn’t even go down there with him. My mother went. I didn’t. I’ve forgotten every other fucking thing about my childhood. You’d think I could forget that.”
“You were young. Children a
ren’t always strong. Who the hell is?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
“That I don’t even care anymore. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t feel sad. Don’t feel anything. I don’t remember enough to feel anything. I threw away my home, my family, every memory that makes a real person. And I have nothing to put in their place but fifteen years of lying and hiding.”
“You have me.”
She closed her eyes. “I can’t give you what you want, Cohen. I lost it years ago.”
“I didn’t fall in love with that child you’re so scared of remembering,” Cohen said after a long silence. “I fell in love with you.”
“There’s no such person,” Li said, and pulled her hand away.
Night had fallen. There was no light, no movement in the open space of the dome below them. A light flared overhead, flashing across the sky like a shooting star, and it took Li a moment to realize that the light was there beside her; Cohen had picked up his lighter and was fidgeting absentmindedly, passing Ramirez’s fingers back and forth above the blue flame.
“I’ll call it off,” he said. “I’ll tell Korchow you can’t do it. I’ll figure out how to make him believe it.”
Li laughed bitterly. “You think this is a bridge game? You do that, and he’ll kill me.”
“No. No. I’ll take care of it.”
“There are some things you can’t take care of, Cohen.”
“Then what?” he asked, his words muffled by a fierce gust of rain outside.
“We go forward. We make the intraface work and we go through with it. And when it comes to the point —the real breaking point—we do whatever the hell it takes to walk out alive. Can you do that?”
“Can you?”
“I can damn well try.”
“All right, then.”
A drop of rain slipped through a cracked panel seal and fell next to Li with a sharp plink. She leaned over, stubbed her cigarette out in the water, and smeared it around into a dirty, sooty mess.
“Catherine?” Cohen touched her shoulder, as if to turn her attention to him.
She looked around. He was close, very close, and he sat so still it was hard to believe Ramirez’s heart was beating.
He touched her cheek, and she felt his fingers slide across drying tears. Then he curved a hand around the nape of her neck, and drew her head down onto his shoulder.
She relaxed into his arms, letting her body shape itself to his, letting her breathing slow to match his. A safe comfortable warmth spread through her. She was tired of hiding, she realized. Tired of fighting. Just tired.
Gradually, so gradually she didn’t at first notice it, the comfortable warmth gave way to a different kind of warmth. She began to notice Cohen’s particular smell—or Ramirez’s smell. She began to feel, through the link, how she smelled to him. The sensation of his fingers on the back of her neck took on a new focus and urgency. An image took shape in her mind: herself, raising her head, parting her lips, offering her mouth to him. Did it come from her mind or his? Was it her desire or his she felt? Did it matter?
“Cohen,” she said, but her voice sounded so blurred and muffled in her ears that it seemed as if a stranger were speaking.
He raised her face toward his, brushed away a last tear, ran a soft fingertip along the curve of her upper lip. He looked at her. A soft, defenseless, questioning look. A look that demanded an answer.
The blanket swished in the airlock and someone stepped into the room, moving quickly. Cohen pulled away. Li looked down, her pulse hammering in her ears, and saw Bella staring up at them.
“Korchow wants you,” Bella said. Li could see her eyes shifting back and forth between them. “He wants to try another run.”
Shantytown: 7.11.48.
She knew where she was going when she slipped out of the safe house that night, even though she didn’t admit it to herself.
It was embarrassing really to see how little her life had changed her. She was still hiding, still lying to herself, still playing the same games she’d played in these streets as a scabby-kneed ten-year-old.
Don’t walk in front of a black cat or a white dog. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Throw salt over your shoulder and the mine whistle won’t blow. And, of course, the main rule, the unbreakable one. Don’t admit what you want, even to yourself, or you’ll never ever get it.
She couldn’t believe she found the house. It unnerved her to see her own feet take her there as if this street, this turning, this particular crooked alley, were etched into her body with something more tenacious than memory. The way seemed so natural, so familiar in the darkness that she wasn’t sure she would have known it in daylight. Why was it that she only seemed to have walked this street after dark? How many times had she half-run past these doors, eyes riveted on her hurrying feet lest she look up and accidentally see some terrible sight that would stop her heart before she made it to dinner on the table and the lights of home? And how many of those times had been after she was already working underground and far too old to be scared of the dark? Or at least too old to admit it to herself.
The alley took a last turning and dumped her out into a narrow laundry yard. If she’d stopped and looked around, she might have lost the thread of memory she was following. She didn’t. She kept her head down, crossed the yard, and turned in to the third doorway as unerringly as a homing pigeon. There was a light switch, a lot lower on the wall than she remembered it. She pressed it. No light.
She climbed the stairs in the dark, hearing their familiar creak underfoot, and stopped on the third floor, just under the steep roof. A final half flight of stairs ended in a roof door marked EXIT. Its viruflex panel shed a little light onto the landing, enough for her to see the crate of empty milk and beer bottles that had always stood by the door of the apartment. And there, propped up against the far wall, a bicycle that she could swear she remembered riding.
‹Where are you?› Cohen asked, popping into her head suddenly and shockingly.
She grimaced. She hadn’t wanted him to know about this. ‹None of your business,› she told him.
‹Korchow’s looking for you.›
‹I’m busy.›
‹Doing what?›
‹If I wanted you to know, I would have told you. Now leave me alone. And I mean it this time.›
A suspiciously long pause. Then, ‹All right. Just don’t do anything stupid.›
Someone walked overhead with heavy, flat-footed steps, and Li spun around to face the roof door. It opened, letting in a gust of wet, fecund air. A man in street clothes and bedroom slippers shuffled past Li and down the next flight of stairs, staring at her all the while with a flat, suspicious look on his face. He had a freshly strangled capon tucked under one arm and a small splash of blood on his sleeve where he’d cut himself, or the bird, in the plucking. Li watched him until she heard a door close behind him a few flights below. Then she turned, stared at the door for a minute, and knocked.
A latch opened, and a chain clinked on the other side of the door. A finger’s breadth of lamplight spilled onto the landing. A thin, Irish-pale face pressed itself to the crack in the door.
Relief and disappointment battled in Li’s heart. Not her. Too young. “I’m looking for Mirce Perkins,” she said.
The girl shifted, and Li caught a glimpse of a baby riding her hip. “What are you selling, then? Oh, never mind, we don’t want it.”
“I’m not selling anything.”
The girl opened the door another few centimeters and looked Li over. “Oh,” she said, and her voice sounded like a door shutting. “Cops.”
“Is she here?”
“No.”
“Where then?”
The girl hesitated. Li could see her weighing the risk of personal trouble against the certainty that Li would find Mirce even if she didn’t help her. “Try the Molly.”
Li heard herself laugh nervously. The Molly Maguire. Of course. Where else
would half the Irish-Catholic population of Shantytown be a few hours before midnight mass on a rainy Saturday night?
Her feet knew the way to the Molly almost as well as they knew the way to her house. Five minutes later she was stepping into the front room of the rusty Quonset hut and shouldering her way past the laughing, jostling crowd that always seemed to mill around the Molly’s threshold.
Every table she could see was taken. Even at the bar there were only a few empty stools left. She found one and settled onto it.
“Triple,” she said to the barkeep. He started slightly, but only at the unfamiliar face; half the Molly’s regulars were at least part construct, and even the most Irish of the Irish bore the marks of Migration-era genesplicing. The triple stout was good when it came, thick and peaty and so rich you could drink it instead of a meal in a pinch. Whatever else might go on at the Molly, or in the dark alleys behind it, the beer was on the up and up.
She drank thirstily and looked around the long, narrow space under the curving roof. Nothing had changed here except her. There were the same hard-muscled, hard-faced miners that still stalked her dreams. There were the pictures of famous local sons and the cups and ribbons of twenty years’ soccer championships gathering dust above the bar. There were the same cheap wall holos, opening onto the stone walls and heartbreakingly green fields of Ireland.
Li let the talk flow around her, listening to the hard-edged flat-voweled voices, relishing the same Saturday night arguments that had always bored her to tears. Wives trying to get their husbands to dance. Husbands trying to keep arguing about soccer and politics. The inevitable table of Gaelic speakers, talking a little too loud and sounding a little too much like they’d learned it out of books. The loners at the bar solving life’s injustices with drunken earnestness. But there weren’t many loners at the Molly, of course. Everyone was someone’s cousin, someone’s brother. Even the shabbiest drunk had two or three or five friends ready to stand by him in a fight or just carry him home if he needed it.
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