“Don’t you wish to finish the game?” Kya asked.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll finish it.”
I walked out the door and never went back. I left Intana there, completing the total betrayal I had started days before. I had no idea what else I could do except run, until I found some way of freeing myself from other people.
I wondered what the thing was that he did not want to remember. It bothered me a lot. The brutality hidden in it must be very big, considering that he’d had no problem revealing the extreme violence of his “death.”
I couldn’t imagine him doing anything unpleasant to anyone. He wasn’t like that. I knew this was a ridiculous thing to think about most people, all of whom were capable of unlimited violence given the right conditions, even me, but he wasn’t even human, and one of the ways he was least like us was this way.
I knew he was going out to see her, the partial. Rita. I envied her. For the first time in my life I knew what it meant to be green with jealousy. I was so disappointed with myself.
The fire had almost burned out but I dare not go looking for any more wood, not in the Foundation’s apartments. I thought I might go see if Greg had any, but then I felt a fool for being weak. I ought to stay here and trust Jalaeka and believe that if I shouted out his name in my mind, he’d hear me. I supposed we should have tested that.
Outside the wind drove snow at the south side of the house, covering the windows so that there was no way to see out. It rattled the guttering and every so often a slump and rumble of snow would shift over the roof and in the attics something whispered.
I put on my old clothes, the ones I’d come to Sankhara in, plus the superlight winter gear J had bought me, and curled up beside the embers to wait. How stupid it is that women have spent so much time helplessly waiting, I thought, but here I was, in its ordinary, relentless horror.
40 / Jalaeka
I went to Rita’s apartment in the Aelf as I’d promised her. She wore black and was immaculately groomed. The coat was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Theo. In her intricate sevenshadow I could see only the most remote traces of him. He must be busy at some other task. I was willing to bet I knew exactly where it would find its expression—round at mine—which is why I had decided, against my better judgement, that I should come here while he was distracted.
“Why did you put that tub of plants there? They ruin the view,” I asked her, for something to say as she brought me a drink.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Some designer did it for me. Will you help me move it?”
“Sure.” Such a gentleman, Patrick Black.
Francine did not call, not then. I stayed with Rita for two hours. We did not spend much time talking.
Afterwards I found that I couldn’t go straight back. I had to get free of my old friend’s skin, his kindness, his forgiving ways—that’s what I told myself anyway, though another part of me stared on and said it was simple guilt working, because I knew damn well that Francine was hurt by what I was doing, in spite of herself. And I missed Patrick now, I missed him and the days of our lives when nothing happened.
You kid yourself that you don’t know, part of my mind said to me, contemptuously. You always know what you’re doing, you just don’t want to admit it.
I went to the club. I avoided the dressing rooms and the friends I had there and found myself in the bathrooms on the fourth level, next to the Library. People gave me some really odd looks. At the first sink a group of three young men stood around, all shooting up with intravenous heroin doses, doing risky doubles. They stared at me, not in a good way.
I looked at my face in the mirror. The problem was clear. I’d become Patrick Black. Well, I was oscillating between his outer appearance and my own.
I shifted back to Francine-me and made it stick. I felt old.
“Fuck!” said one of the guys who was watching me. “What are you wearing, like, Tekskin? I didn’t know they made it that good.”
“They don’t.” I glanced at him and saw an Unevolved tourist who wasn’t as young as he seemed, this adventure in Sankhara one of many he’d taken almost like a college course in living, without particular joy or anticipation. “Take it easy with that stuff.”
He was about to give me a mouthful for my patronizing remark, the syringe in his hand ready to go, but I apologized. I touched him on the arm, where he was about to inject and felt a flicker of Angel’s charge cross between us. “Want to come with me?”
“Yeah,” he said, after a moment’s struggle with his doubts. I could see him thinking he might as well, even if I was crazy, because nothing was interesting him much otherwise. “Here.” He gave the syringe to his friend. “Save that.”
“Oh trust him to score when he’s scoring,” said the other friend, already high.
We went to the first private room off Rush, where, as an employee, I could get as many drugs as I wanted out of the security box for free. He was nervous and I was desperate. I pushed him around too much getting his clothes undone.
“Hey, I like it gentle,” he protested. “You should have gone to a deeper zone. I didn’t know you were into that.”
“I’m not.” I stopped myself and put my hands on either side of his face. “I’m not.”
“Sure,” he said uneasily. I’d torn his shirt.
“Here.” I kissed him, very gently, mouth open. He tasted of alcohol and he was slick in returning tricks, in spite of his protests of innocence. I thought it was a style he wore in the hope that it might fit him one day. I did the god thing, the darshan, and held him in my arms and fed on the expression on his face. I drew him closer to me, watching the mysterious light open up whatever lost dream was in his head. I wanted to know what it was like.
“Oh my god. Oh my god,” he said over and over. He half laughed, half cried out and kissed me, lifting me up, pulling me onward, close to a place deep inside which I could almost, almost touch.
He made it. I didn’t. I know it’s not for me. It’s of me. I know that.
I held my newborn addict’s sweat-slicked body against mine and waited for him to recover. His skin had become luminous, taking on that genuine quality that Francine’s had without trying. His whole nervous system was remaking things, undoing things, doing things. Somewhere in there is the answer to my problem, I was thinking: help without burdens, hope without despair, love without condition or limit.
As I watched him coming round I recognized myself in his glazed, delighted expression. I felt like the real thing.
After him I found another one. And another one after that.
“Hey.”
It was long past midnight: Engine Time. Someone pulled me round by my arm.
It was dark on the dance-floor. The men where I was didn’t wear much, mostly their Tektattoos and their enhanced musculature, their perfect skins, their moves. This hand was big, cool and heavy. I found myself looking at a polished bronze cuirass two inches from my nose. It wasn’t like the metal I remembered from Koker Ai. It was Tek, and it shifted with the breathing of the person whose skin it was.
She’d stripped down to the minimum allowed for a Valkyrie—no weapons and no helm, but she was still a giant compared to most of the people in the club and they backed off from her as they tried not to look like they cared. She had thick blond hair bound round her head in braids like rope and her face had that strong, classical look with a perfect Alexandrian nose. Red marks showed where her helm fitted close to the skin—like slaps or burns.
I recognized her immediately. “What?”
“I need to talk to you,” she said. “Not here.”
“No literary questions.” I removed myself from her grip and she looked confused because she hadn’t let go. It was a bit of a mistake on my part. I staggered and almost fell.
“What’s wrong with you?” she hollered above the music’s tribal thump.
“Nothing,” I said. “What’s wrong with you?”
Out of nowhere Damien pushed in between us. He
yelled in my ear, “You’re pulling a train. Self-destruction loco style, you idiot! Don’t self-destruct now, just when it’s all going so marvellously well.” He dragged me to the door. The Valkyrie followed with ponderous precision.
“What are you talking about?” I let him direct me to a quieter place in Chocolate Floral. It was peculiarly difficult to walk straight. I couldn’t make the floor be still.
Damien whacked me across the face with a head-rocking slap. “This won’t make it stop hurting, you know.”
I growled at him and he let go quickly. “No, that’s not the point. It has to hurt, just like it has to feel good, or you die inside. I have to keep the connections open, wide as they can be, or I can’t do it at all.”
The Valkyrie looked at me with a fixated, strange expression. “The darshan?” she asked.
“No. The other thing,” I said, but she didn’t know I meant Translating Francie. Damien did. He nodded grimly at me and pushed me out to the door and then into the street.
“I’m trying to help you,” he whispered to me, his hands on me cold and kind. He looked hurt. “I think she might take you somewhere useful. The Metatron.”
I avoided the Solar AIs. I didn’t like AI in general but something in Damien’s face prompted me to think that he had some clue what he was talking about.
He gave me a hopeful smile. His desperation made me taste my own. I thought of the Valkyrie’s sadness. I nodded. Okay.
Outside the Valkyrie waited for my attention in a stoic position, legs wide, helm in hands. The night air was cool and the streets were busy. I could hear Engine Sirens not far away and the creak of earth being put under pressure. Trams rolled past over the little earthquakes, their bells jangling. Music played from several doorways. There was a peculiar party atmosphere to the place, as if Engine Festival had come early. I couldn’t be bothered with walking or public transport systems. I felt claustrophobic.
“Do you know the Triptrap Bridge?” I asked her and didn’t wait for an answer.
But the Engine had been very busy. It had erased the illusion of Crisscross Street continuing beyond the bridge and pushed the Hinterland right out, pressing Hoolerton almost into Central Sankha. Where the Moorlands tower blocks had leered at one another, the churn and grind of old, dead machinery and its ghosts ran right to the sea’s edge. Where there had been the old European neighbourhoods of the Wundershön and the Triptrap Bridge across the Purbright, there was now a span of solid frost like a new bone joining them to Anadyr Park—the bridge seeming to vanish in midair where it crossed the border. The river, like the Tact at Aelf, was redirected underground in vaults of brickwork and stone.
I waited for the Valkyrie on the frost bridge where it arched at its highest and looked towards the beachfront where we used to skim. There among the tacky shop-fronts and tackier hotels lay the unmarked doorway that was the entrance to Engine House. As my boots froze to the ice I wondered if it was possible to use the Engine on myself.
Neither Theo nor I was gifted with insight into everything Stuff made. It was possible that the Engine was as mysterious, as experimental, as inconclusive in its nature as he or I. It may not work for me, but it may not work for him. It was made by a team of human speculative engineers, one of the last Sidebar Engines to be cast and one in which it was likely Theo had had very little if any interest. If it could rebuild worlds overnight, surf millions of minds, shift matter into mind and back again, maybe I could get it to rebuild me. The only thing I needed was an engineer and I knew whom I’d choose.
A rush of cold, ice-strewn air suddenly surrounded me. I looked up and saw the flare of blue jet fire. There was a smell of kerosene as the Valkyrie landed beside me on the filament of frozen air. The bridge creaked and groaned with our weight.
She was mercifully direct. “Are you able to cross into Uluru?” Her breath misted in the bridge’s frigid atmosphere and instantly fell between us in a shower of ice.
I had never tried it. Sankhara was enough virtuality for me. “Probably.”
“Will you come and take the darshan to my friend?” She looked exhausted and driven. I thought of Francine. The changes of Sankhara under the Engine had only just finished. I could hear the wolves of Anadyr even from here, and other cries and calls, farther from human than theirs. Then they were drowned in the wailing sirens of the emergency vehicles racing to the areas of greatest disturbance: the night’s casualties at Anadyr’s newly massive frontier.
I could hear the Valkyrie’s body shrinking in the cold.
I listened to Francine, to Francine, sleeping alongside Greg on the sofa.
“Show me the way,” I said.
She wanted to take me to some temple across the city but I took hold of her metal hand and drew the gauntlet off it. Her hand was larger than mine, but on the palm the Tek and the lines of her skin ran together, almost like one, and I could fit mine against it. I let my hand become like hers. Where we touched I could run up through her arm. She felt me do it and tried to jerk her hand back automatically but I held on to it and this time I was stronger.
Emotionally she was in a similar state to me. We regarded one another with some surprise and in that moment our sympathy formed. She understood the rest intuitively and simply tuned herself in to Uluru through its coded transmission bands.
I rode with her and found myself in another park with a warm sun overhead and blue skies. Beside me she held my hand, suddenly over a foot shorter than I was, her ragged fairy costume tickling my legs. We stood beside a half-buried silver aeroplane. She stared up at me, her mouth half-open.
“You didn’t change,” she said.
“Should I have?” I said, looking down at myself, wondering what she meant.
“People here are . . . what they want. Not what they really are.”
“You mean who they really are and not what they actually look like. Show me your friend,” I said.
“I have to ask the AIs to let you in there.” She rubbed the wing of the plane with her free hand and shyly detached her other hand from mine. “You don’t need to touch me now.”
The figure of a seraph took shape in the shine on the metal and stepped out of it to stand with us on the grass. He had a sword of fire and red, fire hair. His eyes were blue flames burning inside their sockets. He looked at me for one long second and turned to Valkyrie.
“You never cease to surprise,” he said. Then he held out his hand to me. “I am Metatron, the voice of the Hosts, Mode and Myanfactor. You are an unknown process to us. Will you identify?”
“No,” I said. “I’m with her.”
Metatron bristled. Clearly he wasn’t used to getting many “No” answers.
“Take us to Elinor,” the Valkyrie said, a note of desperation in her voice.
“We don’t recognize this system.” He looked at me. “It cannot enter there.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “Nothing bad will happen. It’s for Elinor. To let her go.”
“Let her go?” the avatar repeated. “Are you requesting deletion?”
Valkyrie looked down. Her fists were clenched. She whispered her reply and I only just caught it because I was running on her circuits. “I cannot afford to maintain her and she’s locked in such a bad pattern. And anyway there’s barely anything . . .” But she didn’t finish.
“Let’s go,” I said to him. “You know I’m governed by her access rights. It’s in the rule-book. I’m not trying to datamine you. No hostility.”
Metatron looked at me with dislike and annoyance but he had to give way—Valkyrie knew it and so I knew it. She had paid in advance and he was bound by his debt. A human wouldn’t have had to give in to such compulsion, but he was no human.
We stood in a white place, without temperature, without depth. During the momentary transfer time Metatron tried to read me, and I let him do it enough to see that I was not an AI, or a human either. His interest made his eyes blaze so that they consumed his entire face.
“I believe you must be
Francine Annelise Bequerel’s alien system. If you wish to speak later, I am sure we can make some trade,” he said.
“Sure,” I said and felt Valkyrie’s small fingers close gently around mine.
“Go away Metatron,” she said. “Give me my time.”
“The code is fragile,” he said. “To see her is to rewrite her. To rewrite is to destroy. A few more moments is all you have left, before the corruption is fatal.”
I thought it all sounded depressingly familiar. If there’d been a bulletin board for us to talk about it upon I might have swapped notes on the impossibility of life-capture. As it was Valkyrie held my hand as Metatron vanished, and we waited together in the empty space. She could not bring herself to speak of her friend and so she told me the facts by direct data transfer, one electron gate to another; machine telepathy.
Elinor had been a Light Angel, Valkyrie’s partner. She had been killed in a power station explosion during one of the sporadic terrorist attacks by the so-called Galactic Forged Independence Fighters. The only thing left to save of her were the last few seconds of her life. But the laws of entropy applied to all kinds of copying. The nature of Uluru meant that Elinor’s life here as pure code was determined by the error rates imposed on Mode and Myanfactor by their billions of clients and the inherent instability of the Uluru structure itself.
One thing about Uluru I had never much considered before was how seldom it experienced serious wipeouts. It also managed large numbers of individuals and characters that it generated spontaneously with relatively few losses.
Meanwhile, Elinor’s remains had been delivered.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I said uneasily. So little of her existed that the system had not been able to construct a visual form for her yet. It was struggling to locate enough information.
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 31
