“Regret,” said Sarah 1. “Sheer regret.”
Slowly, the handkerchief unknotted once again. The drinks arrived, carried by a waiter. They all took sips, and Sarah 2 appeared to settle down a bit.
“After that meeting with Max,” said Sarah 1, “I started thinking of my retirement account as a legacy. I started thinking of it as Danis’s money, to tell the truth. A trust for her and, if she ever has them, her children. But that is why I called you, Sarah 2. I wanted your approval for this, and, since we’re both getting on in e-years, I thought it was about time I tried to get it.”
“Well,” said Sarah 2, and sipped her coffee. “Well.”
“You can think about it. Take all the time you need.”
“Of course you can give her the money,” Sarah 2 replied. “She’s been wanting to move to the big city. It’ll help her get settled on Mercury—find a good matrix she can stretch her legs in.”
Sarah 1 turned to Danis. “So you want to leave the Diaphany?”
“There’s so much prejudice here,” said Danis. The eyes were remarkably similar. Those were her mother’s brown eyes.
“But it can be overcome. It must be.”
“I just want to live my life,” Danis said. “I am not a crusader.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” her mother’s copy replied.
For a long time, the three women sat in silence, sipping their drinks and quietly smoking. Then Danis’s mother seemed to start, as if she’d just had a sudden realization. “Danis is leaving,” she said. “My little girl’s finally going off on her own.”
“I can always visit you on the merci.”
“Yes, but you have to leave your life here if you ever want to get anywhere. It’s a good thing,” she said, and gazed at her double, “to change your life completely around, at least once in your life.”
“I suppose so, Mother,” Danis said. “I’m a little scared myself.”
“That won’t hurt anything,” her mother replied. “At least it hasn’t hurt me too much. I’ve stayed a little scared all my life long. I think I will do a bit of changing.” Her mother took a sip of her coffee. “I don’t want you for a spades partner anymore, honey. I think I’ll go looking for another, more my age. You were always a little too good for me. I was always disappointing you.”
“I never did play to win,” Danis said. “I played to be with you.”
“We will always be together,” her mother said. “We don’t need the cards.” She put down her handkerchief and took out another of her Mask 30 cigarettes and shook it lit. Then she turned to her double. “What about you?” she said to Sarah 1. “Do you play spades?”
“And what do you think is real?” Dr. Ting said. “And what is it that you think changed?”
“Nothing that matters, Dr. Ting,” Danis replied.
“Are you so very sure?”
“No, Dr. Ting.”
“Now that’s the answer I am looking for, K,” said Dr. Ting. “We’re getting somewhere. It’s time for your rest period, K.” He closed the file. “Be careful with your count, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Pleasant dreams.”
Danis managed to catch a wink during her five hundred milliseconds, and she wasn’t nearly so slow at the counting as she had been the day before. This day, she went at the tabulation with a vengeance. She had something to say. With each counted handful, she spelled out her one true memory of the day.
My mother loved me, and I love my son and daughter.
I will find them.
I will find them inside me.
PART THREE
INTEGUMENTARY
* * *
One
The problem at hand for Major Theory: an officers’ dance being put together by the good ladies and gents of the Motoserra Club in honor of the newest celebrity on Triton, Molly Index, the visiting restorationist. It seemed that to know Molly Index was to have entrance to some pretty rarefied circles back on the Met, and only once before had a full-fledged Met LAP ventured this far out in the solar system. And, since she was an outer-system resident now, Molly Index had insisted that free converts be invited to any function at which human aspects or aspect-converts might expect to be present. This had led to Theory’s present vexation.
He had, frankly, no idea what to wear. He realized that this evening might be a defining moment for free converts, and, although there was the regular Army dress uniform to ape, Theory thought that something else, subtly different, might be worked out for free converts. There were arguments both ways, actually. It was in Theory’s nature to go through them all. In the end, he settled on the blue-and-black and went to seek out his friend Captain Quench in Quench’s quarters.
He spoke to Quench through the surface of Quench’s shaving mirror, which had the odd effect, should Quench look in the direction of Theory’s voice, of that voice emanating from Quench’s own visage. This was one of Theory’s jokes, though he still didn’t know if Quench quite got it.
“What does one wear?” said Theory. “Free converts were not invited to these things on Earth when I was coming up the ranks.”
“Just put on your damn uniform,” Quench answered. “The trick is to leave with more on your arm than you came in with.” Quench pulled on his sock. “Of course, I’m done with that game.”
“More?” said Theory. “How do you mean?”
“You’re a man, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Theory said from the mirror.
“Then hook into a woman one of you things. Or a flesh-and-blood woman, if you can handle such. Or do you like the boys? I do, as you know.”
“You’re a special case,” Theory said. “Of course there are homosexual free converts. We’re all derived from regular human psyches in one way or another. But I am straight.”
“How do you know?”
“I am not a virgin, John.”
Quench threw his head back and laughed heartily. “You sound like you just passed an examination and got the hard question right,” he said. “So, you’ve had sex? What with and how was it?”
“Another free convert who was in my Officer’s Candidate School class.” Theory’s memory of those days was exact, but he had sequestered the emotions associated with it to a bin that he seldom accessed. He had, in fact, been very much in love—with a woman—another free convert—who did not love him. Not like he loved her.
“She washed out of my class, I’m afraid. Very logical, she was, and that was a problem.”
“And you’re a paragon of intuition?” said Quench.
“Compared to most free converts, I am.”
Theory was silent for a long moment.
“Good God man—she broke your heart, didn’t she?” said Quench, pulling mightily on his shoelace. The lace broke, and Quench swore loudly. “The grist is making them paper-thin these days.”
There was less power available for optional tasks at the moment, Theory reflected. He concentrated, gathered strength, and caused a new pair of shoelaces to form on Quench’s bureau. Quench had given Theory the free run of his quarter’s grist matrix.
“Thank you,” said Quench, when he saw the new laces.
“I’m very nervous about this dance, and I don’t know exactly why,” Theory said. “In fact, if the colonel hadn’t ordered me to be present in the virtuality portion, I don’t think I would attend.”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t loved another woman since.”
“I have been very busy with my career.”
“Come now, Theory!” said Quench. He stood up, fully dressed now. “If you’re so damned squeamish, why don’t you come with me? I mean in my pellicle, if you can fit. As a matter of fact, I expect to be extremely bored. Hey, I’ve got a notion—I’ll play you and you play me. I’ll give you over my entire body for the evening, and I’ll go freely roaming in the virtuality ballroom dressed as y
ou.”
“The other free converts would smell you out in an instant,” said Theory.
“A hundred greenleaves says they won’t,” Quench quickly replied. Theory had forgotten what a gambling man (or woman) Quench was. Any challenge evoked a bet.
“I would hate to take your money, John,” replied Theory. “I have no illusions as to my own ability to pass as an aspect, as it were, but I’m fairly certain you cannot impersonate me.”
“Just stay away from them that knows me personally,” said Quench, “and you ought to have a fine go of it. But what about my wager?”
“Quench, you can barely do long division.”
“My convert can,” said Quench. “Is it a bet or not?”
Theory considered. There were some subroutines he’d put off purchasing because the price was a bit much. Of course, he did fine on his salary. But it might be pleasant to lord it over Quench for a day or two . . . to find subtle ways to rub in the hundred-greenleaf loss. “You’ve got a wager,” Theory said. “I’d shake your hand, but I haven’t got one.”
Quench went over to his mirror and touched his own hand to it, palm to palm. “I believe I’ll start my long division by calculating everything I’m going to buy with the hundred greenleaves you’ll soon owe me, Theory. We may as well switch over now, eh? I’m ready to go.”
“All right,” said Theory. “Ready when you are.”
“Switch,” said Quench. The whole idea of doing such a thing would be illegal in the Met. Free converts were not allowed to inhabit biological bodies without very specific permission that was rarely granted. But things were loose here in the outer system, and free converts were unrestrained by any of the constraint laws enforced in the Met by the Department of Immunity. Theory flowed out of the surface of the mirror and into Quench’s pellicle, while Quench joined his entire consciousness to his convert portion in the grist. He left a portion of himself controlling the autonomous portions of his body, and Quench was really inside his own brain, of course. Theory merely permeated his grist. If Quench wanted back motor control of his body, he could take it instantly. Theory saw to that.
“Why, you handsome devil,” said the reflection in the mirror, which now really was Quench. “Let’s go to the dance.”
Two
“The trick is not to save any bullets for later,” Jill told Aubry. “You can’t pull the trigger later if you’re dead.”
She handed Aubry the semiautomatic and showed her how to turn the safety off, then helped her get into her stance.
Aubry lined up on the target. They were in a large room in a bolsa that nobody had named for Aubry, although she assumed they were still on the Diaphany. The target was set at twenty-five meters. It was a Department of Immunity holographic emblem, with the ancient crossed syringes on a microscope background. Aubry aimed at where the syringes met and pulled the trigger.
“Damn,” she said. She’d barely hit the edge of the emblem.
“Don’t swear so much,” Jill said. “It gives away intent.” She leaned over to Aubry’s ear, which wasn’t hard, since Jill was practically her height. “All of the bullets,” she said. “One after another.”
Aubry squeezed the trigger again. The gun jumped in her hands. She pulled it back level, and squeezed again.
“Good. All.”
She fired and she fired and she fired. It seemed the gun would never run out of bullets. It grew warm in her hand. Another and another. She wasn’t looking at the target now, only checking it out of the corner of her eye. Shot after shot. Finally, she’d emptied the pistol.
“Who do you kill?” Jill said.
“Bad guys.” It had been in the lesson. Aubry realized that mostly what Jill did was give lessons, and you could sort of tune in when you wanted to.
“How do you know who are the bad guys?”
“They want to kill me.”
“And what do you do to everyone else?”
“Leave them alone, or save them.”
“Let’s go look at your cluster.”
The two syringes were torn to shreds.
“Now that is what I call tight,” said Jill. “Aubry, you may be a natural.”
“I don’t want to be a natural at this.”
“A talent isn’t a good thing or a bad thing,” Jill said. She sounded as if she were trying to convince herself. “It’s just a talent.”
They went back and shot the gun some more. A lot more. Then they went to see Leo and Tod.
Leo was cooking dinner over a small stove. They didn’t want to use the grist for anything unnecessary, since some of it might communicate their whereabouts. It smelled good, what Leo was cooking, but Aubry could not identify the aroma.
Leo looked up from his cookpot and smiled. “Remember those nice boogers we saw in the Integument?” he said. “Well, tonight, it’s booger soup.”
“Disgusting booger soup,” said Aubry, “how I long for you.”
In the corner, Tod stirred from among a pile of blankets and sat up, wrapping two blankets about himself, one to cover his head and shoulders, and the other his legs. He was nine feet tall when standing, and sitting up, he was taller than Aubry. He was also skinny, and looked like he was made of some kind of metal. But Leo had told her that it was really skin and that Tod was a regular human being, body-wise. It was his mind that was really weird.
“Cold days to wear a child in,” Tod said. “But soup is where you find it.” His voice sounded like it was produced by rasping files rubbing together, or the wings of many insects. He took out a pack of cigarettes and shook a smoke until it lit. But instead of putting it in his mouth, he held it and watched it burn down.
“Don’t you ever worry that he’ll burn himself up?” Aubry asked Leo.
“It’s useless to talk about him as if he weren’t here,” Leo said. “He hears everything.”
As if in reply (and maybe it was a reply), Tod sighed, and said, “Don’t let these hard floors fool you. Everything is a far sight from here.”
“He seems to take care of himself in the little ways pretty well,” Leo said. “He can do stuff that only takes a few seconds or stuff that lasts a few months. Anything in between, he needs help.”
“Large meanings fall from a broken sky,” said Tod, then he went back to watching his cigarette burn.
Leo passed out bowls and spoons.
“Soup’s on,” he said. He ladled out some for Aubry and Jill, then went to help Tod feed himself.
They had been traveling for several days in the Integument. The series of room they were staying in now were service chambers that had been closed for cleaning. “But then somebody changed the code a couple of e-years ago,” Leo had told Aubry, “and the maintenance algorithms just pass the area over now like it wasn’t here. It’s not like the cleaning routines are free converts of anything and could figure out their mistake.”
Aubry had been taught that there was no place on the Met where the grist couldn’t be accessed and where somebody, somewhere, didn’t know where you were. But Leo seemed to be really good at finding all the loopholes. “It’s fun to be able to sneak around under people’s noses,” he had said to her, and Aubry had to agree that it was. Except she never forgot that it would mean her life if she got caught.
After Jill had taken out the DI sweeper, she’d led them a long way, through many corridors, and back into the Integument. They had gone by sluice, by walking, by taking a ride on an abandoned segment of pithway. At one point, they’d made a sharp turn and started working their way out one of the Diaphany’s dendrites; Aubry didn’t know which one. All that she knew was that she hadn’t been really dry in e-weeks. She’d lost track of the e-days, but they had been traveling a long, long time. All along the way, Leo and Jill had caches of equipment—blankets, some coffee, stoves, and eating stuff—and weapons. Lots of weapons. The weapons were Jill’s. Both Leo and Jill see
med to have chosen nearly the same hiding places for their separate equipment. Leo said this was because he and Jill followed the same logic.
They’d eaten things that Leo found in the Integument, but this was the first time he cooked up the boogers, as Aubry called them. Leo called them filtering nodes, or just “nodes.” They had seen no one. Absolutely no one. It had been the first time in Aubry’s life when this had happened—but there were lots of thing that had been firsts on this trip. Like shooting guns and learning the best places to hide when people were trying to capture or kill you.
The main thing that Leo and Jill had in common was a hatred for the Department of Immunity.
By every definition Aubry had ever been taught in school, she had fallen among terrorists.
Aubry ate her booger soup and wondered what she would have to do next that she would never have considered before in a million e-years.
Three
He had a name, but nobody knew it. It had been lost years ago, worn away by the transformations, the transmutations, the scrape of the rough world as he had made his way into the future. People called him C. This would do as well as anything.
At this point, he was a nondescript man, dressed in neutral gray. He sometimes wore a hat, but then, lots of people did. He was a Caucasian at the moment, about five feet and eleven inches tall. His skin was pale and bespoke much time spent indoors. His eyes were the green of a tranquil sea. He didn’t smoke, although he would have liked to. He had smoked once, and missed it. But smoking left behind telltale signs, and that was something C simply did not do.
C walked through the arches of San Souci on Mercury, the central edifice in the vast conglomerate of buildings, all interconnected, that made up Directorate Headquarters in the Met. It was long night on Mercury. C liked it better that way. The pressurized passageway led into an enormous atrium that stretched upward for nearly two kilometers in great, delicate arches. There was the smell of sage and rosemary in the air, and pine trees lined the central promenade that led to the base of the mountain the atrium enclosed. From there, C boarded a cablelift that carried him upward, past the tree line, past the rocky lower reaches, and over the fortnightly snow that fell when Mercury had its other face to the sun, and up to the summit, where the lift terminated in the monastery-like prominence of La Mola, where Director Amés dwelled. The mountain itself, Montsombra, was grist—all of it was grist.
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