“Didn’t have much choice.”
“Yes.” He smiled more broadly. “Helen has a real genius for that sort of thing. I can just imagine how she presented it. How graciously she must have thrown you a life preserver after she finished torpedoing your career.”
Li’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know Nguyen was involved?”
“Oh, you know nosy little me. Grapes?” He offered a shallow bowl with several dusty green bunches.
She extricated her hand from his and pulled a grape off the stem. She put it in her mouth and chewed cautiously.
It turned out that grapes didn’t taste much like grape at all. They had tough, acrid skin. And they popped between her teeth, sending out a startling burst of juicy pulp with sharp woody-tasting things embedded in it.
“Watch out for the seeds,” Cohen said, as she choked on one. He eyed her intently, evidently expecting some sort of comment.
“They’re, um, good,” she said, nodding.
“You’re an abysmal liar.”
“You’re right. They’re terrible. Not to mention dangerous. Why would anyone eat this shit?”
And just like that they were back on the safe ground of old habit. Metz was wrapped up and put away. They would simply carry on as if it had never happened. That was as close to an apology as anyone was ever going to get out of Cohen. Or out of Li herself, for that matter.
They talked through the afternoon as long panels of refracted sunlight wheeled across the study, picking out the clear blues and yellows of the Uzbek carpet. The grapes were followed by real tea, real scones, real crème fraiche, and little green-and-white slips of watercress sandwiches. There was nothing more outrageously luxurious than tea with Cohen—streamspace or realspace.
When they’d worked their way through a full tea’s worth of personal news, gossip, and political chitchat, Cohen set his cup down and looked at her. “Are you aware that you nearly got yourself killed the other day?”
“Oh, come on!” Li said.
“You absolutely and unequivocally flatlined.”
“Nonsense,” she answered. In fact she’d had no idea it was that serious.
“What would have happened if I hadn’t been there? I can’t always be available to charge to your rescue on a white horse, you know.”
“I think in your case it’d be more like strolling to my rescue with a hand-rolled cigar in hand. And I never asked for rescuing anyway.”
“Right.” Cohen sounded irritated. “I know you too well to expect thanks. But let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again, shall we?”
“What makes you assume it wasn’t just a random attack?”
“Would it interest you to know that the signal was routed through the Anaconda Mining Company’s field AI?”
Li stared. “That’s impossible,” she said after a moment. “The field AI flatlined when the mine blew up.”
“That,” Cohen said, “is merely the story which the Secretariat has released for public consumption. In fact he’s quite alive. Or at least, he seems to be, as far as anyone can tell without making contact.” He lit a cigarette and stared at her through the curl of smoke. “He’s simply not speaking to us.”
Li looked at him suspiciously. “How do you know about this?”
“It happens to be a matter of personal interest to me. And to certain of my colleagues.”
“ALEF, in other words.”
“Mmm. The Secretariat seems to be under the impression that we have somehow, er, liberated AMC’s field AI.”
“Have you?”
“Of course not. Really.” He rolled his eyes. “You’ve been downloading too many cheap interactives.”
“Okay,” Li said. “So you didn’t have anything to do with it. How far do you trust the other ALEF AIs?”
He looked at her condescendingly. “That question displays an almost human obtuseness. It’s not a matter of trust. It’s a matter of information-sharing protocols. Besides, what would be the point? Field AIs are zombies. Have you seen the feedback loops they program into them? They’re barely even sentient.”
“Then who did it?”
“Why jump to conclusions? Maybe the field AI is controlling himself.”
“You think it’s gone rogue?”
“Oh, how I loathe that word,” Cohen said to the ceiling. “It makes it sound as if any AI who tries to get control of his own code is the equivalent of a rampaging elephant.”
Li forged ahead. “I thought field AIs couldn’t go ro—uh, rewrite their own code.”
“Well, they’re certainly not supposed to be able to.” He grinned. “But then neither was I, according to some so-called experts. Tell me, what fool’s errand does Nguyen have you running on Compson’s? What’s the cover story? And how much has she told you about what’s really going on?”
“I don’t think—”
“My dear girl. You’re the one sitting in my house asking me questions.” He threw back his head, closed his eyes, and blew an exquisite smoke ring. “If you can’t share, I really don’t see why I should play with you at all.”
She told him. He slouched against the sofa’s high back and listened, the slow rise and fall of Roland’s stomach the only sign of life about him. When she was done, he gazed at the ceiling and blew several more smoke rings before answering.
“Three things,” he said finally. “One, Helen’s told you nothing. Nothing of substance, anyway. Two, this is cleanup detail, not a real investigation. Three, she’s worried cross-eyed about keeping the lid on whatever Sharifi was doing, or she wouldn’t have picked you for the job.”
“There wasn’t any picking about it,” Li lied. “I was the closest person.”
“Mmm. Convenient that you were so close, isn’t it?”
“I guess.”
Cohen snorted daintily. “Don’t give me the simple soldier act. I know you better. Nguyen put your court-martial, or whatever they’re calling it, on ice in order to send you on a private fishing trip. You’re in bad trouble, and she knows you well enough to know you’ll do whatever it takes to climb out of it. Do the math, Catherine. You step out of line, and you can bet your Fromherz nodes it won’t be ten minutes before she’s politely reminding you that she holds your career in her hands.”
Li shifted, suddenly uncomfortable on the plush sofa. “That’s a suspicious-minded way of putting it.”
“Which is precisely why I know you’ve already thought of it.” He grinned. “Besides, I have great respect for Helen. She’s admirably ruthless, and it’s always edifying to watch a master at work. By the way, I wouldn’t recommend telling her you’ve been to see me. She’s a little sour on me just at the moment.”
Li resisted the urge to point out that Nguyen might have good reasons for being sour on him. Instead she said, “What can you tell me about Hannah Sharifi?”
Cohen smiled. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything. Did you know her personally?”
The smile broadened.
“Christ, Cohen, is there anyone you haven’t slept with?”
He sighed ostentatiously. “Oh, spare me your puritanical miner’s daughter morality. At least I’m still speaking to all my exes. Unlike some people I could name.”
“I’m still speaking to you, aren’t I?” Li said, deadpan.
They looked at each other—really looked—for the first time since she’d arrived.
Cohen looked away first and leaned forward to tap the ash off his cigarette. “I don’t think you get the credit for that.”
Li stood up and walked around the room.
Pictures of long-forgotten eighteenth-century contessas and marquises hung on the grass-papered walls. The Jaquet-Droz automaton on the card table could write messages of up to forty strokes in any alphabet, nod its head, and move its buckram-stuffed chest up and down under its frock coat in a gear-and-pulley imitation of real breathing. The bookshelves held snapshots of scientists clowning for the camera in front of ivy-covered buildings, including a first-
generation print of the famous shot of the original Hyacinthe Cohen at some historic AI conference before the Evacuation. Beside it were newer photos of the Cohen she knew—or rather photos of handsome unfamiliar faces wearing his sly smile. At parties. Playing with his dogs. Talking to the Israeli prime minister. Sitting on the beach outside Tel Aviv. That one must be recent, she realized; there was Roland’s face eyeing her from inside the picture frame.
And there were novels, of course. Cohen and his novels. Stendhal. Balzac. The Brontës. Sometimes Li thought he knew more about book people than real people.
She pulled a book from the shelf. It crackled in her hand and breathed out a tickly but pleasant-smelling cloud of leather, glue, and paper particles. She let it fall open at random:
“Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?”
I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was full.
“Because,” he said, “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now; it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you —you’d forget me.”
“Why do you keep this rubbish?” she asked Cohen, her nose still in the book. Her back was to him, but she couldn’t quite hide the smile in her voice. “It’s toxic. I’ve ingested eighteen kinds of mold just from opening the thing.”
“I’m obsessed by obsolete and troublesome technologies. Why else would I waste so much time on you?”
Li laughed and shut the book. “Speaking of obsolete technology, you knew Sharifi came out of the XenoGen birthlabs, didn’t you?”
“Oh yes. Same as you.”
Li stiffened, still not looking at him. “Same as my grandmother.”
“Of course.”
“Did Sharifi ever talk to you about that?”
“Not as such. But she talked about Compson’s World. She lived there until she was eight. Some orphanage in Helena. With nuns.”
“Sounds fun.”
“What I remember being most impressed by was why she ended up in the orphanage.”
“Oh?”
“She was blind.”
Li turned to stare at him.
“She was born blind. Something in the ocular nerve. Easily correctable. Her adoptive parents fixed it. But the birthlab made a cost-benefit analysis and decided to cull her instead of paying for the operation.”
“Merciful Christ,” Li whispered.
“I doubt mercy had much to do with it. What’s the saying? Pray to the Virgin; God took one look at Compson’s World and went back to Earth? Anyway, according to Hannah the orphanage she grew up in was full of constructs the labs dumped on the streets because of minor defects. Brings a whole new meaning to the externalization of operating costs. ‘The cheapest technology is human technology,’ she liked to say. And she was right, really. The Ring, the UN, interstellar commerce. It’s all running on the blood and sweat of a few hundred thousand miners who spend the first half of their lives underground and the last half dying of black-lung.” He laughed. “It’s positively Victorian. Or maybe it’s just human.”
Li felt a flash of anger at Cohen for… well, for what? For talking about it? For laughing at it? For knowing about it and still enjoying his elegant life? But he was right, just like Sharifi had been right. And hadn’t she gotten off Compson’s as fast as she could? Wasn’t she just as determined to take some of the good life and not think too hard about where the condensate that made it all possible was coming from?
She slid the book back onto the shelf and kept moving along the wall, toward Cohen’s desk. She picked up an open fiche, glanced at the screen:
The era of the unitary sentient organism is over. Both the Syndicates and the UN member nations are now scrambling to catch up with this metaevolutionary reality. In the Syndicates we have seen an evolutionary shift toward a hive mind mentality, viz., the cr`eche system, the thirty-year contract, the construction of a distinctively posthuman collective psychology, including generalized cultural acceptance of euthanasia for individuals who deviate from the gene-norm.
“Don’t you believe in privacy?” Cohen asked, sounding exasperated.
“Only my own. What is this, anyway?”
“A talk I’m giving. A draft. Meaning get your snout out of it.”
She shrugged and put the fiche down. “It doesn’t sound like Sharifi had happy memories of Compson’s. So why did she go back there? And what was she doing underground in the Anaconda?”
“I don’t know. We’d lost touch, rather. But I do have a pretty good idea of what kind of person she was. And no matter what Helen claims to believe, Sharifi wouldn’t have sold information. She was a real crusader.” He smiled. “A little like you.”
Li brushed that aside. “I’m just pulling a paycheck.”
“Is that what they call it?” He snorted. “I’ve met better-paid bellhops. Speaking of which, why don’t you tell me exactly what you were looking for when the field AI latched on to you.”
“Do you really think it went rogue?” she asked.
“No. Or rather, I stopped thinking that when it went after you. Semisentients just aren’t that interested in humans. Most full sentients aren’t even that interested. No, someone sent it. Someone who is interested in you.”
“Who?”
“Dragons,” Cohen murmured, tracing an elegant figure in the air with the tip of his cigarette. “White Beauties.”
Li’s oracle dipped into the spinstream to figure out what White Beauties were, and what they had to do with imaginary lizards. All she got was a few obscure references to sixteenth-century mapmaking.
Cohen laughed, and she realized he had seen her instream query—and her failure to turn anything up.
“When mapmakers reached the edges of what they knew back on Earth,” he said, “they’d write ‘Here Be Dragons.’ Or if they were a little more prosaic they’d simply leave blank spots. Blank spots which were white, of course, on the old paper maps. Siberia. The Empty Quarter. Deepest Africa. The great explorers called those blank spots White Beauties. Silly of me, perhaps. But what I mean to say is that streamspace is more than the sum of things humans have put there. There are White Beauties in the Stream. Living, sentient systems as unknown and uncharted as those white spaces on the old maps. Humans don’t see them. Or if they do see them, they generally don’t recognize them. But they exist. And you may have bumped up against one, that’s all.”
Li shivered. “You can’t honestly believe that.”
“People have believed stranger things,” he answered. Then he shrugged and smiled. “I’m not making any claims. You asked me for a guess, that’s my guess. For the moment anyway. Like every woman, I reserve the right to change my mind.”
It was an old argument, but one Li couldn’t resist. “You’re not a woman, Cohen.”
“My dear, I’ve been one for longer than you have.”
“No. You’ve been a tourist. It’s different.” Li tapped into her hard files, pulled up her scan of Sharifi’s interface and copied it to him. “Take a look at that and let me know what your woman’s intuition tells you.”
“Well now,” Cohen said, sitting up abruptly. “I was wondering when you’d get around to mentioning that.” His upper lip twisted in a crooked little smile. “It was quite entertaining to see you teetering back and forth, trying to decide how far you trusted me.”
“It’s not a matter of trust,” Li said. “It’s a matter of information-sharing protocols.”
“Impertinent monkey.”
He wizarded the file into realspace, opened the case, ran his fingers along the wire, turned it over to look at the raised sunburst.
“It was made for Sharifi,” Li said. “Some kind of wet/
dry interface.”
“Intraface.”
“I think she was using it to interface with the field AI—”
“Int raface.” He sounded pained. “Do you listen to anything I say?”
“Interface, intraface, what’s the difference?”
“Think, Catherine. An interface manages the exchange of data and operating programs between two or more discrete systems. An intraface, in contrast, merges the two into a single integrated system.”
“Pretty academic distinction, Cohen.”
“Not when the two things you’re networking are a human and an Emergent AI. Think of your own internals. The various systems are platformed on an oracle—a simple, nonsentient AI that’s little more than an intelligent game-playing agent. The oracle routes data and active code back and forth from you to your wetware, translates classical queries into quantum computational functions, tags and produces correct solutions.” He fluttered slim, perfectly manicured fingers. “In broad outline, it’s little different than the shunt through which I receive sensory data and route commands to this or any other wired body. An intraface, however, is an entirely different beast. It merges the AI and the human into a single consciousness.”
“Who controls it?”
“A nonquestion. Like asking which neurons in your brain control your own body. Or asking which of my associated networks is in control of me. We all are.”
“But some of you are more in control than others, right?”
“Ah. Yes. I should have been more precise before. When I say a single consciousness I’m speaking of consciousness not as you understand it, but as I do. I know it’s fashionable to describe human consciousness as Emergent, but really, as soon as you get above the level of the individual neuron, that’s just a metaphor. A true Emergent is a very different animal. Emergent consciousness is born out of a kind of parallel processing that the human mind simply isn’t wired for. Control in such a context is… complicated.”
“And you’d need an Emergent to run it?”
“A very powerful one at that.”
Li looked at him, thinking. “How many Emergents are there who could do it?”
“Not many,” Cohen said, picking at a thread on the cuff of his suit jacket. “Alba’s Emergents, of course, especially if you ran them through AMC’s field AI. Two or three Ring-side AIs, all under depreciable life contracts to DefenseNet or one of the private defense contractors. Any of the cornerstone AIs in FreeNet’s Consortium could run it—and stepping on the Consortium’s toes could certainly explain your little adventure in Freetown.”
Spin State Page 15
