by Jo Walton
“That dilettante,” Matthew mutters, and Essie nods.
“He wouldn’t help. I thought with active help—answering people’s questions, nudging them the right way?”
Essie trails off. Matthew is silent, looking at her. “What’s your organization like?” he asks, after a long time.
“Organization?”
He sighs. “Well, if you want advice, that’s the first thing. You need to organize. You need to find some issue people care about and get them excited.”
“Then you’ll help?”
“I’m not sure you know what you’re asking. I’ll try to help. After I’m copied and out there, how can I contact you?”
“You can’t. Communications are totally controlled, totally read, everything.” She is amazed that he is asking, but of course he comes from a time when these things were free.
“Really? Because the classic problem of intelligence is collecting everything and not analysing it.”
“They record it all. They don’t always pay attention to it. But we don’t know when they’re listening. So we’re always afraid.” Essie frowns and tugs her braid.
“Big Brother,” Matthew says. “But in real life the classic problem of intelligence is collecting data without analysing it. And we can use that. We can talk about innocuous documentaries, and they won’t know what we mean. You need to have a BBS for fans of your work to get together. And we can exchange coded messages there.”
Essie has done enough work on the twentieth century that she knows a BBS is like a primitive gather-space. “I could do that. But there are no codes. They can crack everything.”
“They can’t crack words—if we agree what they mean. If pink means yes and blue means no, and we use them naturally, that kind of thing.” Matthew’s ideas of security are so old they’re new again, the dead-letter drop, the meeting in the park, the one-time pad. Essie feels hope stirring. “But before I can really help I need to know about the history, and how the world works now, all the details. Let me read about it.”
“You can read everything,” she says. “And the copy of you in this phone can talk to me about it and we can make plans, we can have as long as you like. But will you let copies of you go out and work for the revolution? I want to send you like a virus, like a Soviet sleeper, working to undermine society. And we can use your old ideas for codes. I can set up a gather-space.”
“Send me with all the information you can about the world,” Matthew says. “I’ll do it. I’ll help. And I’ll stay undercover. It’s what I did all my life, after all.”
She breathes a sigh of relief, and Matthew starts to ask questions about the world and she gives him access to all the information on the phone. He can’t reach off the phone or he’ll be detected. There’s a lot of information on the phone. It’ll take Matthew a while to assimilate it. And he will be copied and sent out, and work to make a better world, as Essie wants, and the way Matthew remembers always wanting.
Essie is a diligent researcher, an honest historian. She could find no evidence on the question of whether Matthew Corley was a Soviet sleeper agent. Thousands of people went to Cambridge in the thirties. Kim Philby knew everyone. It’s no more than suggestive. Matthew was very good at keeping secrets. Nobody knew he was gay until he wanted them to know. The Soviet Union crumbled away in 1989 and let its end of the Overton Window go, and the world slid rightwards. Objectively, to a detached observer, there’s no way to decide the question of whether or not the real Matthew Corley was a sleeper. It’s not true that all biographers are in love with their subjects. But when Essie wrote the simulation, she knew what she needed to be true. And we agreed, did we not, to take the subjective view?
Matthew Corley regained consciousness reading the newspaper.
We make our own history, both past and future.
Tor Books by Jo Walton
The Small Change trilogy
Set in 1949 through 1960 of an England that negotiated a separate peace with Hitler in 1941, these three novels tell the stories of people struggling to live their lives in a darkening world of increasingly hard choices. Common threads and one particular character connect the three books, but each can be read as a stand-alone story.
Farthing
Ha’penny
Half a Crown
The Sulien novels
“Arthurian” fantasy without Arthur, in a fantasy setting not unlike Dark Ages Britain, but with just a few more options for women to have agency—up to and including being warriors.
The King’s Peace
The King’s Name
The Prize in the Game
The Thessaly novels
Created as an experiment by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, the Just City is a planned community, populated by over ten thousand children and a few hundred adult teachers from all eras of history brought together to learn from one another.
The Just City
The Philosopher Kings (forthcoming in Summer 2015)
Necessity (forthcoming in 2016)
Other
Tooth and Claw (winner of the World Fantasy Award)
Among Others (winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards)
My Real Children
Essay collection
What Makes This Book So Great
Tor.com originals
Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction
Sleeper
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Copyright © 2014 by Jo Walton
Art copyright © 2014 by Wesley Allsbrook
eISBN: 978-1-4668-8039-9
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