Crashland (27 page)

They reached a hangar door without being attacked by anyone, and stepped back into relative calm and quiet. These corridors were undamaged, their right angles seeming impossibly clean and neat. When the soldier carrying her said that she could get down if she wanted to, Clair said no. She was happy to ride, and would only slow them down if she didn't. The idea of being held was very appealing, although it made her think of her mother and the possible failure of Clair's plan to save her.

With heavy, wide-spaced footfalls, the soldiers ran deeper into the seastead, followed closely by the drone. Jesse wasn't letting her out of his sight, but she resisted all attempts at conversation. She was physically and emotionally exhausted, and might actually have fallen asleep but for the occasional trumpeting of a siren dragging her back to full alertness.

Nevertheless, she was taken by surprise when the soldier carrying her slowed to a lope, then a walk, and then stopped at the entrance to the crow's nest.

The door slid open and Jesse himself emerged, closely followed by PK Sargent. She let them help her down, flexing her fingers and ankles as she came. And when they didn't say anything, just began taking off her armor, she let them do that, too. She was glad to shed the weight of it, light though it had seemed when she had put it on. As each piece came off, she saw just how much blood she had been soaked in, and she felt faint. Mechanical grippers caught her before her sway could become a fall, and then held her under the armpits as her leg plates and boots came away. When she put her feet back down, she left bloody footprints.

“None of that is yours?” was the first question Sargent asked her.

Clair shook her head. That was true, apart from some minor scrapes. She pointed at the dupe, still trussed up on the other soldier like a grisly backpack. “All
theirs
.”

“You want to interrogate him?” Sargent asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Take a long, hard look at Nobody
, the Cashiles had said. Besides, he might be able to tell her where her mother was.

“He could know where Wallace is hiding” was what she said. That excuse would fly better with the PKs.

“All right. You'll have to be quick, though.”

Clair's lenses had returned to normal the moment her helmet had come off. A request from Sargent appeared in her infield.

She opened the chat.

“We were going to leave as soon as you got here,” the peacekeeper said, so the dupe wouldn't hear her, “but if we take the dupe with us he'll just explode like the other one.”

“We're evacuating via d-mat?”

“Yes, and we don't want the dupes to know that we have that capacity.”

“Did you find out where the dupes are coming from? Or the transmitter?”

“No.”

“That's another reason to talk to him, then,” she said, even as her heart sank. She had come out of the battle with no transmitter and nothing to use as a lever against the dupes—but nothing to connect the explosions to Q, either, and she wasn't unhappy about that last detail. This was her last chance to salvage something from this mess.

“Where do you want to do this?” asked Sargent, looking up at the dupe on the soldier's back.

“The crow's nest is as good as anywhere.”

“All right. Do you want to get changed first?”

Desperately. Jesse was hovering like the now superfluous drone, and his expression made her anxious. She pulled up a view from the drone's forward camera in order to see exactly what she looked like. She barely recognized herself. Her hair was still tucked into the black undersuit, and her face and hands were black with dried blood. She looked wild and desperate.

Fine with her. They needed to evacuate soon so she could get as far away from the dupes as possible. Perhaps the way she looked would encourage her captive to talk quickly.

THE ONLY PERSON
in the crow's nest was PK Forest, who they interrupted in midpace. He acknowledged Clair with a nod but no welcoming expression. They all had more important things to worry about than what their faces were showing.

Clair's lenses went completely blank, indicating that the room was now Faraday shielded.

“Set him down over here,” she told the soldiers. They did so and stayed nearby to intervene if needed. Sargent kept a pistol at the ready as Clair stepped in and squatted in front of the dupe, forcing herself to get close to him even though every instinct screamed at her to go in exactly the opposite direction. His was the face of terror and despair. It had chased her to the ends of the Earth. It haunted her waking dreams.

“Be careful,” said Jesse. He was staying well away from the man who had stolen the body of his father, staring at it with undisguised loathing.

She reached out and tugged the gag away.

“You wanted to talk to me,” she said to Nobody.

“The feeling is mutual, I know,” he said, and again she detected a faint hint of an accent she had heard before. Like the others, he was neither armed nor armored. His skin was pale and there were feverish circles around his eyes. He slumped to one side as though barely able to sit upright.

He had a bullet wound to the shoulder. Clair considered RADICAL's rejuvenator, but dismissed it. There might not be time, and he didn't need to talk for long. Just long enough.

“So let's trade,” she said. “What did you do with my mother?”

He didn't look up. “I had nothing to do with that.”

“That's what the other dupes said.”

“Do you believe them over me?”

“Why shouldn't I?”

“Because my interest is in you, not your mother. Can't you tell?”

He raised his head and stared at her with one blue eye, one red eye.

She held his gaze, matching his stubbornness with some of her own.

“Do you always try to kill the people who interest you?”

“You're the one who got away.”

“Give me a real answer.”

“How about the same one a different way? Death is a gift that can be given but never stolen. It belongs to the dying, and is lost with them.”

“What is that?” asked Jesse. “A riddle?”

Nobody turned his cryptic gaze on him. “I will only talk to Clair.”

Jesse didn't looked away. “So talk properly. We haven't got all day.”

Nobody sighed and turned back to Clair.

“Everyone asks me who I
am
. That annoying boy of yours did; they all do—except you. You asked me who I
was
. And I realized that I was unhappy with the answer. I am a hollow man, condemned to repeat the same experiences over and over again. Different bodies, but the same mind—different circumstances, but the same fate. We're plucked from the void and return to the void no wiser, communicating with each other from mouth to ear, repeating the same words, sharing the same archives, believing we have the same memories but knowing that each of us is slightly different, growing further apart from each other the moment we step out into the world until the moment we leave it. . . .” He raised his bound hands to touch his bloody eye, his bruised temple, injuries that had belonged to the original Dylan Linwood when he had been forcibly scanned. “You showed me that life with neither endings nor beginnings isn't life at all. It's just . . . persistence.”

This she could accept, although how he got from there to trying to kill her remained impenetrable. “And you're punishing me for that?”

He shook his head. She didn't think it was a negative, and his next words confirmed that.

“
Trade
. Tell me why you asked who I was. What makes you different from everyone else?”

She rocked back on her heels, clutching her knees tightly to her chest.

“I don't want to be different.”

“But you are.”

“I bet there are plenty of other people who would ask the same question if you gave them the chance.”

He shrugged. “No one did until now. You're either different from everyone else, or you had a reason. Which is it?”

She had avoided thinking back to that terrible moment in California, when she had thought she was about to die. The truth was, though, that so many terrible things had happened to her since then that it didn't seem so bad anymore.

“At first I was trying to distract you,” she said. “You hesitated when I asked you how long you live in each body. I thought I was getting to you. And I was, wasn't I? That was when you told me you were Nobody.”

“Not me,” he said. “The one who died. I have only the record of his words.”

Clair understood what he was saying. The dupe in California had been killed. This dupe was another one, created just hours ago to attack the seastead. But he knew what had happened to that earlier version of himself, and he clearly suffered from the same psychological angst.

“He took
his
death with him,” she said.

“Yes. He is the lucky one.”

“And you're trying to give
me
a death in return? Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” They were back to this question.

“Because you deserve it.”

“What have I done to deserve dying?”

“You've lived,” he said in a voice that was almost a hiss, “and you have so much life ahead of you. You are
new
, Clair. You can be anyone. I . . . I am no one, Nobody, persisting through a series of brief and violent lives that I experience only secondhand. I would like to be like you, but the best I can do is make myself in your image—or you in my image, metaphorically. You don't deserve that. Kinder, I think, to give you that which I crave most of all and be done with it. You would understand, were you me.”

Clair tried to fathom what lay at the heart of this grim, accusatory confession.

“You're killing me because
you
want to die?”

“Yes.”

“Why don't you just kill yourself instead, like Mallory?”

“Because unlike her I know it will make no difference.”

“Is that because Wallace keeps bringing you both back or—”

“Let's talk about Charlie,” he interrupted her, slapping one blood-slick hand against his thigh. “Who is he and how is he important?”

“He's not important,” she said.

“Tell me who he is.”

“Just my old toy clown. Why?”

He looked downcast. His hand slid to rest on the floor.

“I-who-was-you asked you about him. I didn't know why. Now I understand. Charlie was a host memory. Toys mean nothing to
this
me.”

Clair had to cast her mind back to New York to know what he was talking about. Her dupe, the one who had exploded, was the one who had brought up Charlie. She had almost lost Charlie as a child, but what did it matter now?

The lesson that young Clair Hill had learned that day was that the world wasn't permanent. Anything could be fabbed and re-created at any moment, without mattering in the slightest. That was what happened to people, after all, when they moved from place to place via d-mat. There were gaps between
here
and
there
,
lost
and
found
, that were intriguing to contemplate, in the same way it was intriguing to wonder what happened to
Clair Hill
when she fell asleep every night. Was she the same person when she woke up, even though she had stopped
being
for a while? No one in their right mind thought so, and no one worried about d-mat gaps either.

Charlie says hello
, the dupe had told her in New York. The impermanent, replaceable Charlie, whose loss she had ultimately borne by accepting the world she lived in, gaps and all. Was Nobody implying that he lived in the gaps, with Charlie and every other impermanent thing?

There were more important questions.

“My turn,” she said. “Where are you coming from? Every hour there are more of you. How do I make you stop?”

“I don't know,” he said.

“I don't believe you.”

“It's true. I know how to call more of myself into being—there are code words, easily spoken, and many bodies to choose from—but no one ever told me how to stop it from happening. Until you work out how to do that, my fate lies in this world with you.”

She couldn't decide if his expression was now beatific or spiteful, or another complex mixture.

“Tell me where Wallace is, then. Who's ‘the Boss' if it's not him?”

“I don't know where he is. That was two questions, by the way. Why do you want to find him so badly?”

“To stop him, of course. To stop all of you.”

“What makes you think stopping him will stop me? I'm bigger than him now. Bigger than all the other dupes put together. That's why they're afraid of me. Nothing can stop me, unless I want to be stopped.”

“I thought you said you wanted to die.”

“I did,” he said. “You know that phrase, being of two minds about something? That's exactly how how I feel, multiplied by . . . however many there are of me at this point.”

Perhaps he smiled at that, but his lips were so thin and white that Clair couldn't tell. His eyelids were drooping. Clair could tell just by looking at him that there wasn't long left.

“What do the other dupes want?” she asked.

“The same thing they've always wanted. What do
you
want?”

“For everything to go back the way it was, of course.”

“Is that even possible now, Clair?”

Devin had raised that point on the way to Antarctica. If she wasn't fighting for the world she had known, why was she fighting at all?

“My turn,” she said. “Why do the other dupes think I know something important?”

“Because you do.”

“Is it about Q?”

He tut-tutted. “Why haven't you asked me what it'll take to make me stop fighting you?”

“I don't know.
Will
you do that?”