Ghost Spin (46 page)

He had said something else about the tiles as well, something strange and suggestive and riddling. And when Cohen spoke in riddles, it was a good bet that he was saying something that mattered to him.

Li searched her memory, wishing vainly that it was as solid and reliable as the shimmering screen of mosaics.

And the walls became the world all around, Cohen had told her. She could see him now, leaning against a blue-and-white-tiled pilaster, giving her a long, sideways look out of the hazel eyes of a body he’d favored in the first summer of their marriage. And that night the trees
grew and grew in Max’s room, and the ceiling hung with vines, and the walls became the world all around.

Between the shimmering fractals of the courtyard’s walls ran a long, slender, geometrically precise line of water. The watercourse flowed from a burbling fountain just at Li’s feet, down the long slope of the courtyard, and into an identical fountain and a matching arcade. The water sparkled as it flowed from shadow to sunlight and back into shadow again. Its movement was hypnotic, mesmerizing; and as Li gazed into the crystal blue she saw that every ripple, every eddy, every molecule was a memory. Everything in and around and above and below the courtyard was a memory. The tiles were memories. The trees were memories that branched into the limbs and twigs, leaves and flowers. Memories haunted the shadowed rooms that stood still and empty around the courtyard, ranked like loyal family retainers in a fairy-tale castle cursed to eternal sleep. Even the sky was a memory, lifetimes upon lifetimes shading away into blue infinity.

She read the memories with the instinctive speed of the sensory interface. But when she dropped beneath that, slipping into the numbers, she could see that her eyes had not been fooling her. No other AI could fake this place. Not even ALEF, with all its power, could have done it. And certainly no lone Navy ship on the outskirts of UN space could manage it.

This was home—as much as any physical place in her co-penetrating real and virtual lives was home. This was Cohen. Or at least it was the part of him that could be contained in the virtually infinite, folded databases that contained his four centuries and many lifetimes of accumulated memories.

It took everything she had to remind herself that, real or not, Cohen’s memories belonged to others now. And those others could use the memories for their own purposes, and in ways that might be completely antithetical to everything Cohen had ever stood for. For the first time, facing the otherworldly beauty of Cohen’s memory palace, Li understood what it meant to be unable to die. And for the first time, facing the unearthly beauty of Cohen’s past, and knowing that Cohen
himself was nowhere inside it, Li understood the real curse of immortality.

Cohen might not inhabit his memories anymore, but someone still lived here. And that someone might be the very person who had murdered him.

Li walked cautiously down the length of the courtyard, her feet slipping on the wet tiles where the watercourse had overlapped its boundaries. There was no sound, no movement, no sign of life anywhere. But she could feel in every cell of her being that the palace was not empty. And whoever now inhabited it was no unfamiliar and easy enemy. The new soul of the database was both Cohen and not Cohen, both lover and stranger, both friend and enemy.

Under the far arcade, she found the first sign of life: a silk shawl, six feet on each side, as soft as cashmere, and woven into a dense, rich, intricate paisley. It was an item of unimaginable luxury, something that had no place here and would have been a museum piece worth the price of entire planets if it were real rather than virtual. It was the kind of thing Cohen would have admired but never worn. To Li’s bemused eyes it seemed unimaginably far from the living, breathing AIs of her world, and more like the sort of detritus an elegant Victorian lady might have left in her wake … along with tastefully arranged flowers, painted fans, and discreetly engraved calling cards.

Li should never have picked it up. She should have left it where she found it, safely untouched. Everything was code in a memory palace. Even the most innocent object could contain hidden programs, executables, viruses. And something like this practically screamed danger at her. But it was cold, and growing late, and the sky was dark with an oncoming storm. And some half-conscious premonition told her that she might be stuck here overnight—and that the heating might not be up to its usual standard.

She wrapped the shawl around herself and stepped into the shadows.

She found bits and pieces of the ghost before she found the ghost itself. An empty glass. A half-read copy of
Jane Eyre
with page 247 folded down into a precise triangle. A lady’s purse—a sort of arts and
crafts project, also abandoned midway through—made of what Li was pretty sure the nineteenth-century society women in Cohen’s old novels had called netting.

And then, abruptly, she turned a corner and came face-to-face with the person to whom—she had no doubt about this whatsoever—the shawl and the book and the purse belonged.

It was a woman, pale-skinned, dark-haired, strong of jaw and straight of spine, dressed in expensive, uncomfortable-looking clothes that hadn’t been in fashion for at least six centuries. And she wasn’t Cohen at all. Li was quite sure about that, though she could never have said how she knew it. She just knew, without hesitation or question, that this was no one who had ever been a part of Cohen.

“Who are you?” the woman asked her.

“Catherine Li.”

“And I am the Lady Ada, Countess Lovelace.”

“Oh,” Li said stupidly.

“Li,” the Countess repeated. “That’s a strange name. And you … are you from China?”

“Um … Korea. Sort of. It’s complicated.”

“Everything here is complicated.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“At first I thought I had imagined it. I’m a mathematician, you see. And—well, this probably won’t make sense to you at all, but … this entire palace is a sort of mathematical puzzle.”

“Oh?” Li said weakly, feeling the conversation slide sideways at a speed too fast for any hope of recovery.

“I actually wrote a whole book about—” She broke off and looked away, as if distracted by an event taking place on some plane of the folded database Li had no access to. “Oh, never mind. That’s not the point. The point is—Where are we? And why have you brought me here?”

“I haven’t. I was brought here, too.”

“So we’re both prisoners.” The countess’s white shoulders slumped despairingly. “And you can’t help me after all.”

Li started to answer—and then lapsed into silent confusion. The
memory palace was shifting around the ghost, its familiar contours suddenly gone feral. Another building was superimposed on the one they stood in, as if there were a second shadow universe hovering behind the other one like a face hidden behind a carnival mask. “What’s happening?” the ghost cried.

“I don’t kn—”

“You do know!” The woman stamped imperiously. “I won’t be lied to!”

“I’m not—”

“Do you think I don’t hear them? Do you think I don’t know what they whisper in the corridors after the doctor goes and they think the morphine has sucked me under? Do you think I don’t know they’re lying to me?”

“I don’t have anything to do with—”

The woman was plucking at her clothes now, in a distraught, self-mutilating gesture that reminded Li of the way she’d seen dying men pluck at themselves on the battlefield.

“Am I a child, to be treated this way? Am I a madwoman? This brain has built worlds of numbers! This body has made two whole human beings out of nothing! Don’t I deserve better than this?”

“I—yes,” Li said, not knowing what else to say and afraid of what the woman would do to herself.

The Dark Lady stepped toward her in a heavy rustle of silk. She smelled of perfume and medicine and something worse … something that turned Li’s stomach and sent her mind flashing back to the worst weeks of the slaughter on Gilead.

“Will you help me?” the woman whispered, grasping Li’s arm with the feverish, convulsive grip of an invalid.

“I’ll try.”

“Then tell me the truth!”

“I don’t know—”

“Don’t lie to me! You’re no better than they are! Smothering me, lying to me, imprisoning me. You think I haven’t seen blood before? You think my mind and my body are too feeble for this? I’ve borne two
children! You think I can’t tell my womb is eating me from the inside out?”

Suddenly she fell silent, her rage spent, and shrank into herself.

“They think they’re being kind, of course. But I don’t want to be lied to. Do you see? I want the truth. I want to know. I want to prepare myself. I want …”

And gently, gently, she took hold of her dress and pulled aside the rich layers of silk and brocade to reveal the yawning, rotting, stinking chasm of the womb beneath them.

Li gagged and took an involuntary step backward.

“You’re going to see Llewellyn, aren’t you?”

“I—”

Li stopped and stared. The body in front of her was changing, flickering back and forth as Ada’s projected proprioceptive architecture—her own image of herself—cycled through confused, contradictory iterations. First the woman. Then the horrible sharklike thing that Li recognized as the deformed and half-mad embodiment of a malfunctioning military-grade semi-sentient. Then the sleek silver spire of the ship itself. And then—

“Tell him—tell him I forgive him. I just want him to come and see me. I won’t hurt him. I promise. I just want to know why he did it. Don’t I have a right to know why?”

And suddenly it wasn’t Ada talking. It was Cohen. And Li was face-to-face with the one person she would have known through any shunt or avatar or disguise.

She reached for him—but it was too late already. The rot was spreading, swelling, devouring everything around them. It devoured the ceiling and the beams that supported it, and the roof that crashed down around their ears, and the sky above them. It chewed up the floor beneath their feet. And then it began to devour Li herself …

The walls blackened and curled in on themselves like burning paper. Her vision tunneled and her lungs began to smart and sting with lack of air.

“Cohen! Cohen!”

Some rough force jerked her up and backward. She struggled, writhing and scratching, got free, scrambled away, and was caught again.

“No!”

And the memory palace was gone, annihilated, blotted out of existence as completely and instantaneously as it had sprung to life in the first place. Wherever she had been was gone. And whoever had been there with her was gone, too. She was lying on the deck of the twisting umbilical cord, halfway back to the pirate ship, her head and one arm in Sital’s lap as the other woman dragged her out of the target ship by sheer force.

“Avery,” Sital gasped. “Avery’s ship was dark-side all along. She came in, almost got us. Got you.”
Drag, huff, drag
. “Okay?”

“I guess.”

“You see Ada in there?”

“I—guess.”

Li got her feet under herself and scrambled along the umbilical beside Sital. As they waited in the airlock, both still panting slightly, Sital turned to her.

“What did she say to you?”

“I don’t even know, really.”

“She hurt you?”

“Tried to.”

“You got off lucky, then. She’s a stone-cold killer.”

THE PIT

Dolniak showed up the next morning to spring her from jail. He looked like he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before. And he looked very, very angry.

Much too angry, actually, given how predictable it should have been that she would manage to find some kind of trouble to get into.

“What’s wrong?” Li asked when they brought her into the interrogation room and pushed her into the chair that faced Dolniak across the usual battered table.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I mean, what else is wrong?”

He looked as if he was about to chew her out for a moment. But then he visibly reined himself in, he shrugged, stood up … and walked out of the room, closing the door behind him in an ostentatiously careful way that made it completely clear he was stopping himself from slamming it.

He came back ten long minutes later, with a station-side cop to handle the paperwork. She was fingerprinted, DNA-swiped, and released into his custody. He didn’t talk to her during the processing, or during the walk to the shuttle, or on the ride down.

“Where are we going?” Li asked when he gave the taxi driver a Shadyside address instead of directing him to her hotel.

“You’d know better than I would,” he said in a tone of smoldering fury.

After that she decided to just keep her mouth shut.

He took her to a flophouse deep in the permanent twilight of Shadyside. This one made the boardinghouse Korchow had been holed up in look like a palace. And the carnage on the floor and walls in the upstairs back room made Li put a hand to her mouth and swallow hard. The body on the floor was covered with a chaste white sheet. But the stains oozing through the sheet—and the gore on the walls—made it clear that this hadn’t been a quick or painless death.