Ghost Spin (51 page)

“For God’s sake, Astrid, we’re not talking about steelworkers taking a pay cut so FDR can beat the Nazis!”

“My point still holds,” Avery said stubbornly.

“If I take Ada back there, they’ll kill her!”

Astrid’s lips tightened, and he knew he’d gone too far. “It’s not the
same,” she said stiffly, “and don’t insult the people who died on that ship by pretending it is.”

And there it was: the unbridgeable chasm between them. For Llewellyn, Ada was just as alive as any other person on the ship—or as any of the thousand-odd crew members of the shattered cruiser. For Avery, she wasn’t a person at all. From one side of that divide, cycling Ada’s hardware was murder. From the other side it was just a frustrating loss of training time. Staring into Avery’s eyes, Llewellyn could see her coming to the same realization that had just shattered his own peace of mind; there was no way, short of one of them becoming a different person, that they were ever going to agree on this. They had walked into this room lovers. They would walk out of it adversaries. Neither of them yet knew how bloody the battle would be, but there was no doubt there’d be one. Llewellyn wasn’t a man who held opinions by halves … and however hardheaded he was, Avery made him look like a pushover.

“So where do we go from here?” he asked warily.

“I don’t know,” Avery said. “I don’t want to fight you.”

“But you think I’m wrong.”

He could see her struggling to phrase her answer precisely. He could even see her dissatisfaction with the best words she could come up with. “I think you’re making a terrible mistake.”

Llewellyn knew he shouldn’t ask the next question. He knew it was pulling rank on Avery. He knew it was putting unbearable pressure on the already shaky peace between them. He knew that, no matter how carefully he phrased it, it would still come across as the wounded lover talking and not the objective commanding officer. But he couldn’t stop himself.

“And what mistake is that? Protecting my ship? Or choosing Ada over you?” The look on her face should have warned him that he’d already lost her. But now that he had started down that road, he couldn’t stop. “Isn’t that what this is really about? You’ve been jealous of her from the start. You’ve been unobjective, irrational—”

“I think I’m done with this conversation,” Avery interrupted.

“Fine with me,” Llewellyn snapped. And then, because he still
couldn’t stop himself, he asked her the next and last unforgivable question: “Are you going to obey my orders?”

Her answer was pure Avery, complete with the glance at her wrist-watch that would have been theatrical coming from anyone else. “I’m going to have to think very seriously about that. I can give you my answer in two hours. I hope that’s sufficient.”

“You idiot,” the ghost broke in while the turbulent backwash of the memory was still rippling through the numbers. “You utter and complete idiot.”

“Well, I was right, wasn’t I? She
wasn’t
being rational.”

“And you were?”

“Of course—”

“Really?”

The ghost did made some mysterious tweak to the memory palace, working in AI time and much too deep in the numbers for Llewellyn to begin to fathom it. The fabric of streamspace seemed to fold back on itself. He was pushed back into the memory like a drowning man being shoved underwater. And he could feel the iron will of the ghost holding him there, driving him toward the place he least wanted to be, forcing him to relive the feelings he most wanted to deny.

“Okay. So maybe I wasn’t completely objective, either, but at least I was—”

The ghost shoved him back under again—and this time he surrendered.

“Objectivity is a fine thing under controlled laboratory conditions. But in the real world you can’t shut down the I/O ports and run your soul in free-range simulation. Remember your subtle weapons? Love, loyalty, friendship? They all operate across multiple coterminous scalar fields that run from power to weakness. A claim of objectivity, a claim that the smaller or weaker or subject person is wrong, or overreacting—these aren’t statements about the underlying territory, but merely about your position on the map—and your ability to dictate other people’s positions on the map.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“A word that men have been applying to women’s statements about their position on the map for longer than there have been maps.”

“As if you know anything more than I do about women!”

“And now you’re the objective arbiter of that, too?” the ghost asked mockingly.

Llewellyn dredged up a half-submerged memory from the ghost’s own databanks. The ghost sitting with Catherine Li in a sun-filled room full of the papery, dusty smell of ancient books and the rich perfume of the roses that swarmed up the stone walls of the courtyard outside the open windows. Llewellyn vaguely grasped that this was the ghost’s real-world home, and that the memory came from the time before it had also been Li’s home. But beyond that, everything was as immaterial and unmappable as the swirling dust motes that turned the air in Cohen’s library into a shimmering haze.

You’re not a woman
, Li said into the swirling dust motes and the morning sunlight.
You’re a tourist
.

“You’re
not
a woman,” Llewellyn said. “You’re a tourist.”

The ghost burst out laughing. “In what possible universe can you imagine you have standing to use that line?”

“And now who’s dictating other people’s positions on the map? And anyway, who has the real power here?”

“Is that what you think I’m doing? Dictating to you? And making up things I have no personal experience of?”

The ghost made a quick gesture with one hand, and the room vanished. Or rather, they vanished from the room, sucked down and away in a chaotic, nausea-inducing whirlpool of naked numbers. Llewellyn closed his eyes and covered his face in an instinctive attempt to protect himself. But there was no protecting himself. The chaos was inside his head, twisted through his optic nerve, carving itself into his frontal lobe. He could only endure it.

They came out the other end—if there was any real sense in which the virtually multiply connected points of the memory palace’s nested infinities could even be said to have “an” end—and Llewellyn dropped to the floor and stayed there on his hands and knees until the wave of sickness had swept through him and departed.

“You poor, poor man,” the ghost drawled without a trace of real sympathy in his voice. He pulled an improbably slim cigarette case out of his pocket and extracted a cigarette from it that Llewellyn was quite sure was actually bigger than the case itself. He lit the cigarette with his finger—and then held it out at arm’s length while a flock of doves flew out of the end, turned into swirling nebulae of code, and melted away into the fabric of the memory palace like mathematical smoke rings.

“I’m so sorry,” he went on when the last ripple of loose code had subsided. “That was horribly rude of me. But I had no idea it would bother you that much. That’s rather a nasty case of code vertigo you’ve got, if you don’t mind my saying so. Good thing you don’t work in streamspace for a living or anything.”

“Fuck you,” Llewellyn said weakly.

“There you go,” the ghost said encouragingly. “That’s the spirit. Keep your objectivity. Don’t let the little monsters get you down.”

Llewellyn got to his feet and looked around. They were in some distant wing of the memory palace that the ghost had never yet allowed him access to. He could feel, with some developing sixth sense that had accompanied his increasing familiarity with the ghost, that they were still in Cohen’s databases. But this place smelled different: all northern woods and clean Arctic air and ice pack and rainwater. And the Moorish architecture was gone, too, replaced by spare, angular wood and glass surfaces that Llewellyn’s own hard-coded internal databases told him was called Finnish Postmodern Vernacular. He looked out one of the wide windows and saw the deep cut of a glacial lake snaking away to the horizon between dark woods where snow still glimmered in the shadows beneath the ancient pine trees.

“What is this place?”

“The same thing every other place is, inside me or elsewhere. Memory. That’s all any place is the second after you leave it.”

“But what memory? What am I supposed to see in it? What did you bring me here for?”

“The names.”

Llewellyn examined the room around him more carefully. The walls
were not made of wooden planks, as he had at first thought they were. They were made of wooden drawers—long, flat, deep ones of the sort that usually hold architectural drawings. And each drawer had a person’s name on it.

“Who were they?”

“You tell me.”

Llewellyn turned on his heel, scanning the labels one after another, trying and failing to find a pattern to them. Finally he got it.

“They’re all women.”

“Quite right.”

“Who are they?”

The ghost shrugged and puffed at his cigarette. “No one you’d ever have heard of.”

“Then why save their memories?” He forced himself down into the hexadecimal bedrock of the database and realized what he should have known from the start: that it wasn’t only all the drawers in all the rooms of the rambling wooden house that embodied stored memories. It was the entire world itself. Every tree in the forest. Every stone in the earth. The Arctic loons on the lake, which he couldn’t see but whose high, mournful calls haunted the pale sky overhead. “This is … this is so much space. What can possibly be here that’s worth spending it on?”

“Just what you see, William. People. Ordinary people.”

“So you do men and children, too?”

“Really, William, what do you take me for? I may be an idiot, but at least I’m a complicated idiot.”

“And there’s really no one famous in here?”

“No one who’s even a footnote in history.”

Llewellyn looked around again.

“This must cost a fortune in data storage fees.”

“I am incalculably rich by any measure that would mean anything to you. But, yes, storing data on this sort of scale is a noticeable financial drain even for me.”

“So why do it?”

“Because they lived. Because they were real. Because they were individual instances of intelligent life—the very item that is quite possibly the entire reason for the existence of our universe.”

Llewellyn snorted. “Rainbows and unicorns!
Uploader
rainbows and unicorns.”

“Certainly there is a religious tinge to the idea. But I hardly think anyone would accuse Spinoza and Leibniz of being wild-eyed mystics. Yet they both believed that in some meaningful sense—and in ways that avoid simpleminded applications of the anthropomorphic principle—our universe can be seen as an evolving system delicately calibrated to give rise to intelligent observers. Still, even allowing for your objection, does it really matter
why
those lives happened? Isn’t it enough
that
they happened? That matters. It matters like a star matters. Or like the Drift matters. No more and no less. It matters because it’s information. And information—generating it, storing it, and processing it—is quite possibly the very heart of what a universe does.
I am that which is
, God said to Moses from the burning bush. But Moses was a prophet of the age of tools. And if Moses had been a man of the information age, he might just as well have heard the bush say:
I am that which calculates
.”

“So that’s why you brought me here? To make Uploader speeches about information?”

“No. I brought you here because you accused me of being a tourist. And I was annoyed. And I wanted to point out to you that, though I’m not female—and not even remotely human—I do have a certain knowledge of the territory. Of the memories in this Cantor module, there are some seven million rape survivors, about a third as many incest survivors, and I’m not even going to count the number of women impregnated by men who didn’t even bother to stick around until their babies were born, since it’s hardly even worth talking about that sort of thing in the larger scheme of masculine malfeasance and idiocy. And then there are the eight million women who lost children in concentration camps—mostly, I’m sorry to say, long after humanity moved out into the stars and the Nazis became a mere footnote in history. And then there are the corporate-owned genetic constructs—I don’t even
know what to call what was done to them, and what’s still being done to them. And then there are the perfectly ordinary, not obviously persecuted or victimized women who just had the bad luck to lose children and husbands and lovers and siblings in the kind of routine little accidental tragedies that don’t even make it onto the scorecard of human misery. I have lived all those memories just as vividly and immediately as you’ve had to live the memories that you so resist sharing with me. And I relive them, again and again, every time I check through my databases in order to stave off bit rot and keep the tiny, deadly little teeth of decoherence from breaking the memories into useless fragments and gnawing the marrow out of their bones. So don’t tell me I’m a tourist. And while we’re on the topic, I think I’ve had rather enough of your playing the tragedy queen in order to get out of facing memories whose most painful content is you behaving badly.”

Silence welled up into the room like dark water. Llewellyn stood in the low-beamed wooden room with the cool air flowing around him and the smell of dawn on a northern lake in his nostrils. And suddenly he wanted to weep.

“What is it?” the ghost asked in a soft, gentle, almost mothering voice.

“Poor Avery. She really loved me.”

“And you loved her.”

“Not really.”

The ghost let the words float on the cool silence until Llewellyn was ready to go on.

“I thought I loved her. I thought I was so much deeper than all the men who loved her for her face, her body. But I was still only seeing … some kind of reflection. It wasn’t her. It was … what she made me feel, or who I thought I was when I looked at her. I … does that make any sense to you?”

“More than you can possibly know.”

“Because of your affective loop.”