Until Cohen rediscovered it—and rescued it and put it in the great ballroom of the house from rue du Poids de l’Huile so that Li’s subconscious could hang all her fears on its broad shoulders.
The Turk was playing the Qf3 Nc6 gambit at the moment: the same strategy that had checkmated Napoleon in just twenty-four moves during the bloody campaign of Wagram. It slid the pieces across the board with a long stick, its mechanical arm whirring and chuttering as the ancient gears grabbed and slipped and slid against each other. But Cohen noticed this with only a tiny fraction of his currently integrated consciousnesses. Because mostly what they were noticing was that Li was utterly, shatteringly terrified.
And as he looked up at the massive cloaked torso of the Turk, at the turbaned head, he understood why. He knew the face around those dead glass eyes. It was his face…Roland’s face…
“Cohen!”
Li was staring down at him, her lips pursed, the smooth curve of her forehead furrowed with a fine network of curving parallel wrinkles.
“You okay?” she asked in a light, carefully neutral tone that told him just how bad he must look.
He mustered a smile, feeling Roland’s skin itchin one of those neural feedback loops that he’d long ago given up trying to track through the vast labyrinth of patched and rewritten and expanded source code that ran his shunt subroutines.
“You gave me a nightmare,” he told Li.
“I don’t have nightmares.”
“Maybe you have them and just don’t remember them.”
“What’s the difference?”
A shofarblew somewhere nearby, some lone musician practicing for Rosh Hashanah.
“What is that?” Li asked.
“The shofar.A ceremonial ram’s horn. They blow it during the Yamim Noraim,the High Holy Days. This is when every Jew is supposed to review his actions over the past year—they call it the Arithmetic of the Soul in Hebrew—and do penance. They blow the shofarto symbolize that the Book of Life will stand open for ten days and even the worst sinner can be entered into it as long as he repents before nightfall on Yom Kippur.”
“I thought only Catholics did guilt.”
He snorted. “And where do you think you people got it from?”
“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry about yesterday.” He didn’t have to ask what part of yesterday she was sorry about; the memory of the nasty fight they’d had on the way home from Didi’s house was still fresh enough to have both of them on edge. “I shouldn’t have gotten personal. It’s just that I think you’re letting Didi use you.”
“Last time I checked, letting the Mossad use you was the dictionary definition of a sayan.”
“But you let him manipulate you.”
“Everyone lets people manipulate them, Catherine. It’s called having friends.”
“You know what I’m talking about.” She dropped her voice, the way she always did when she couldn’t avoid this particular topic. “The Game. Didi’s not an inscribed player, is he?”
“No! You think I wouldn’t have told you? I can’t believe you think I wouldn’t tell you that!”
“Okay, okay. Calm down. I just…but Gavi is, right?”
“What’s your point?”
“That you’re not thinking straight.”
“You’ve been talking to router/decomposer too much.”
“Well, sometimes he’s easier to talk to than you are.”
“That’s because he agrees with you.”
“No. He’s just less…conflicted.”
“That’s because there’s less of him to beconflicted.”
“You don’t have to be condescending,” she said sharply.
“I’m not being condescending!” Cohen stopped and forced himself to continue in a more reasonable tone of voice. “That’s as ridiculous as you being condescending to your big toe.”
“Last time I checked my big toe didn’t have a Ph.D. in applied mathematics.”
“Excuse me, Catherine, but what are we actuallyfighting about?”
Li crossed her arms, set her jaw, and stared stoically into the middle distance. He’d clearly struck a nerve. But why? And what did it have to do with “condescending” to router/decomposer?
“Do you think,” Cohen said, “that maybe, I don’t know, this is something we should, uh, talkabout sometime?”
She gave him a wry look. “Yes, I do think maybe, I don’t know, this is something we should, uh, talk about sometime. But if we talk about it now, it’s only going to go one way. And I don’t want that. Necessarily.”
Relief trickled through Cohen like snowmelt, freeing systems that had been frozen in a holding pattern of anxiety. “And just when do you think you’ll be ready to talk about it?” he asked.
She sat up and looked intently at him. “That’s not like you. You’re usually the first one to put off till tomorrow what we could fight about today.”
But despite all his good intentions, Cohen couldn’t keep from pushing.
“The thing is,” he said, “I’m rapidly approaching achievement of the convergence criteria indicating termination of this particular iterative process.”
Every other person he’d ever been married to (except the mathematician, whose failings had gone far beyond the merely syntactical) would have asked what the hell he meant by that. Li just looked at him, her eyes level and calm, and said, “Are you asking for a divorce?”
“No! God!” He sat up, the room spinning around him. “You’re so far beyond paranoid there isn’t even a word for it! I’m just asking you to talk to me about whatever it is you’re so”—he backed carefully away from the inflammatory word afraid—“whatever it is that’s making you shut me out.”
“What if it’s something you can’t change?”
“I can change a lot, Catherine.”
The shadow of an unpleasant thought drifted across her face. He couldn’t hear it. She’d shut him out completely. And though he could have broken the door down instead of standing outside knocking on it, he knew that there was no future for the two of them on the far side of such an act of violence.
He waited. She looked at him, knowing that he was waiting. Letting him wait.
“You can’t change me,” she said.
Cohen stood under the shower, luxuriating in the feel of hot water running over Roland’s skin. Water smelled different on Earth. Better.And like so many of life’s small physical pleasures, it couldn’t be simulated no matter how state-of-the-art your streamspace connection was.
On the other hand, the water also turned off sooner on Earth than it did Ring-side. Even the outrageous room rates at the King David only bought you an extra thirty seconds or so on the clock. And, Israel being Israel, a call to the front desk was more likely to get you a lecture about water conservation than a longer shower.
Cohen sighed. This was starting out to be a bad day. And he, or Roland more likely, had a headache. And he really didn’t need any Israeli attitude in his morning.
He snuck a feeler into the hotel’s ambient AI systems and confirmed the first impressions gleaned through casual contacts over the last week. It was a primitive decision-tree-based expert system not even worthy of being called intelligent in any real sense. He hacked it, made his way to the shower defaults, changed the four-minute cutoff to a ten-minute cutoff. And since he felt like being a nice guy (and didn’t relish having to explain himself when the hack was discovered), he changed the allowances for all of his 212 fellow guests as well as himself.
Not that he actually enjoyed the shower, of course. Because instead of luxuriating in the hot water pummeling Roland’s back, he stood there, wreathed in steam, and brooded about the Game.