Instead of executing the command, router/decomposer sent an un-characteristically snide message floating across the lowest layer of Cohen’s internal traffic:
‹You’ve got me shuttling things around so fast I don’t even know where to find them. And anyway, how do you expect her to trust you when you’re playing a thousand and one moving files with her?›
‹Did I ask for your advice on my sex life?› Cohen snapped.
He regretted it immediately. Patience might be running thin, but squashing intrasystem feedback was a textbook-perfect recipe for losing good associates.
He sent an apology rippling through the local system. The routing meta sent back something suspiciously like a shrug.
Li blinked and shook her head slightly.
She’d caught on to the edge of something there. But it wasn’t the routing meta. So what, then? He catenated the several hundred mostly routine processes he happened to be running at the moment, but saw nothing when he passed them in review that could explain that little shiver he’d felt in her.
Perhaps it really had been nothing; sometimes all it took was an accidental glimpse at the traffic on the other side of the firewall he kept between her and his core systems.
“You scare me sometimes,” she said.
It was a lie. A lie by omission, anyway. He’d sensed the first wordless thought that those words replaced: You scare me.No sometimes about it.
Cohen hesitated, then shrugged. “Okay. I’ll give Roland a chance to catch up on his beauty rest. You know where to find me if you need me.”
He paused to set the various trap commands that would alert him if the hotel’s formidable security systems were breached. He thought about setting a hash log on Li’s own internals to see if she went anywhere while he was gone, but decided that it wasn’t worth the risk of her catching him at it. Then he released his various selves into streamspace, abandoning Roland’s exhausted body to the sleep it so desperately needed.
THE FEMALE GOLEM
They said about Rabbi ben Gabirol, that he created a woman, and she waited on him. When he was denounced to the authorities, he showed them that she wasn’t a perfect creature, and [then] he returned her to her original form, to the pieces and hinges of wood, out of which she was built up. And similar rumors are numerous in the mouths of everyone, especially in the land of Ashkenaz.
Li snapped into wakefulness. A minute and a half before her internals were set to wake her. She opened her eyes and lay in absolute stillness, savoring the wired wide-awake feeling that always came to her before a mission.
But there was no mission today. No last-minute fixes to see to. No orders to follow, good or bad. That life was over. All she was following today was a name, whispered into her ear as she stepped into Didi’s armored car.
She hadn’t decided what to do about that name.
Or whether to tell Cohen about it.
It can’t hurt to talk,she told herself in the last dark corner of her mind that she’d managed to shelter from Cohen’s devouring presence. I’ll just see what she wants. And then I can tell him about it. What harm can that do?
She eased out of bed, though she knew her caution was pointless; Roland was sleeping the sleep of the dead, his body worn down by the relentless assault of Cohen’s presence. Still, there was something corpselike about the faces when Cohen had used them hard. And he was using Roland very hard indeed on this trip.
Outside, the city was mean and yellow with the khamsin.Cohen had said the winds had gotten worse when their seasons shifted. Li figured that had to be true; no people in their right minds would have settled here with this banshee spitting at them.
A quick dogtrot took her up King David Street and cutting over toward the neighborhood that showed up on the Legion maps as Mea Shearim. She passed the sign at the quarter’s entrance, which she vaguely remembered Cohen pointing out to her a few days ago. It was written in Hebrew and English, but not UN-standard Spanish, which was odd, she thought, if they wanted the tourists to understand it:
REQUEST AND WARNING TO WOMEN VISITING OUR NEIGHBORHOOD NOT TO APPEAR IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD IN SHORT GARMENTS (NOT COVERING THE KNEE) IN SHORT-SLEEVED CLOTHING (NOT COVERING THE ARM). THE TORAH OBLIGATES TO DRESS IN MODEST ATTIRE THAT COVERS THE ENTIRE BODY
No problem there,Li joked to herself. The accused pleads guilty to the charge of being a golem instead of a woman.
Cohen claimed that the ultraorthodox neighborhoods had shifted—the hidden life of cities, he’d called it—and that the sign was maintained more for historic than for enforcement purposes. But it was awfully well maintained, Li thought. And she’d seen enough of the version of human history maintained Ring-side to know that people mostly maintained the pieces of history they agreed with.
She twitched her shirt cuffs over her wrists—Cohen, in one of his usual old-maidly excesses of caution had made her order a bunch of new shirts with particularly long sleeves before they left—and checked that her jacket collar was covering her neck reasonably well. Then she straightened her back and stepped out a little more soldierly…just in case anyone in those narrow little alleys happened to be looking her way and thinking about anything.
She felt she was seeing a new Jerusalem—and not the one she’d sung about in church when she was a kid, either.
Before, Jerusalem had always been mediated for her by Cohen. Now, alone, it took on a new and vaguely menacing aspect. The narrow streets seemed airless and claustrophobic. The men passed her by with averted eyes as if she were an abomination, and the few women on the street were so thoroughly wrapped up against the rain and cold that they hardly seemed human, let alone female.
All the conversations she overheard seemed to be arguments, and the one time she caught a sentence of English it came from an irate young woman who stood in a street-level window shouting, “What am I, a professor?” in answer to an unseen questioner.
Even the graffiti raged apocalyptically. A lurid poster informed all passersby that
and followed up with a helpful swastika in case anyone missed the point. A second poster proclaimed
Someone (a Zionist Hitlerite? There couldn’t actually be such a thing, even on Earth, could there?) had tried to tear that poster down, but, defeated by the apparent superiority of anti-Zionist Hitlerite glue technology, had settled for defacing it with the words
The more Li saw of Jerusalem, the more convinced she became that the people who thought Earth needed to be protected from the Ring had it all completely ass backwards. It was the rest of the universe that needed to be protected. And it needed to be protected from the maniacs that passed for human beings inside the Embargo line.
To her relief the neighborhood seemed to be getting less crazy as she got closer to the address Ash had given her. She passed a coffee shop called the Up/Spin. A streamspace access point? She’d been offstream since she left the King David; after all, you never knew who was watching. But now she reached out cautiously and felt the familiar comfort of the uplink.
‹Oh. Thereyou are.›