Shit.
‹What are you doing, router/decomposer? Following me?›
‹No! No! I’m not here! He told me not to tell you I was here!›
Li froze in midstride, and an evening shopper slammed into her from behind and passed by, cursing her.
You’re not that incompetent,she started to say. And then she stopped herself.
Of course he wasn’t that incompetent. He was acting on instructions. Instructions that he was following to the letter…and completely violating in spirit. She looked back at the affective fuzzy set that had accompanied his confession. Sure enough, it was an almost vaudevillian parody of dismay, embarrassment, self-recrimination. And it was definitely canned; the syntax was far too polished not to have been prepared in advance.
‹Why don’t you go home before you get yourself into bigger trouble than you already have,› she told him.
‹I need to make sure you’re safe, and…›
‹Well, don’t worry. It’ll be the last time you need to spy on me. I’m going to have a little talk with our mutual friend when he climbs out of his pod tonight.›
‹Even though I personally loathe shunting, I have to tell you I find the bodysnatcher jokes demeaning. So where are you going? You can tell me. I can keep a secret.›
Li snorted, and was amused to see several nearby pedestrians dive sideways in an attempt to avoid the crazy woman. Talk about hicksville. ‹You actually expect me to believe that?›
‹Check my code if you don’t believe me.›
She checked. Unbelievable. He had more cutouts than a chain of paper dolls. He was squirreling all kinds of data away that Cohen had no idea about. Including data that Li had thought she was successfully hiding under her own steam.
‹Why are you doing this?› she asked warily.
‹I’m interested in you. Not like Cohen is. In a more theoretical way. I want to see what you turn into.›
‹Right now I’m afraid I’m turning into a bad person.›
He appeared to pause and consider this. The pause was faked, of course; designed to make the exchange feel natural at organic processing speeds. But it was the thought that counted. ‹You’re falling into the identity myth. That’s the problem with nonfunctional nomenclature. Names encourage people to harbor the illusion that there’s identity beyond interface. That you can be good or bad apart from the effect of your actions on the world.›
‹Good intentions have to count for something,› Li protested.
‹Good intentions are just a fairy tale humans tell themselves so they can sleep at night.›
‹But some actions have unpredictable effects.›
‹What do you expect? Life is an intervention in a complex adaptive system.›
‹So you’re saying you can’tknow whether you’re a good or bad person?›
‹Not once you exceed the CAS’s Lyapunov time. At that point you have to wait until you can take a final measurement of the end state of the entire universe.› A note of impatience slipped into his affective sets. ‹What do you want from me, a physics lesson?›
It was half an hour shy of sunset, but the elevator in Ash’s building had already been switched over to its Sabbath rhythm. It would travel up and down its appointed route, one floor at a time, stopping long enough for even the slowest of the orthodox to board without breaking the Sabbath by operating a mechanical device.
When Li arrived, the light claimed that the car was on the sixth floor. After watching it sit there for a good minute and a half, she got tired of waiting, located the stairwell behind a door that looked like it led to a broom closet, and climbed five flights. She didn’t lose her breath, she was pleased to note, but behind the smooth push of the wires she could feel her almost middle-aged joints complaining under the relentless assault of Earth’s gravity.
“What?” she asked before Ash had even fully opened the door to her impatient knocking. “What’s so private and important you have to drag me halfway across the city to tell me about it?”
“Say hello to Auntie Li,” Ash crooned.
The child on Ash’s hip looked to be a little over a year old. Li guessed uncertainly that it was a boy; she hadn’t seen many babies in her life, and she’d been only minimally interested in the ones she’d seen.
“Yours?” she asked.
Ash smiled and gave a little shrug that looked like she’d practiced it in front of the mirror a hell of a lot more than once.
Li followed the mother and child into a living room full of just the kind of sleekly forbidding glass and steel surfaces Li would have expected to find in Ash’s home. The stark white and chrome of the decor made an incongruous backdrop to the trail of bright plush and plastic toys strewn across the carpet, into the tiled kitchen beyond the dining area, and across every flat surface the furniture offered.
“Sorry.” Ash pulled a wry face. “Can’t keep up with the little guy these days.”
She bent, the child still over her hip, to pluck a red-and-purple squishy cube off the one relatively free chair so Li could sit down. As her shirt rode up with the movement, Li saw the faint silver fishtails of stretch marks riding her hips like notches on a gun barrel.
“So why am I here?” Li asked.
Instead of answering, Ash crouched down between the vat leather couch and a lethal-looking glass coffee table and carefully settled the baby on a beach towel already spread out for that purpose. This took several minutes and involved the kinds of noises Li had last heard from Cohen’s Italian greyhound puppies.
Eventually, however, Ash finished stalling, settled herself on the sofa facing Li. “I have a message for you from an old friend.”
Oh shit.
Ash smiled.
Li didn’t.
Silence arrived.
Li, who had outgrown the urge to make nicey-nice long before her first day of interrogation training, let it stay.
For one thing it gave her a chance to reexamine the impressively contradictory woman sitting in front of her. Gone were the high heels and the high-tech now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t suits. Ash was still carefully made-up—and Li never could quite bring herself to trust a woman who wore makeup—but she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and thick wool socks, and her long hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail. She was more beautiful like this, Li decided. Certainly she was more approachable. But there was something slippery about her: a hard, unnatural self-assurance that repelled every attempt to access the person inside the beautiful package.
Basically, there was no there there. Unless you counted the toddler and the stretch marks. And that was the kind of “there” that could only make any sane person duck for cover.
“You haven’t asked who the old friend is,” Ash prompted. “Is that because you don’t want to know, or because you already do know?”
“Helen Nguyen and I have known each other since before you kissed your first boy. Or girl. Or whatever. We aren’t friends anymore, if we ever were. So why don’t you skip the dance of the seven veils and tell me what she wants from me?”
“Your help,” Ash said simply. “Your help to get the Interfaithers out of Israeli Intel.”
“And I should care about this because…?”
Ash’s perfectly made-up eyes widened. “I would think you’d be the last person to ask that question.”
“Are you about to become the next rich Ring-sider who takes one look at my DNA and thinks she knows what I should think and who my friends should be? It’s a long line. You’ll have to take a number.”
“You know I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Well, I’m not very bright, I’m afraid. You know how those Xenogen constructs are. Bet you’ve sat through any number of nice dinner parties where your mother complained about how hard it was to turn them into decent kitchen help.”
Ash’s lips tightened in anger.
Li—finally—allowed herself the faintest of smiles.
We have a decision, gentlemen. Bottom card fight to the lovely Miss Catherine Li on a technical knockout. And may it not come back to bite her in the ass when it really counts.