I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was full.
“Because,” he said, “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now; it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you —you’d forget me.”
“Why do you keep this rubbish?” she asked Cohen, her nose still in the book. Her back was to him, but she couldn’t quite hide the smile in her voice. “It’s toxic. I’ve ingested eighteen kinds of mold just from opening the thing.”
“I’m obsessed by obsolete and troublesome technologies. Why else would I waste so much time on you?”
Li laughed and shut the book. “Speaking of obsolete technology, you knew Sharifi came out of the XenoGen birthlabs, didn’t you?”
“Oh yes. Same as you.”
Li stiffened, still not looking at him. “Same as my grandmother.”
“Of course.”
“Did Sharifi ever talk to you about that?”
“Not as such. But she talked about Compson’s World. She lived there until she was eight. Some orphanage in Helena. With nuns.”
“Sounds fun.”
“What I remember being most impressed by was why she ended up in the orphanage.”
“Oh?”
“She was blind.”
Li turned to stare at him.
“She was born blind. Something in the ocular nerve. Easily correctable. Her adoptive parents fixed it. But the birthlab made a cost-benefit analysis and decided to cull her instead of paying for the operation.”
“Merciful Christ,” Li whispered.
“I doubt mercy had much to do with it. What’s the saying? Pray to the Virgin; God took one look at Compson’s World and went back to Earth? Anyway, according to Hannah the orphanage she grew up in was full of constructs the labs dumped on the streets because of minor defects. Brings a whole new meaning to the externalization of operating costs. ‘The cheapest technology is human technology,’ she liked to say. And she was right, really. The Ring, the UN, interstellar commerce. It’s all running on the blood and sweat of a few hundred thousand miners who spend the first half of their lives underground and the last half dying of black-lung.” He laughed. “It’s positively Victorian. Or maybe it’s just human.”
Li felt a flash of anger at Cohen for… well, for what? For talking about it? For laughing at it? For knowing about it and still enjoying his elegant life? But he was right, just like Sharifi had been right. And hadn’t she gotten off Compson’s as fast as she could? Wasn’t she just as determined to take some of the good life and not think too hard about where the condensate that made it all possible was coming from?
She slid the book back onto the shelf and kept moving along the wall, toward Cohen’s desk. She picked up an open fiche, glanced at the screen:
The era of the unitary sentient organism is over. Both the Syndicates and the UN member nations are now scrambling to catch up with this metaevolutionary reality. In the Syndicates we have seen an evolutionary shift toward a hive mind mentality, viz., the cr`eche system, the thirty-year contract, the construction of a distinctively posthuman collective psychology, including generalized cultural acceptance of euthanasia for individuals who deviate from the gene-norm.
“Don’t you believe in privacy?” Cohen asked, sounding exasperated.
“Only my own. What is this, anyway?”
“A talk I’m giving. A draft. Meaning get your snout out of it.”
She shrugged and put the fiche down. “It doesn’t sound like Sharifi had happy memories of Compson’s. So why did she go back there? And what was she doing underground in the Anaconda?”
“I don’t know. We’d lost touch, rather. But I do have a pretty good idea of what kind of person she was. And no matter what Helen claims to believe, Sharifi wouldn’t have sold information. She was a real crusader.” He smiled. “A little like you.”
Li brushed that aside. “I’m just pulling a paycheck.”
“Is that what they call it?” He snorted. “I’ve met better-paid bellhops. Speaking of which, why don’t you tell me exactly what you were looking for when the field AI latched on to you.”
“Do you really think it went rogue?” she asked.
“No. Or rather, I stopped thinking that when it went after you. Semisentients just aren’t that interested in humans. Most full sentients aren’t even that interested. No, someone sent it. Someone who is interested in you.”
“Who?”
“Dragons,” Cohen murmured, tracing an elegant figure in the air with the tip of his cigarette. “White Beauties.”
Li’s oracle dipped into the spinstream to figure out what White Beauties were, and what they had to do with imaginary lizards. All she got was a few obscure references to sixteenth-century mapmaking.
Cohen laughed, and she realized he had seen her instream query—and her failure to turn anything up.
“When mapmakers reached the edges of what they knew back on Earth,” he said, “they’d write ‘Here Be Dragons.’ Or if they were a little more prosaic they’d simply leave blank spots. Blank spots which were white, of course, on the old paper maps. Siberia. The Empty Quarter. Deepest Africa. The great explorers called those blank spots White Beauties. Silly of me, perhaps. But what I mean to say is that streamspace is more than the sum of things humans have put there. There are White Beauties in the Stream. Living, sentient systems as unknown and uncharted as those white spaces on the old maps. Humans don’t see them. Or if they do see them, they generally don’t recognize them. But they exist. And you may have bumped up against one, that’s all.”
Li shivered. “You can’t honestly believe that.”
“People have believed stranger things,” he answered. Then he shrugged and smiled. “I’m not making any claims. You asked me for a guess, that’s my guess. For the moment anyway. Like every woman, I reserve the right to change my mind.”
It was an old argument, but one Li couldn’t resist. “You’re not a woman, Cohen.”
“My dear, I’ve been one for longer than you have.”
“No. You’ve been a tourist. It’s different.” Li tapped into her hard files, pulled up her scan of Sharifi’s interface and copied it to him. “Take a look at that and let me know what your woman’s intuition tells you.”
“Well now,” Cohen said, sitting up abruptly. “I was wondering when you’d get around to mentioning that.” His upper lip twisted in a crooked little smile. “It was quite entertaining to see you teetering back and forth, trying to decide how far you trusted me.”
“It’s not a matter of trust,” Li said. “It’s a matter of information-sharing protocols.”
“Impertinent monkey.”
He wizarded the file into realspace, opened the case, ran his fingers along the wire, turned it over to look at the raised sunburst.
“It was made for Sharifi,” Li said. “Some kind of wet/dry interface.”
“Intraface.”
“I think she was using it to interface with the field AI—”
“Int raface.” He sounded pained. “Do you listen to anything I say?”
“Interface, intraface, what’s the difference?”
“Think, Catherine. An interface manages the exchange of data and operating programs between two or more discrete systems. An intraface, in contrast, merges the two into a single integrated system.”
“Pretty academic distinction, Cohen.”