“You crazy fuck.”
He smiled. “Just idealistic. Have you read any syndicalist political philosophy? Alienation? The Decline and Fall of Species? ”
“I saw the movie. And don’t waste your time feeding me some line about gene duty and gaps in the ranks and choosing my part. I’m not playing.”
“Unfortunate. Though, I must confess, not entirely unexpected.”
Korchow lifted Bella’s hand, and a pale ideogram appeared under the curve of her palm. It rotated, unfolded, blossomed into a dog-eared piece of yellow paper covered with close-set numbers.
“What is that?” Li asked, and even she could hear the tremor in her voice.
“I think you know,” he said as he handed it to her.
It felt real in her fingers, so real that she imagined for a moment she could just rip it up, burn it, get rid of it somehow. But she knew that the rough nap of the paper under her hands, even the slightly musty smell of it, was illusion. The original was somewhere far away. Down on Compson’s where Korchow was. Maybe even back on Gilead.
“I don’t know what you think this is,” she said, though of course she did know.
“Read it,” Korchow suggested.
Block letters ran across the top of the page: REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES, S.A., J.M. JOSS, M.D.G.P., B.S., SPECIALIZING IN ARTIFICIAL REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES AND REMEDIAL GENETIC ENGINEERING. Below the letters were a series of numbers: medical codes to the left, prices to the right. The prices were given in both UN currency and AMC scrip.
Li didn’t have to check her oracle to know what the codes stood for; she already knew. And even if she hadn’t known, there was her own signature, or rather Caitlyn Perkins’s signature, scrawled below the tightly printed boilerplate of the medical release.
“Where did you get this?” she whispered.
“Where do you think, Major?”
“I watched Joss burn my file. He burned it in the sink. I wouldn’t leave until he’d done it.”
“Apparently,” Korchow said, “he didn’t burn everything. People are so untrusting in human space.”
She sat, head down, staring at the paper. When Korchow reached out to take it back, she made no effort to stop him.
“Well,” he said, folding the slip of paper and whisking it back out of realspace. “We all make mistakes. The thing now is to put regret behind you and go forward.”
“What do you want?”
“I want this little venture to work out satisfactorily for all of us. But at the moment I just want you to make a choice. If you decide to help me, then you will go to Shantytown twelve hours from now and meet with a man who will give you the data you need for the first stage of the operation. And you will bring the AI with you. Or at least an assurance that he will participate.”
It took Li several moments to realize he was talking about Cohen. “He’s not under contract to us,” she argued. “He’s a freelancer. I can’t make him do shit.”
“I imagine you can make him do quite a lot, actually.”
“You’d imagine wrong, then.”
“Oh? Why don’t we ask him?”
“Oh, sure,” Li said mockingly. “What do I do, draw a pentagram and say his name three times?”
Korchow smiled. “What an amusing idea. I think a simple and sincere call for assistance will suffice, however. Try it.”
She stared at Korchow. But then she did try it. And there Cohen was, real as a government paycheck.
He wore a summer suit the color of pomegranates. Wherever he’d been when she called him, he was in the middle of getting dressed. He leaned forward, still peering into a mirror that was no longer there, knotting a mushroom brown silk tie around his throat.
“Oh, my,” he said. He cocked his head in apparent confusion and turned slowly around until he caught sight of Li. “This is a nice surprise,” he said, blinking and smiling.
Then he took in her state of undress, the rumpled bed, Bella sitting across the room. His smile vanished.
“Korchow,” he said in a voice of terrifying gentleness. “I can’t say it’s a pleasure, so I won’t say anything.”
“I thought we talked about this, Cohen,” Li said. “I thought you were going to stop spying on me.”
He turned back to her. “What a nasty little word. Of course I would never spy on you. And if I do assign an autonomous agent or two to keep an eye on you, it’s only to prevent unpleasant people”—he glanced in Korchow’s direction—“from making trouble for you.”
Bella cleared her throat meaningfully, and Cohen looked at her again.
“So,” he purred. “Korchow. I almost didn’t recognize you behind that cheap shunt. You really should get the Syndicates to pay you better. You are still working for them, no? Or has your alleged idealism worn thin enough that you’re taking UN money too?”
“Cohen,” Li said. “You can go now.”
Cohen gave her a pained and innocent look.
“You can go, I said.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked, glancing at Korchow.
“Yes I am. I can take care of this. And don’t eavesdrop!”
He cast a last look at Korchow, frowning. “You shouldn’t have anything to do with him, Catherine. He’s… well, he’s not nice.”
“Go home, Cohen.”
“Going,” he said. And then he did go, leaving a subtle whiff of hand-rolled cigars and extra-vielle behind him.
“Well,” Korchow said. “I think we understand each other.”
“What if I don’t show tonight?”
Korchow merely moved Bella’s fingers in answer, and the tattered yellow receipt reappeared, fluttering as if it had been caught by a stiff breeze. “That would be regrettable.”
Li looked at the thing in his hands and shivered. If that receipt ever ended up in front of the Service, they would check it out. They would have to. And when they checked, it would be over.
Fifteen years ago she’d had high confidence. The chop-shop geneticist hadn’t been much, but he’d been the best the meager payout on her father’s life insurance could buy; and his work, if not inspired, had at least been competent. Now, she knew its limits. Knew them in her gut with a wrenching certainty. She’d seen the gene work the best Ring-side labs could do, the work the Corps techs at Alba did. She’d slipped through the cracks this long only because there was no real proof—no proof damning enough to justify testing her. One fifteen-year-old scrap of paper could change that. And when it did, the whole crushing weight of the Security Council bureaucracy would fall on her like mine overload dropping into a collapsing tunnel. Losing her commission would be the least of it. She’d be lucky—or irretrievably indebted to Cohen’s high-priced lawyers—if she escaped without a prison sentence.
So what? She had other chances, other possibilities. It wasn’t all or nothing anymore. She had options.
But did she? What else was there for her, really? She loved her job. Was her job. Couldn’t imagine any other life. She thought about private security, about Cohen’s well-paid bodyguards. She remembered the high-tech muscle on the Calle Mexico.
No way. Not for her.
She sat on her rumpled bunk looking at the receipt, barely an arm’s length away from her, in the hands of a woman she had just made love to. And she knew she’d do anything, kill anyone, to get it.
UNCENSORED TOPOLOGY
All the worlds are there, even those in which everything goes wrong and all the statistical laws break down. The situation is no different from that which we face in ordinary statistical mechanics. If the initial conditions were right the universe-as-we-see-it could be a place in which heat sometimes flows from cold bodies to hot. We can perhaps argue that in those branches in which the universe makes a habit of misbehaving in this way, life fails to evolve; so no intelligent automata are around to be amazed by it.