She staggered and fell heavily against the railing. He put a hand under her elbow, steadying her. In the same instant, her brain clicked back into the VR interface as if someone had flipped a cutoff switch. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Cohen said, and drew her back from the ledge.
She stared at him for a moment, feeling like a child who had put her hand into the fire only to have an all-seeing adult pull it out miraculously unscathed.
“You’re all right?” he asked.
She nodded and followed him back inside.
The hall’s internal wall was broken by what seemed to be an infinitely receding line of doors. Cohen was still behind her, one hand on her hip, his mouth inches from her ear. “Close your eyes,” he said. She closed them.
“What do you hear?”
“Water.”
“Good. That’s the fountain. See it?”
She turned and looked back over her shoulder into the glittering shadows of the portico. “Yes.”
“If you get lost, just follow the sound of the water and it will bring you back here. Now. How many doors do you see?”
“I can’t…” She looked down the hall and saw that the illusion of infinity had been just that. “Forty… forty-eight?”
“Good. Every door is a separate network with its own memory palace. Every room in each palace is a directory. Every object in the room is a datafile. Understand?”
She nodded.
“When you want to access a network, you find its proper door. When you want a directory, you find its proper room. When you want a datafile, you just open the drawer, the box, the cabinet, whatever it’s stored in. Just like the standard graphic user interface you’ve used in Corps archives… although I flatter myself that my aesthetic instincts put me a cut or two above the Corps designers. But bear in mind that you’ll still be dealing with a fully sentient AI every time you open one of those doors. And some of them are less… accessible… than the networks you’re familiar with. If you feel… nervous about anything, you can always leave. Always. Just come back here, shut the door behind you, and you’re alone again.”
“Except for you.”
He laughed. “You’re in the belly of the beast, my dear. I’m always here. I am here.”
Li looked around. “Which door should I open?”
“Whichever one you want.” He looked at her, Hyacinthe’s little boy’s body so slight he actually had to look up to meet her eyes. A small, secret smile slipped across his face. “Try the last door.”
She walked down the hall, running her hand along the cool marble of the walls, the carved hardwood of the doorframes. Each door was labeled: network designations, Toffoli numbers, directory profiles. The last door, tucked into the farthest corner of the hall as if in an afterthought, had only a single word printed on it: Hyacinthe. She set her hand to the latch, and it opened to her touch as if it had been waiting for her.
A large, bright room, shot butter yellow with morning sunlight. On every wall, row on row of wooden drawers, each drawer with its own polished brass knob, none of them much more than big enough to fit a datacube. There were no labels or schematics on the drawers, but as Li touched them brief images of their contents flashed before her. “What is this place?” she whispered.
“Me.” Cohen nudged an oriental rug straight with one toe. “Well, that’s the short answer anyway. The long answer would be that I thought this was a good place to start because Hyacinthe is the core network that you’re most familiar with.”
“Do you actually use this place yourself?”
“Of course. I shift back and forth between VR and the numbers like you do when you go instream. I won’t use VR much when I’m running under time pressure or handling heavy traffic. But when I have the time and processing space…”
Li knew how this sort of VR construct worked. The drawers would contain stored data platformed on a nonsentient access program. Behind the walls, where she couldn’t see them without dropping into code, would be the bones of the system: the semisentient operating programs and the sentient net that these memories and datafiles belonged to. She looked down the length of the room and saw that it was one of many, all opening onto a cloistered garden. And every wall, every arcade, every paving stone held a memory. “Christ,” she whispered, “it’s huge.”
“Infinite, actually,” Cohen called from the garden, where he was restaking a wind-tousled dahlia. “It’s a folded database.”
Li stared, breathless. How could anyone—any ten people—have that many memories? What a weight of the past to be buried under. She walked through the rooms, tentatively, running her hands along the wood but not quite daring to open anything. The memories were grouped in rough categories, and as Li worked her way through the place she began to see hidden links, make telling connections. In the arcade along the fringe of the garden, a whole long wall was given over to a mosaic of books, films, paintings, each compressed into a tiny, emotion-laden point of color. Another room seemed to contain only memory upon memory of Earth, most of them collected in the final few years before the Evacuation. Then came a white, silent room that was entirely empty. As she penetrated deeper into the complex, she saw that most of the memories in the outer rooms were other people’s. Cohen’s own memories were concentrated in the sunny, quiet arcade along the garden’s southern exposure. And in the garden itself were people—all the people Cohen had ever known during his long, long life.
“Come look at these,” Cohen said.
She went.
“All these are Hyacinthe.” He gestured at a narrow row of drawers just inside the door. “The person, not the network. They should be quite easy for you to access. Go ahead, have a look.”
She opened the drawer he pointed to. It was empty. “What—?”
He smiled. “What’s the closest sense to memory?”
Li blinked. “Smell.”
“So?”
She bent over the drawer and sniffed. It smelled of cedar, and of the old-fashioned furniture wax that infused every piece of wood in Cohen’s realspace house. She had a ridiculous momentary image of one of his impeccably dressed French maids getting down on her immaculate knees to scrub at the floors and baseboards of the ethereal memory palace. Then she caught the smell underneath the other smells: the smell of the memory itself.
The room around her disappeared. She stood on a steep scree slope, her face warmed by the golden sun of pre-Migration Earth. A glacier snaked away like a river below her. Behind her loomed a near-vertical wall of rock and ice whose very shadow was like a little death. She turned and craned her neck to look up the soaring granite column above her. This was the Walker Spur of the Grandes Jorasses, her oracle told her. The most spectacular route up the most beautiful rock face on the planet. Given the state of the glacier winding below her, this couldn’t be much after the turn of the twenty-first century. Italy lay south, on the other side of that colossus. To the west, the Mont Blanc glittered under a sky blue enough for the most cautious climber to gamble on.
“Planning on helping?” someone said behind her.
She turned and saw a woman crouched on the slope below her coiling a brightly colored climbing rope. She handled the rope expertly, without wasted motion, lean climber’s muscles bunching and flexing under her sunburned skin. Lucinda, Li thought. Her name is Lucinda.
Lucinda looked up, her eyes (which Li somehow knew were blue) hidden behind mirrored glasses. Li saw her own doubled reflection staring back out of the lenses: a dark, narrow-faced greyhound of a man that could only be Hyacinthe Cohen himself.