Something was happening.) “FIVE.” (She had changed course, looking out into traffic for a chance to cross the street. A figure in black called out. I couldn’t quite hear what he said.) “FOUR.” (She followed him into the doorway of our building, out of sight. I searched in the windows across the street, and at last found her reflection. She was lowering her sacks to the ground with the exquisite slowness of someone who knows she’s in gunsights.
“Take out your Net chip,” said the videophone. Her voice— Keishi’s voice.
“Don’t do it,” I pleaded. “You’ll never make it—”
“!take.out(it2)!”
And I took it out, knowing what she would do and what would happen to her when she did.) “THREE.” (She had spent too much time on the Net, where no situation is ever quite hopeless, and where one person, wired right, can stand firm against a thousand. But I, who had stayed behind to sponge her brow with water, still remembered the inevitability of the flesh.)
“TWO.”
(And in the windows across the street, I saw her take a wine bottle from the sack and break it across the Postcop’s face. Diving into the doorway, she clapped a black chip to her head, and half the people walking down the street staggered and fell. Cars caromed like billiard balls. She crashed up the stairs—she was at the door—she opened it.) “ONE PERCENT.” (And as she crossed the room, a man in black was watching from the roof across the street. A Weaver had possessed him; you could see it in his eyes. He looked down along the barrel of his rifle, like one who cocks his head in thought; paused a moment; then lifted his head again and nodded slightly, as though the thought were now complete. A smooth circular hole had been punched in the front window, and another in the wall behind, and between them she lay with a hole the same size in her temple, already dead.)
“ZERO.”
(I did not go to her. If I had warned her, it would not have helped; if it had not been him, it would have been some other; she had been dead the moment she reached into the sack, no, the day she departed for Zanzibar. And so I did not call out to her, though I had seen the man gone Weaver on the roof from the beginning, lifting his gun to his shoulder, and carefully taking his aim.)
Nineteen
ORPHEUS
I stayed there as long as I could, in that time when she had just now fallen. She might yet live. She might yet shake her head and rise. The stain of blood spreading out from her temple might be nothing more than a lengthening shadow, cast by the setting sun.
But that sun had set, and twenty years of suns. I must step up out of the sunken garden of the past into this present, where she had been twenty years dead. She lay now in some secret grave, abandoned, with no flowers and no tombstone to mark the spot. If any trace remained of her at all, it was only a blaze of deep green in some field of withered grass, and I would never find it.
I hadn’t known. I had remembered so little. The cable inside my head, scraping and scraping. The drug that burned the sex out of my body, as I vomited into the drain in a holding cell for thirty hours. And I’d remembered saying that I would do whatever they asked of me. I would tell them everything, I would reveal every shared secret and betray every confidence. And then I would forget it all, and leave the station as a person who had never been in love. And remembering how quickly I had agreed to forget, I had assumed some series of casual liaisons, lightly entered into, and lightly abandoned. Now I knew the full extent of my betrayal. I had been the only one to remember her, and I had given it up, not after a fight, but readily. I was not the person I had thought I was; and tears fell like scales from my eyes.
“Desuppression complete,” the god said. “If you would like to discuss any of our fine moistware products, I am always at your service.” He folded Africa into his hands, and he was gone.
“The recording of your desuppression is already being distributed,” Voskresenye said. “In the days to come, as the Weaver viruses are defeated, others of your kind will appear. You have struck a blow for them. Because of what you did today, there may yet come a time when they no longer have to hide.”
I had recognized her. They had tried to tear her out, but she had lived in me—deep in my heart and secret, nameless and indescribable, yet never entirely gone. She had been a face in the window of every departing train, a form seen from the back on every crowded street, always just out of my sight, always turning away. And I had known her when she came to me, though I could not say it, and though the very thought had sent my mind skidding across the ice into unconsciousness.
I took the camera chip out of my head. “What,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady “—what is Keishi Mirabara?”
“Ah!” Voskresenye laid a finger along his nose. “Not ‘who,’ but ‘what’! Very impressive! I had not expected you to guess so much so quickly.”
“Don’t critique the question, you son of a bitch, just answer it. Did you create her? To seduce me? To get me here?”
“How Manichaean of you, Andreyeva. I did not create her; that is Someone Else’s job. I merely found her and made use of her.”
“You’re lying,” I said. “She’s not real. She doesn’t exist at all.”
“Oh, but I do, Maya,” Keishi said. She was leaning against the doorframe. She had restored the face I had seen in my memories, the face she’d had before she disguised herself as Japanese and then as Japanese Black. She was dressed all in white, and she shone like the sun, which was the least of the reasons that I found it hard to look at her.
“So what’s the joke, revenant?” I said, my whole face aching from the effort to hold back tears. “Did he make you? Are you a Postcop?”
“No, and no.” She looked behind me at the tank where the whale floated aimlessly, her wings gently stirring the water. “I’m her,” she said, nodding toward the whale. “Part of her. And I am the woman that you loved, twenty years ago.”
“Can’t you come up with a better lie than that? She’s dead. I saw it happen.”
“That body is gone,” Keishi said. “But I live.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Think back, Maya,” she said. She began to walk toward me, but stopped, as if she sensed that I could not have borne her touch. “You remember who I was. Don’t you think I would have had a plan to stay with you, even after my own death?”
“If she had,” I said, not meeting her gaze, “she would have told me about it.”
“If I’d told you, it wouldn’t have worked. I knew they’d mind-suck you; anything I said to you, they would have found out. I had to let you think I was dead, hide out in the Net, and then come back to you when the worst of the heat was off.”
“The soul can’t survive discorporation,” I said. “Maybe in the African Net, but not here.”
“A soul can’t live in the Net, no. But there’s nothing mystical about it. It’s a physical process—for all intents and purposes the soul is serotonin. If you upload your mind to the Net, at least here in the Fusion, you lose your sensory qualia, your emotions; you become a program. But then if you put it back into a brain, the soul grows back. —Especially,” she said, “if it’s the soul of a Weaver.”
“Oh God,” I said, “Oh God, I knew there was a setup in this somewhere—”
“No… no, Maya! I mean, I was a Weaver. It’s a manner of speaking—you know, to your last dying breath and all that. But seeing as how they killed my body, I should probably give up that loyalty. Don’t you remember?”