“She was my screener….” I said, slowly.
“Yes, and Maxwell Smart wrote greeting cards. It was a cover, Maya. Weavers keep cuckoos in every profession…. Including one named Keiji Mirabara.”
I watched her silently, fighting back memory.
“And now you know how I replaced Anton without causing an outcry. And how I obtained the, ah, the Postcop pursuit vehicle— which, by the way, no Postcop in the world is authorized to drive. And that’s how I found the Weaver viruses, and how I created the bubbles and back doors, which Mister Resurrection hastens to take credit for.”
“Believe what you like,” Voskresenye said lightly. “The point is insignificant.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“Look back into your memories. It’s there.”
But I would not touch those memories. I would keep my muscles clenched around them, I would squeeze them into a ball, hard-shelled and separate. They were in me, but I would not make them part of me; as a sunken anchor does not give up its substance to the ocean, or an acorn passes through the stomach whole. I would not become that other woman, who had died when her lover died, twenty years past. I would remain myself.
“Do you remember?” she said.
“No.”
“You will,” she said. “In time. You were a camera and I was a Weaver, and we have known each other nearly thirty years.”
“I don’t believe you,” I repeated.
“Maya, let me touch your mind again,” she said, extending one beseeching hand. “This time with nothing hidden. I promise you you’ll understand.”
“Keep your hands off me,” I said. I backed up a step and tripped, so that I had to catch myself against the whale’s tank with one hand. I braced myself against her mind’s touch, holding up one futile hand to shield my face.
She looked upon my fear with horror. Her hand fell to her side. “All right, then,” she said, nodding. “I’ll tell you the story.”
Twenty
PENELOPE
“I was created a Weaver in 2290,” she said, “just a few years before I first found you. I was nineteen years old—they take us young, you know, like Mousketeers. For nineteen years I was the prisoner of my own skull, trapped in an almond-sized sphere at the intersection of my ears and eyes. Then the surgeon injected me with nanobugs—not like yours; bugs made from clones of my own cells, half robot and half leukocyte. They made a blastula inside my skull, dividing again and again, with their animal pole at my left ear and their vegetal pole at my right. Their signals pulsed from one side of my head to the other, as I lay unconscious on a surgeon’s table in Mecca—holy, hallucinatory town.
“Then I woke from the knife, and I was the Net. Without moving, I could touch Novaya Zemlya and Cape Town, both at the same time. Or I could walk through the streets and understand the shouts of Arabic, without needing a fluency chip. I discovered that the slogan shouted on every street, that I had taken for a prayer, meant ‘Take you to Africa? Ten thousand riyals!’ I had the money, but I declined the offers. Why should I go anywhere, when I had the Net inside me? I could sit in the Net as a spider sits, perfectly still, at the center—for wherever she is, is the center—and when a fly brushes the web, it’s as if the silk were her own body. Night after night, I coursed through minds, leaving new dreams behind me. And in the day, my kibo fell around me in a thousand voices, like a gentle rain.”
“What’s a kibo?” I asked, more to gain time than to hear the answer.
“A kibo is a Weaver’s summoning-word,” she said. “Nobody knows why they’re called that, they just are. They even try to get you to take your kibo as your name. Silliest damn thing I ever heard of—grown people going around being called Alcoholism or Famine. What am I, a Horseman of the Apocalypse?” She grew quiet. “Do you remember what my kibo was?”
“Lesbianka?” I guessed, still not touching my memories.
“No,” she said gravely. “If it had been, many things would have been different. It was Calinshchina.”
“And?”
“And, to begin with, that’s how I found the whale,” she said. “Voskresenye slipped up, just a little, and of course I felt it. But I decided not to turn him in, because by that time I’d met you, and I was beginning to plan what I would do if the other Weavers found out about us. I carved myself a refuge in the whale’s mind. And I forced him to accept it, or be taken by the Weavers. After that, for my own sake, I protected him.”
“Why me?” I asked. “What did you want from me?”
“Maya, when I said I’d been in a thousand minds, it was just a fraction of the truth. There’s hardly a mind in the Fusion I haven’t touched. You were the one that fit—the only one. That’s what I kept trying to tell you last night: we are the halves of a single whole.”
From the chair where he was sitting, Voskresenye called out: “I do believe Miss Mirabara is a better Platonist even than I. She appears to believe in the rolling spiders of the Symposium.”
“Shut up, old man,” she said over her shoulder. “This isn’t about you.”
He smiled, acquiescing. But he watched us from his seat, an audience before the stage. Or rather, an actor between scenes, who already knows the outcome, but watches to compare the other actors’ performances to his own. And all the while he listens, with half an ear, for his final cue.
“If you’re her, and she was a Weaver,” I said, “why did she need to go to Africa? A Weaver could hide from anyone.”
“Except another Weaver. I had to be a step ahead of them, and that meant African tech. If we hadn’t been what we were, you know—if we’d been an airline pilot and a bricklayer—things wouldn’t have been as difficult. Weavers only care about stuff that gets onto the Net. They leave it to the Postcops to take care of mere reality.”
Voskresenye snorted. “As usual, Mirabara, you have things exactly backward. The Weavers control the Net, which is reality; the Postcops only police the flesh, and that has not been real for decades, if indeed it ever was.”
She turned around and hissed at him in Sapir, loud and long. He fell silent, smirking.
“You’re right, though,” she said when she turned back to me. “It started in Africa. I went there on Weaver business—spying, I mean. Half our tech came from Africa, one way or another. But this time, I was looking for an edge. Something to keep me a step ahead of them, something that the other Weavers wouldn’t have. Do you remember what you called it?”
I did; but I would not be drawn out.
“The Cone of Silence,” she said, searching my face for a smile.
“And you found it,” I said flatly.
“No. I searched all through the Net, and all through the streets, and I couldn’t find anything the Weavers didn’t already have. I had to pack up and get on the airship home, thinking, this is it, I’ll have to give her up now. At least that way I’d be able to remember you.
“And then suddenly I was cut off from the Net, as I hadn’t been in years: something was locking me into my skull. In the next seat was a man I hadn’t seen before. He was hideous—wounds boiled over his face as I watched, and there was a hunger in his eyes that I was afraid to look at. And then I looked again, and he was perfect, young, beautiful, streaming with light. It was a manifestation of His-Majesty-in-Chains.”
“The Page of Wounds,” Voskresenye said acerbically. “We may perceive His Majesty’s respect for Weavers from the fact that he did not even bother to send one of the Major Arcana.”
Still harping on Tarot. Cigan? And all his predictions a wanderer’s trick, with neurons instead of tea leaves?