“That could have called a Weaver?” I said in sudden fear.
She looked at me strangely, as though my reaction had been unexpected. “Maya, if a whiteshirt were going to come for you, don’t you think she would have done it long ago?”
“Of course,” I said hastily, realizing I’d misstepped. “I’m just being paranoid, that’s all. Occupational hazard.”
“After all,” she said slowly, “the Weavers have the whole Net to control. Why would one single you out?”
“Yes, you’re right.” I kept my eyes on the road, trying to make my mind as blank as possible.
She watched me a little longer, then let the subject drop. “So,” she said. “The point of your story is that News One is pissed at you, and that you’re the last person I should hitch my fortunes to. Well, you’re not going to get rid of me that easily.”
“No,” I said. “The point of my story is that my objectives and News One’s may not always correspond. You can back them, or you can back me. And if you’re going to back them, I don’t want you around.”
“I see.” She turned her eyes on my feet and did a slow pan upward.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Deciding.”
“I don’t have time for games, Mirabara.”
“Oh?” she said, and chuckled. “Well, don’t worry. It was never even close.”
We drove on, in a conspiratorial silence.
At the next five-K marker she added: “On one condition.”
Here it comes, I thought. “What kind of condition?”
“I know you’re not used to our Japanese informality, but you’re driving me crazy using my surname all the time.”
I winced in apology. She had asked me to call her Keishi, and I had done so, in my thoughts. But I was reluctant to pronounce the name, with its diphthong, its doubtful gender, and its indeclinability. At least “Mirabara” had a feminine ending, whatever its bastard origins.
“If you really can’t bring yourself to just call me Keishi,” she said, “I could make up a matronymic. Keishi Eikovna.”
I laughed. “That sounds like a patronymic. You want people thinking you’re eighty years old, be my guest.”
“Well, what do you do with names that end in o, then? My mother’s name was Eiko.”
“Russian names don’t end in o.”
“Well, whose fault is that?” She frowned and tried again. “Eikichna?”
“Better not try,” I said, and hazarded: “Keishi?”
She smiled on the attempt. “Close enough. If you could bring yourself to hold that first vowel for more than a femtosecond it might sound a little bit less like a sneeze—” she saw my irritation “—but, yes, certainly, you may bid me by that name. How may I serve Your Eminence?”
“For a start,” I said, “pull out everything available about the Holocaust, the Terror-Famine, and any other miscellaneous horrors you can think of. I’m looking for popular media, mostly. Then dig up every broadcast and Net-text about the Calinshchina. And sit down for about a megascops-hour and think about the similarities and differences—not between the events, so much as between the reactions to them. Then put it all on a chip I can slot in over breakfast tomorrow. Can you do that?”
“That, and have time for about four hours’ sleep besides.”
“In that case, bring it to me at the Leningrad trainport. I should arrive there around two this morning. And quit bragging, it’s not attractive.”
“Only if you quit trying to intimidate me,” she said. “I’m not afraid of work. I told you, you can’t scare me away that easily.”
She smiled and her image faded, then returned. “Oh, one more thing. Stick your camera chip in your wrist socket for a second. I want to tweak some things—you’re not getting the color fidelity you should be.”
“I don’t have an adapter.”
“You do too, it’s in your duffel. Don’t you know you can’t lie to your screener?”
“I like my colors the way they are,” I said.
“Now you’re grasping at straws.”
“No, I mean it. Most cameras nowadays make all their colors super-bright. The muted colors from the old moistware remind people that I’m a veteran, not just a mayfly that some idiot has wired.”
“Like me, you mean?”
“Doesn’t one of us have some work that she’s neglecting?”
“Oh, all right, if that’s how you want to be about it.” She faded again. When only Cheshire eyes remained, she said softly: “It will work out, Maya. I promise it will.”
“This,” I said, lapsing back into Bogart, “could be the beginning of a truly appalling partnership.”
I heard her laughter, and the clinking of her earrings. The car’s extra seat disappeared.
Earrings! Honestly! It struck me only then: how like her, to follow fashion right off the cliff into that quaint disfigurement. In my day when you poked holes in your head it was to expand your mind, not just for decoration. Except, of course, for the people who had fake sockets drilled, so everyone would think they could afford a real set. As I drove toward Alma-Ata I wondered idly what those people were doing now that the real status was in being wired invisibly, like Keishi. Wearing hats, I supposed. And carrying around fake totems with fake chips plugged into them. I ought to do a retrospective.
Vanity. I took out the rest of my chips—all but two—and drove to Alma-Ata quite inviolate, my head accepting input only from the holes that Nature drilled there.
It was a quiet drive, and would have been restful, if not for one thought I could not put aside. No doubt it was only a trick of my memory, which I had every reason to distrust. Or too much down and not enough bandwidth. But when Keishi had first appeared and I had seen her forehead in the rearview mirror, a featureless strip of anonymous skin—I was almost sure of it—that skin had not been black.
(Centipede)
(I did leave two chips in my head; one was a dream coprocessor. Whatever you’ve heard, dreams don’t reveal your hidden desires— if they did, I’d never be allowed to dream. They don’t reveal solutions to your problems, and they don’t foretell the future. They’re just the fumes your brain exhales as it digests the day’s new memories and mulches them into the old. A dream coprocessor increases the efficiency of that process, improving memory. Which is a good thing on the whole, although from time to time I wish there were a button for “forget.” One that I controlled, I mean. The dreams you get with a coprocessor are bloody, vivid, and obscure, like second-rate German Expressionism.
On the bullet train to Leningrad I briefly slept, and dreamed she stood before me, holding something in her hand: a centipede. She held it out to me. I must have refused, for she drew it back, laughing. And then I saw that she was wearing a cloak with two hoods, one lying empty on her shoulder. But no, it was not empty. Her second head lifted itself slowly, and its eyes were flashing incandescent bulbs in metal sockets.
I woke with the tunnel lights reddening the inside of my eyelids, dark and bright, flashing, flashing.)
Three
A FASTER CABLE
I had expected that she would be waiting for me, but she wasn’t. I walked out of the gate into the trainport, past a shop full of T-shirts, snow domes, and cheap telepresence tapes of the city’s attractions; past a kiosk of black moist-novels and garish blue and yellow drydisk magazines; then into the trainport bar, which was, I thought, entirely brighter than it should have been. When I gave the bartender my order, he looked at me with alarm. “Vodka and what?”
“Compost. Vodka and compost. You haven’t been here long, have you?”