(spinning like microcosmic comet worlds) and trumpetlike stentors dipping gracefully in their wake, a playful collection of such organisms as might easily be found in a stagnant drop of water. “There is room in human culture for variety.”
“You’re overworking the analogy a little,” Rebel said.
“But okay, so what are you offering?”
Snow returned to the center of the sky. Slice by slice, images locked into place about her. In a leafy niche in Pallas Kluster’s corporate kremlin, a fat woman with her face painted with the maintenance government logo was talking to a man with a simple yellow line across his brow.
A bors. Within the local Deutsche Nakasone subsidiary, a woman painted bors was talking with a woman painted midrange planning. Another bors was conferring with the head of Wyeth’s legal staff. Bors himself stroked the thigh of Rebel’s chief of house security. “You have been led to believe that you have several months before being squeezed out of the corporation,” Snow said. “Not so. Even now the Bureau d’Espionnage is seeking your arrest for economic sabotage.”
“Hah?”
“The rebel mudlarks.” (When the ceiling shifted back to the adventures of her public self on Earth, Rebel said,
“Don’t,” and Snow switched them off.) “Deutsche Nakasone has found that they’re not buying new personas.”
Rebel started to laugh.
“You can say that this wasn’t your fault. That Deutsche Nakasone is paying for its own carelessness in including even a weakened version of your integrity when they copied the more superficial aspects of your personality—”
“Oh, no!” Rebel kicked her legs, clutched her sides, trying in vain to control her laughter. “I wouldn’t say that at all!”
“—but that is irrelevant. They’ve assembled the evidence, silenced your legal protection, bought out your samurai. If I didn’t need information from you, the jackboots would be here now. As it is, I gambled that I could crack your security and bought you a delay of four days. There is one necessary link in the legal process who is… perhaps ‘corrupt’ might be the best term. We bought her. It will take your enemies four days to have her impeached and replaced. That’s if you’re willing to meet our price. If not, I’ll free her from obligation right now.”
Snow drew her cloak tight about her.
“What do you say?”
By slow degrees Rebel managed to calm herself. She lay hiccuping for a time, then sighed deeply and sat up.
“That’s better,” she said at last. “I really needed a good laugh, you know that?” Then she wiped the tears from her eyes and told Snow everything she knew about hypercubing.
“Ah,” Snow said. “Now that is interesting.”
And without even saying goodbye, she was gone.
“I’ve been an outlaw before,” Wyeth said calmly.
“Well, so have I, but that’s not the point. These are your supposed allies that are going to be hunting us down.
You’re not going to be very effective with a dozen wyeths on your tail. They know you inside out—you won’t have any surprises for them. Can’t you see that this changes everything?”
“No.” Wyeth stood in the lightless center of a holographic model of the Smoke Ring Way project. Crisp monochromatic lines pierced the gloom, detailing current and projected construction. Yellow threads reached out from him to those klusters where sun taps were already in operation. The green stretches of completed vacuum roads
(relays of hundreds of transit rings were needed within the matter-dense belts, so that traffic could be halted when a rock wandered across the travel lanes) reached almost a third of the way around the sun. Wyeth shifted slightly to tap a sonic spike and muttered a correction into it. Intangible planets shifted position. “We all do what we can,” he said.
“You are so infuriating!” Rebel flung open the door, and light from the elephant passage flooded in, fuzzing the model’s finer lines. Dark shadow shrouded Wyeth’s face; his eyes were pools of black. “Look! I packed for both of us.
If we leave right now, this minute, we can take along enough to—well, it won’t make us rich by anybody’s standards, but it’ll help set us up. Four days from now, we’ll have to take whatever we can carry on our backs.
What do you think you gain by waiting?”
“Four days,” Wyeth said. “Four days in which I can contribute a little bit, however small, to—ah, shit.” He threw back his head, staring straight up, and made a choked, gasping noise, huk-huk-huk. Puzzled, Rebel reached out, touched his face, felt wetness. Tears. She put her arms around him, and he hugged her fiercely, still sobbing. Rebel felt furious with herself for letting him do this to her.
But when Wyeth stopped crying, he stood back from her and said awkwardly, “Ah. I’m sorry, Sunshine. I thought I had it under control. I’m better now.”
Gently, then, she said, “Come with me, babes?”
He silently shook his head.
“I do not understand you!” she cried. “You’ll be leaving behind any number of wyeths in the service of the Republique—I’d think that would discharge any obligations you may have very nicely. Just what is the big problem here?”
“The truth is, I’m of two minds on what to do,” Wyeth said. “No, I’m not. Yes, I am. The arrangement I have with myself is that I can’t make any major change in my life unless all four of my personas agree. It’s a wise policy, too.
No, it’s not, I wish I’d never… Well, too late for that. Hey, let’s be honest here, I want to go with you, and the clown wants to go with you, and the pattern-maker will find purpose wherever he is—he wants to go with you too. But the warrior… No, I want to go too, but I can’t. I can’t. My duty is to stay and fight.”
“You mean that’s it? One fucking persona won’t play along, and you’re letting it screw up both our lives? Come on, now! When have I ever had the luxury of being three-quarters certain of any decision I made? Why should you be any better?”
Wyeth shook his head sadly. “I have to be true to myself, Sunshine. The warrior is part of who I am, and I can’t change that.”
Rebel’s fist closed around holographic Mars. The image remained, glowing deep within her flesh, as if it and she were in overlapping universes, coincident but unable to touch. That sense of futility was returning, the awareness that nothing she could say or do was going to make any difference at all. “Well, I can’t change either, you know that? I’ve hit my limits for growth—right now, my persona is as good as frozen. It’s locked in with integrity, and I can’t get the unlocking enzymes this side of Tirnannog. It takes a wizard to brew them up, and they don’t travel.”
“Stay anyway,” Wyeth urged her. He smiled weakly,hopelessly. “I don’t want you to ever change. I love you just the way you are.”
She covered her face with her hands.
The ALI tagged her as she entered the Corporate Trade Zone.
Rebel abandoned her landau at the transit ring—the corporation could reclaim it, if they wanted—and climbed into a cable car. She slid her passport into the controls, tapping into a line of credit that would be worthless three days hence, and the car began sliding along a long, invisible line toward the out station.
The station was a traditional structure, five wheels set within each other, rotating at slightly differing speeds to maintain constant Greenwich normal throughout. The transit ring was fixed within a stationary hub dock at the center, and the whole thing was done up in pink and orange Aztec Revival supergraphics. Conservative but practical.