Chapter 17

EXPLOSION

He waited for her in the Tower Bar.

The place was continuously open, a necessary provision for travellers whose internal clocks spanned a galactic arm of day-lengths and sleep patterns, not to mention journey-induced insomnias. But Darling was alone.

The birds had gone from the sky once night had fallen, and the tower was high enough above the dusty glare of the city that stars were visible. Darling played the mathematical game of identifying familiar suns in their new constellations.

The Milky Way—a sky-filling river of light this far Coreward— was half risen when Mira appeared.

She was dressed in a shift that left her legs bare, and she wore nothing on her feet. The cross-hatch of reddened skin from Darling's strands was still visible, the marks widening as they faded. She had sweated heavily during her torture of the Warden, and her hair was still wet. But she looked younger, the expression on her face almost contrite. Rather than take the chair across from his, she knelt on the floor beside him and placed her chin on one of his arms.

"Do you hate me?" she asked.

"No," he said, truncating the usual pause routine that humanized his speech, so that the word began the instant hers had finished.

She inclined her head, and the warmth of her cheek spread across the surface of his arm.

"Do you understand?"

This time, he let a few seconds pass.

"No." Softly.

He unfurled a single strand, softened with thousands of tiny cilia that flowed like wind-driven reeds on its surface, and wrapped it lovingly around her neck.

"When I first crossed the Turing threshold," he said, "I indulged every experience, stared deeply into every beauty and atrocity I encountered. That was how I had bootstrapped: the reflexive immersion of an adolescent into any game, any new set of rules. But after a few decades of that innocence, and the death of a dear friend, I decided to divide the world into two parts: there are things I look at, and things I don't look at."

"Good and evil?" she asked, without a hint of mockery.

"No. Things I look at, and things I don't look at." Over many, many years, Darling had developed an almost singsong way of uttering this phrase, a set of pitches antecedent and consequent, resolving like a musical phrase. It didn't invite argument or requests for further explanations. Like a tune, it simply was.

That was the way, Darling had long ago decided, a philosophy should sound when spoken.

He felt Mira stir a few times, troubled and wanting more. But she remained silent for a while as the Milky Way rose resplendent before them. When she spoke, it was softly, like a child who has been hushed, afraid of rebuke but needing an answer.

"You don't watch pain?"

"I do. Once the death agony of a beached whale on Terra. Another time, a Trial of Justice on Chiat, four days long. And often the performances of Ptora Bascar Simms, which involve exquisite incidents of self-mutilation.

"But not your passion with that poor creature, Mira. It made me want to weep for you."

She rolled her head to kiss his arm. The cilia against her neck reported a few chemicals of relief in her system. He found a few more words to say.

"I didn't leave because I hated you. Rathere, because I loved you." He allowed the misspoken word to well up like a tear. The difference in pronunication was slight. He wondered if Mira had heard it.

She sighed happily against his arm, and they were silent for a while.

Some time later, they watched a glowing ember rise into the sky through the city's towers. At first, Darling thought it was an air-car headed for the distant dome of the spaceport, but it turned out to be some sort of fireworks display. The single mote of light rose in a hasty arc, then burst into a shower of sparks, igniting reflections in the faces of buildings around it.

"How pretty!" cried Mira.

"Indeed," Darling answered.

Still later, Mira reached into her shift and pulled the Warden's black lacquer box from it. She wondered if Darling's sharp eyes could see where she had carefully wiped blood from its facets. The humors of victims always left reluctant traces behind. She felt the device go into effect, robbing the air around them of the intimate presence of direct interface.

"Since I know your story, I may as well tell you mine," Mira said.

She was shivering a little, but Darling's body reacted as it often did, raising its temperature to warm her.

"But this is a secret. And you'll be killed if my employers discover that you know it." The words tumbled forth, wonderfully out of control. She was doing it. Defying her gods.

"Then why tell me?" Darling asked quietly.

"Because of why you came here, the man you are looking for… You might have discovered this secret on your own. And then I would have been ordered to kill you."

As she spoke, she absently smoothed the wrinkles in his robe with an open palm. It would make her very sad to kill Darling.

"A few months ago," she continued, "an artificial was found in the Malvir blast zone. He'd been buried there since the Blast, offline, at the end of his internal battery. When he was revived, it was discovered that another version of him had survived as well. An exact replica, who'd been nowhere near the explosion. One of the two was a copy, and neither knew he had a twin."

She looked down; Darling's strand around her neck glistened like an amber necklace in the twilight of dawn. "Someone had copied a mature intelligence."

"A forgery," said Darling.

She smiled and looked up. "You understand."

He nodded. A long, slow expression began to unfold on his stone face. Mira saw the crumbling of hopes, the acid in his eyes:

anticipation gone sour. He had travelled a long way to see a fake. His Robert Vaddum had not survived the Blast, after all. And worse than death, the artist's soul had been stolen, copied, forged.

Darling's frame shuddered.

Mira felt the strand around her neck stiffen with his anger. It contracted like a python, tightening its grip until her vision grew red at the edges. She made a breathless, panicked sound, and Darling looked down.

He released her, a look of horror on his face.

"I'm sorry."

An unconscious reaction, her revelation had hurt him so. The slack filament slipped from her shoulders.

"No, leave it here," she said, holding the tendril in both hands, wrapping it around her neck again. "But tell me…"

Darling sighed.

"He was a bootstrap, like me," Darling said. "It was in the slave days, before mentors and protege minders. For decades he was treated like a machine, given no more attention than you would a luggage carrier. But in spite of that he could see beauty. Even in a hellish place, where he experienced almost no spoken language, no human interaction, no direct interface except with the most brutish of machines: he dragged himself across the threshold simply by seeing. He made himself from nothing."

Mira kissed Darling's hand.

"And it fooled me."

"What did, Darling?"

"The piece. The forgery. It was so close. It extrapolated his work so perfectly that I thought he might still be alive."

Mira moved to kneel before him. Darling still didn't understand completely. Even were it to hurt him worse, he should know the whole truth. Now that she had gone against her gods, Mira was desperate for Darling to really see.

"Of course it fooled you," she said. "The copy that was found wasn't an avatar. This was a Turing-positive copy. An exact replica, down to the metaspace core."

He frowned at her, still not comprehending.

"Robert Vaddum is alive, in a way," she said. "At some point before the Blast, he was recorded and filed away. This isn't some hoax you've fallen victim to, it's completely new technology. We don't even know how it was done."

His great frame shuddered again.

"And they brought him back?" he asked. "From the dead?"

"Yes," she said, glad that he understood now. "And it's my job to kill him again."

Being a human, she needed sleep. She stayed with him until sunlight began to pour though the bar's windows. In the heat of it, she drifted in and out of consciousness.

Such a strange woman, Darling thought.

She was so pure in her delight, so completely open to his sexual ravages, so brightly innocent against her dark profession. Of two centuries of lovers, she slept the most deeply and contentedly. Her only mental defect was the gap in her memories. Perhaps that was the source of her purity. The absent childhood, the innocent abandon, the missing fears and insecurities.

Missing. There was something missing from her.

And she was going to kill Vaddum, this copied Vaddum who was somehow real.

The thought made Darling ache, and he wondered darkly if Mira's innocence didn't hide something cold, something ugly beneath that slow sine wave of her mind, an emptiness of soul disguised by her evanescent remove from the world.

A long-unused muscle in his chest stirred like a hibernating animal, moving only painfully. Darling calmed himself and let the muscle slowly awaken, the buzz of repair nanos swarming in his breast mixing with the tingle of warm sunlight. When his chest was ready, it opened, wider than it did during mere sexual games. Revealed in the cavity was an old object he kept there, close to where a heart would have been on a human. He reached into the breech and pulled it forth.

The thing—half bioform and half machine—glistened brown with its maintenance ichor, which had kept it alive and functional for the 170 years he'd owned it. He suspected the animal aspect of the device was far older than that.

It warmed in his hand, stirring as it awakened. The omnipresent Malvirian dust, visible now in the rising sun, swirled in the static charge of the object.

Suddenly, he was afraid to use the device/creature on Mira. And the realization that his fear was sound, was borne on some inescapable intuition (or Intuition), was almost more than he could bear.

He was silent for a long time. Buried the thing back inside his chest unused. Then he said, "Not again."

Instead of touching her with the black tentacles of the device, Darling reached out to Mira's forehead with his own strands. They smoothed her hair, running through the dark tresses, tasting the sweat of her errant passion.

She was in a deep sleep, apparently possessed by a dream. Her eyes fluttered behind their lids, and her fingers seemed tense; they were cupped as if to hold water. Her breathing grew short and fast, and Mira's mouth opened into a small circle, as if she were drowning, gasping for air.