I tried not to think of the little book, the only hard copy book I had ever held in my hands, and which I had for some reason hung on to all these ans. I thought instead about the feeling of Niyara’s blood on my hands as I tried to hold her wounds closed.
But what I saw—what I remembered, intrusively, compulsively—was Niyara giving me the small package. And me staring at her, without even really registering what she had put in my hands. The thermoplex wrapping dented in my hands. Whatever was inside was moderately flexible without being soft, and made a faint crinkling sound. “What is this?”
“A gift,” she said.
“A gift? A physical object?”
“So I’m old-fashioned,” she had said. “Go on and open it.”
That was old-fashioned. Wrapping paper, and something that wasn’t just printed and endlessly recyclable. Except it was something printed. The old kind of printed: text on paper. A book.
I turned a page. It felt fragile and yet somehow strangely substantial. It had, I realized, a faint aroma. Polymer.
“Keep that safe,” she had said. “It might be important to you somedia”
? ? ?
I had given the game away already. I said, She sure did. It was on Singer when your people murdered him.
A book, she said.
Then, after a pause, she said, Do these numbers mean anything to you?
They didn’t. There were a lot of them, and I allowed my feelings of blank confusion to fill my mind while I retreated back into what I had been doing when she distracted me. I would think about this new conundrum later. Right now, I was going to have one more crack at breaking into Farweather’s fox. I didn’t think it would work, and I was sure it was unethical. But I wasn’t exactly in a position where I could turn over what I knew to the Synarche and let them detail Judiciary to do a legal search. So I dropped that totally illegal bit of code I didn’t have and hadn’t written, and crossed my aftfingers in my boots.
The incompatibilities in our hardware and base code were just too much. I didn’t think she’d noticed—I didn’t get knocked back—but it was like throwing spaghetti at a frictionless surface. Maybe if I’d had the time to try a few iterations and adjustments, I could have worked around to something that might find a place to link in and siphon off some data. Possibly I should have tried harder to figure out a way to paralyze her. As it was, I was sure she’d yank the leads off if she got the tiniest inkling of what I was planning.
It didn’t pay off, and I didn’t have time to keep trying.
I wanted to use this time for my own purposes. I needed to pry into my own meat, rather than meta, memories of Niyara—and of what we had done. And see how much truth Farweather was telling me.
I memorized the numbers, though, against later need. You never knew.
I didn’t believe Farweather would be able to feel what I was thinking as I went deeper into my meat memories; I was intentionally blocking the interface machine and also my machine memories. So the ayatana wouldn’t influence what I recalled, and so nothing should show up in my senso feed.
I’d never intentionally blocked out my own ayatana before.
It was strange, like thinking about a story I’d heard of something that had happened to someone else. It had happened to someone else; I was briefly enmeshed in a memory that could only be Niyara’s, and it left me shivering. I had a vivid sense of a . . . bottle, an old-fashioned wine bottle made of the kind of glass that would break into umpteen tiny shards if struck solidly, and of wiping the screws on the neck very, very carefully before threading a bottle cap into place.
In the memory I knew that if I didn’t exercise profound diligence, the bottle would detonate. It was full of a highly reactive explosive and a handful of screws and washers to make shrapnel along with the shattering silica glass.
I wondered if I had read about what I was half experiencing in a court document, or if maybe a bit of Niyara’s senso had been played at the trial and I was recollecting its sensations now. The trial—and the terrorist attack—were both such a long time ago that even if my recollections hadn’t been edited for public safety, the meat ones wouldn’t have been reliable. Especially since I’d been in a state of shock when it happened, and a state of profound trauma afterward, for the inquest and the trial.
One of the best things about the fox is that it gives everybody unbiased memories of what actually happened on any given dia, or in any given interaction. I can’t imagine what dispute resolution must have been like in the bad old diar, when basically anybody could make any kind of claim about what happened, and unless somebody had had a recorder running, nobody ever could be sure of the truth. Eyewitness reports, they used to call them, and they were notoriously inaccurate and unprovable.
Those “eyewitness reports” were good records of what people thought they saw, and what they remembered they thought they saw. They were really good records of what confirmation bias led people to believe, and want to believe.
Trying to get a factual record out of that would be like . . . Like constantly dealing with Farweather, probably.
As if thinking of her had summoned her, she poked me in the attention. Are you on task, babes?
Looking for my meat memories didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere. They were doubtless under so many layers of confabulation that I’d never be able to pick them out clearly anyway. Maybe I was just going to have to shut down my fox for a while and see what happened.
That meant getting to my own operating system, so to speak. And using Farweather’s codes.
I could feel her looking over my shoulder, virtually speaking, as I delved deeper in my mind. The temptation to pull up old ayatanas and wallow in the memories was as powerful as any time you’re going through your music collection and hit that cache of files you haven’t listened to since you were in school. But I managed, despite the pull of nostalgia and procrastination.
Having Farweather right there playing virtual voyeur helped to keep the urge suppressed.
Anyway, I was getting closer to the operating system. I poked around a bit more, and was pretty sure I had found it because I suddenly hit such a strong sense of aversion that if Farweather hadn’t been backstopping me, I would have been halfway across the room and totally jacked out of our jury-rigged sharing system before anybody could have said “boo.” As I reached for the contact pads at the base of my skull, though, she gave me such a boost of calm that I managed to stop my hands in mid-grab and return them slowly to my lap.
“Why do I think there’s more going on here than you’re telling me?” I said out loud.
She shrugged. “Quit now, and you’ll never get the chance to find out.”
I wanted to curse her, but if I randomly cursed out everybody who got on my nerves on a given dia, I never would have been able to exist on a tiny ship with Connla for a decans and a half. Instead, I reached out into the structure of the hull with the Koregoi senso. Make backups, Singer always said. I fiddled with a few things, and left it there.
Best I could do right now.
She said, “What if I told you I had Niyara.”
I stared at her, scoffed. “Niyara is dead. She died while bleeding all over me.”
After cheating all over me, I thought. She’d lied on so many fronts, in so many ways. About big things and little. I could have dealt with being a secondary relationship, if she hadn’t lied to me about not having a primary one. I . . . well, I probably wouldn’t have been okay with her being a terrorist.
Would I have been?
Farweather turned her head so I could see the corner of her smile. “I’ve got her ayatana. Up to the moment of her death, actually. Safely hidden, so don’t bother ratting through my stuff to find it.”
I probably would have made a derogative comment about the desirability of ratting through pirate bags. Except I’d been doing it for weeks, scavenging her food and equipment.
So I guess she had me there.
On the one hand, if there was any such recording, it would explain a lot about how Farweather knew so much about me. And how she knew about the book. On the other hand, if there wasn’t such a recording, her claim that she’d hidden it outside of her luggage meant I could never actually be sure if it existed or not.
I really had to stop underestimating her. It was going to get my head staved in. And maybe I should look into hiding some information where she wouldn’t find it, just in case the Synarche got their hands and tentacles and whatnot on the Prize and I . . . hadn’t made it.
“Then you probably know where she got the information you’re so desperate to get back from me,” I challenged.
“Oh, sure,” Farweather said. “She stole it.”
“It’d help if you told me what it was. I might be able to find it.”
“But you wouldn’t tell me what it is if you did know.” She still had her back to me, but she crossed her arms triumphantly.
“I might bargain,” I said. “After all, you have a lot of things that I want.”
She glanced over her shoulder to leer at me, and I rolled my eyes.