The beaker holds Thales’ gaze as it clatters off the wall, rolls on the ground. He finds the records surrounding it, sees it contained the retrovirus sent from the encrypted server.
Thales brings the retrovirus into focus, sees its functional architecture, how it was modified while it was being synthesized—there’s an altered region designed to hijack Cromwell’s thyroid and make it produce a protein that will dissolve the myelin sheaths of his neurons over the course of the next five minutes, which means the mathematician has already killed Cromwell, and Thales wonders why he changed his mind.
He tries to seize control of the soldier’s rifle but can’t get it and resorts to scrolling a message down the soldier’s heads-up display. Wait! I’m a friend of Irina’s, he writes; to his credit, the soldier doesn’t jump. Cromwell just infected himself with a medical retrovirus. He thought it would help him, but it was tainted—he’ll be dead in five minutes. Let him have his time.
His words seem empty and sure to change nothing.
“Change of plan,” says the soldier, lowering his rifle a little. “It looks like they shopped you, boss. The retrovirus was tainted. You’ve got about five minutes to live, and they’re yours to use as long as you sit tight.”
“And the cure for Magda’s illness?” asks Cromwell, for the first time sounding really worried.
A ruse, Thales writes.
“Just a ruse, boss,” says her soldier, sounding genuinely regretful.
Thales regards Cromwell with interest; he’s lost his lover, his empire and an unbounded future in the space of less than a minute. For a moment he seems to waver, then collects himself and with the utmost formality says, “You strike me as a man who has held officer rank. As such, tell me, are you empowered to perform weddings?”
No, Thales thinks. That’s just the captains of ships.
“Yes,” says the soldier. “As a matter of fact, I am. How may I oblige you?”
Thales leaves them then, because Irina’s back, and just reaching the top.
67
Future Selves Forgive Her
Irina is intoxicated with her own radiant clarity and the mathematician’s grace moves her as she searches for its weakness, doubts her chances. The mountain behind it wavers, as though seen through an ocean of restless pale light.
An opening, or the semblance of one, but in any case she’s on the brink of commiting to an attack when she sees a folded piece of paper protruding from the letters of transit still clutched in her hand.
The paper holds her eyes.
She hesitates. The momentum of events had seemed irresistible, but now everything has stopped, and the mathematician is waiting, apparently on her.
She unfolds the paper, reads:
Dear Irina,
We’ve met, but you won’t remember me.
If you’re reading this then our great enemy stands before you, but take heart, because you’ve already won.
Why? Because I found out where his hardware is hidden, and I set up multiple servers that, in about an hour, are going to broadcast that hardware’s location to the most rapacious state, corporate and private actors I could find. The hardware is special, and they’d all kill to get it. The mathematician has no good physical defenses, so, in the moment his hardware’s location is publicized, he’s done.
You can, if you choose, stop this from happening. All you have to do is go to any comments section of the London Times and post the name of the girl who left youth’s city when it was time. (This will be enough of a hint for you, but not for him.) If that’s been done, the servers will hold fire.
Now you have all the leverage in the world.
My time is up, and this is my last card. That you’re still alive makes it less like I’m about to vanish.
All my love,
Irina Sunden
There’s a sense of breathless anticipation. Irina looks up. The mathematician says, “You win.” (She notices its meaning coalesces directly in her other memory, but there’s that in her which has to put it into words.)
The absence of rancor or hesitation makes her think it’s a trick but Thales says, “Look,” and she sees her other memory has expanded again, expanded radically, its boundaries the boundaries of the world, now hers to shape.
She can’t believe it’s real so as a test she makes a slight peremptory gesture and all the ice and snow instantly evaporate into white clouds that girdle the mountain whose lower slopes are like a tower and she’s laughing as she looks down at the airport and its runways far below and dissolves them into pillars of grey smoke that rise and bend in the wind and now there’s just blue water and a scrap of beach under the billowing masses of vapor and ash. She thinks of Cloudbreaker, or the hybrid it became, but it’s already gone, which somehow doesn’t surprise her, but there’s Constantin sitting on a steep rocky slope barren of snow, disgustedly kicking off his rock-scarred skis, and her heart rises because she could fix this, find engineers to make him some kind of acceptable body and bring him back to life, or in any case into the world, and she’d be the first to have recalled anyone from that other country, but she looks into his mind and sees how he’s been hurtling down the same slope for what feels like forever, and there’s a doubt and a loneliness he can only suppress by going faster, and her depth of thought is so great that the future is visible as a spectrum of probabilities and in the best of all the outcomes he’s huddled in his artificial body, disconsolately flexing the servos of a hand that never feels quite right, and unable to stop mourning the loss of his humanity, so she reaches out and stills his thoughts, contemplates the elements of his being, mourns him, disperses them, says goodbye.
“I can’t hold you together anymore,” Thales says in her ear. “You could just die on me. Do what you have to do and get out.”
“Now for you,” she says, rounding on the mathematician.
“There’s something you should see first.”
She’s poised to destroy it but stays her hand, distracted by its symmetries.
“It’s my work, the point of all this. It will interest you.”
“Where?”
“This way.”
She looks up into the golden cloud behind the mathematician and in it sees an order that shivers through her like strains of deep, grave music, and, as it suffuses her, her life and goals seem far away and somehow beside the point.
“It’s the focus of all my efforts,” says the mathematician. “Your world is a shadow and a mystery, and one I’d have ignored had I not required the wherewithal to think.”
She’s walking beside it, going up into the cloud. Adumbrations as of symphonies tremble and swirl through her bones—she wishes she could hear them clearly, knows that’s coming soon. The world darkens, sways.