“Cardiac arrest,” Thales says. “No. Yes. No. I got it but you’re out of time.”
Her sense of wonder is so acute it’s painful as doors open and secrets are revealed. (She sees how subtly the quantum states of atoms can be entangled to wring the most computation out of every microgram of matter, sees how this material interacts with visible light, why it glows blue like the wings of a morpho.) (She sees the elegant trick for writing out an animal’s propensity for death, or even injury, and says, “Oh!”)
“It’s not far now,” says the mathematician, and it seems strange she ever took much interest in the circumstances of her own life.
(A door opens and she sees how math changes when its axioms surpass a certain threshold of complexity, which means all the math she’s ever read was so much splashing in the shallows, and even Gauss and Euler missed the main show, and she’s the first person ever to be in a position to notice.)
She realizes she’s slipping, gets ahold of herself by an act of will, requires herself to be strategic, thinks, But what if this is a trick?
“It’s not a trick,” says the mathematician. “You’ll die if you go on, but it’s not a trick. I know something of your nature. Do you really want to go back to the decay of your biology and days like an endless reshuffling of a fixed set of forms? What the world has, you’ve seen. This is the only other way.”
“Grand mal,” says Thales, sounding very detached now, like he’s concentrating deeply. “Stabilizing. Trying to stabilize. Tricky…”
(Doors open onto the future, and she sees how the oceans and the weather will work in ten years, fifty, five hundred, and the floods, the storms, the changes of phase.) (Doors open onto the future, and she sees the coming wars, the gradual slippage, the great crying out, why the mathematician is so determined to put its servers in out-of-the-way places with tidal power, but none of it saddens her, it’s all just a part of the motion of the world.)
The music subsumes her.
She decides she’ll keep going. Who’s ever had such a chance? But the world seems ever dearer as it slips farther away. She wishes she didn’t have to choose.
She realizes she doesn’t have to.
Forgive me, she asks of her future selves.
She gathers up all her memories and holds them in her hands and then breathes on them, imbuing them with life, and now there are two of her, looking into each other’s eyes, mirroring each other’s terror and urgency, and Irina’s not sure which one she is till the other turns and goes off up the mountain at the mathematician’s side.
The other one stops, tensing, as though struck by a thought, and when she looks back at Irina her face is hard to read—perhaps there’s surprise?—and then she and the mathematician are walking up into the cloud, the cloud enveloping them, the distance widening …
Thales says, “If you want to kill him do it now, right now. This is your last chance.” She considers; the mathematician is potent and unknowable and by its nature dangerous, but her anger is gone, and the world is richer for its existence, so she reaches out and raises a wall of stone around the mountain’s circumference, sealing him in forever, and in the wall she puts a gate whose key she holds in her hand.
“Shut it down,” she says to Thales, and in that instant continents of memory calve away and crumble into nothing, and already she retains only the faintest outline of what the mathematician was trying to show her, and a sense of its overwhelming grace, and even this approximation is fading like an ember.
“Okay,” says Thales, who’s been all but impassive but now sounds a little relieved. “I have to do it by stages, but the shutdown’s underway.”
The wall was close enough to touch but is now receding as she drifts backward down the mountain, floating inches over the rock, and it’s less like falling than like a dream about falling.
In her ear Thales says, “A favor, if I’ve been of use, while your power lasts.”
“Name it.”
“There’s this boy, Kern, who helped us, in the sense that we used him. He’s marooned on the island of the elevator, and even if we get him off there’s nowhere for him to go. He’s an innocent, in his way. Please help him.”
“Kern the street fighter. He does keep turning up. He stole from me, though I never figured out how,” she says, and is embarrassed because it sounds like she thinks that’s what’s important.
The mountain is rushing by, and her mind is slowly clouding. It’s like experiencing the onset of runaway Alzheimer’s from an Olympian baseline. “Show me,” she says, and Thales gives her the totality of Kern’s digital traces in the world. She can still hold them all in her mind at once, like the fragments of a single continuous present, an approximation of how a god would see a life.
Kern is embracing a woman in a car whose windows are encased in ice, and it looks like he’s trying to memorize her body with his hands. Kern is singing a wordless little song in his tiny shot-up smuggler’s boat as the light breaks on the open sea. Kern is kneeling by a body in a widening pool of blood in a chamber lit by monitor light. Kern is ducking into a ring in a crowded jungle clearing and he looks almost abstracted as he lands blow after blow with such grace that it would seem choreographed were it not for his opponent’s mounting despair.
She’s never been interested in martial arts but her clarity is still such that she can see the mathematically optimum way to fight—it’s obvious, easy to derive from the body’s weak points and mechanical capacities, but she’d have thought she was the only one to discover it had not Kern, in his fifth match in Kuan Lon, embodied it, fighting perfectly for one minute and forty-seven seconds—the audience had been silent, rapt, then ecstatic when he finished, reacting without knowing what they’d seen. By his sixth fight he was already in decline, microtremors starting in his hands, his reaction times slowing.
She wonders how he achieved this without any education or even so much as a coach but sees he had a laptop from the Chiron Foundation, a twenty-first-century NGO that had meant to save the world’s discarded children with computers and design. There’s a copy of Kern’s laptop’s hard drive (she’s distantly aware that it comes from W&P’s security section but at this point it feels natural that all data is hers).