She’s following the signs for the airport’s medical clinic to see about her jaw when it occurs to her that Corporal Boyd’s suit might have kept records exact enough for them to reconstruct her injury. She stops dead, imagining her MRI going off into the net, beyond her knowledge or control, and it’s not clear whether this is self-defeating paranoia or the caution that will avert the small mistake that would undo her.
The airport is owned and operated by a Dutch firm, which is why she can buy a bikini for the sun deck and bask there sipping from a rum on ice. Impossible to hold onto tension in that stupefying heat. She’d been worried she’d feel exposed but her new touch-me-not movie-star sunglasses help and in any case she feels anonymous among all that bared flesh, as though the hard light washed away all individuality, making everyone into just another animal drowsing in the sun.
She stares up into a sky like a sea and imagines she sees currents and depth-warped light. In six hours she’ll fly on to Delhi, which had seemed sufficiently random and far away from Patmos, then check in with her soldier and plan her next move. She wonders if she’ll have to do anything so egregious that she won’t be able to go back to the United States, but no matter, the only real country is the country of wealth, and many places would take her; in any case, she has her Greek passport.
She closes her eyes, making the sky a blood-red glow, and lets herself drift.
As sleep comes she’s glad that for a while she can forget all her strain but instead of disappearing she finds herself in a poorly lit boiler room full of the racket of distant machinery. This is a dream, she thinks, and a lucid one, but at the wrong time—REM sleep should only come after an interval of oblivion. Is the setting a metaphor, a sign that she’s somewhere in the basements of her mind, or could this be one of the implant’s utility programs? A screen on the wall playing a succession of scenes from the recent past—the ice in her drink refracting the light in the bar in the Athens airport, Fabienne’s composure as she shook her awake, the blue sea framed in the VTOL’s window. There’s a woman sitting on a section of pipe watching the screen and she looks just like Irina.
Irina studies her twin, trying to decide whether she is, in fact, pretty, a question she ought to have resolved long ago. Others would probably say yes, she allows, in large part because, having bought off the years, she still has the glow of youth’s embers. Her twin looks moved, as though she might cry, which is somehow unseemly.
“The Cartesian theater,” Irina says. “And here’s my double, bearing witness to my history. They’re interesting symbols, but what does it mean?”
Her twin looks up at her, blinks and says, “Oh, fuck. Well, here we all are,” and her voice is Irina’s, not thin and nasal like in recordings, but rich and mellifluous like it sounds in her head.
“Are you my subconscious?” asks Irina. “My anima?”
“I believe you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
“So then you’re … what?”
“I’m nothing, or nearly, barely even a ghost,” says her twin, who for no evident reason seems greatly moved to see her, but this must be accepted as part of the structure of the dream. “I’m also the only one who’s ever had all the information, and I’m going to be the one who makes everything right. But I’m so glad you’re okay—I wasn’t sure what had happened to you after Cloudbreaker. And poor Iliou. Fabienne was so sweet to you, in the aftermath, more than I’d have expected. She didn’t have to help.”
“I like Fabienne,” Irina says. “She’s slight, but has a depth of kindness, even of courage, in her way. And of course her accusations are correct. Her father is dead because of me, and I doubt there’s anything I can do to make it right, though god knows I’ll try. It’s just that Cromwell stands too far above the law.”
“What’s it worth to you to beat him?” asks her twin. “What would you risk for a chance to annihilate your enemies both known and hidden and then maybe live for a very long time?”
“Everything.”
“Would you manipulate yourself into doing what was necessary?”
“Of course.”
“That’s what I thought, but I thought I should ask. It’s just I’m not myself these days.”
“But how could I beat him? I attacked him before, and with powerful allies, and barely survived. He seems to have no weaknesses.”
“Oh, he has weaknesses,” says her twin, and while they’ve been talking the boiler room has gotten dark and the machines have fallen silent, and now the only light is from the screen floating in the blackness where the wall was, showing Cromwell in his office holding Magda on his lap. “Magda is one. And you remember the strangers, his mysterious correspondents, from when you broke into his servers? They’re another. I’ve met them. They’re AIs, feral ones, running on hidden servers in the dark places of the world. I know where they are.” Now the screen shows a map of the world, the seas and continents fading out as though night were settling, dim stars emerging in Tokyo, LA, Sydney, what used to be Costa Rica. (For a moment she thinks there’s another one, and by far the brightest, near the equator, but it’s already gone from the screen and from her mind.) “Cromwell’s recently figured out what they are, and where, and he plans to leave them alone until their business is done, which is something else I can use. I’ve had about a minute to plan, but I think my plan will work. Which reminds me, I have something for you.” She presses something into Irina’s hands, a passport-sized document. “It’s a kind of security code, obtained with difficulty. Think of it as letters of transit—it will open doors for you. So listen—I need you to know I’ve done my best for you. I hope to god you win, but either way I won’t be around to see it, and now I ask your forgiveness for what I’m about to do.”
“Which is?”
“Change you. I’m going to give you memories of things that didn’t happen, and make you forget this conversation. I know it’s a violation, but at least it’s only me. I’d rather just tell you everything, but if I did you’d distrust me when you woke up, and why shouldn’t you? I’m well acquainted with your skepticism.” Her twin smiles tightly. “I won’t remember this either, as of about a minute and a half from now. We’ll go from two witnesses to one, and then to none, and then it will never really have happened.”
“What do you mean, you won’t remember it either? What’s wrong?”
Her twin takes her hands and says, “It was good to see you,” sounding so sad and proud that Irina is reminded of her first day at college and the tenderness with which the other students’ parents had said goodbye, for which she’d hated them, though she had not, at the time, been able to admit it, choosing instead to despise them as coarsely sentimental; at that point she’d been her own legal guardian for two years, though her lawyer was still punctilious about sending her gifts on Christmas and her birthday.
Her twin kisses her cheek, says, “Now forget me.”
52
Sphinx Explains Our Horror
Akemi is sitting on the roof’s edge pitching ice cubes into the void.