“You guide her.”
“I can’t. I lack your feeling for pattern, and couldn’t get her far. We need you,” she says. “I’ve just been in Japan, in a sense, preparing the way, because our window for Irina is about to open, and that means it’s time to give you the last thing. Here—it’s my access to the control layer. The magician gave it to me, and now it’s yours.” He wonders what she means, then suddenly feels the world’s thinness, its malleability, how easy it would be to shape. “There,” she says. “My part’s done. Whatever else happens will happen through you.”
He looks at her, sees her thoughts (they’re obvious, he doesn’t see how he ever managed to miss them) and that she’s been edited, given a compulsion to bring him here, and it occurs to him to restore her, but her experience has coalesced around the edits, and now there’s no clear boundary between the edits and her.
He stands at the center of agendas that don’t concern him. What, if anything, is owed? He’s unmoved by Cromwell’s ambition, Irina’s rage, the AIs’ opaque complexity. Easiest to do nothing, but he remembers the magician’s fear, how she’d kept trying even as her time ran out, and then there’s Kern, whom he won’t otherwise be able to help.
“When’s the window?” he asks.
“Right now,” Akemi says, pointing to the sky out over the sea, and he becomes aware of a presence and an opening.
64
Difficult Transition
As her wireless comes on the glyphs press in but she flinches away and won’t let them come into focus, quite, as she calls up an email client and writes, “New terms—give us five more fabs in the next twelve hours and we’ll cure Kubota’s.” She sends the message off to Cromwell and there’s a new restlessness in the shifting masses of form surrounding her, and she’s just decided it’s time to bail when she sees something rushing toward her like a glassy black wave and there’s time to think, This too is memory, before impact and all in a tumult she’s torn away to—
Rain falling on the temple’s snow, pitting and eroding the white sweep of the rooftop, rivulets forming, braiding, falling away. She stands beneath the temple’s eaves, cold water plashing on her face, inside her collar. The cold is like an ache but there is peace, there, in the thin light of the sun. The thaw is coming, she thinks, as snow sloughs off to reveal the red imbricated roof, one tile laid over another, rising up and up, and lifting her eyes she sees that the pagoda rises vertiginously and forever … The temple shatters, then, a flurry of broken tiles and wind-borne snow dissolving into the dark and—
Shallow, restless sleep twined around the drone of engines. She wakes slowly, blinks, wonders how long it’s been since she’s had a shower, and how many more hours in the flight. She tries to turn on the seat-back computer but the screen shows only a pale purple glow. She taps it with a fingernail, futilely, then opens the window blind, revealing an airy gulf of scintillant blue. It could be ocean below, but there’s no boundary between sea and sky, and never a cloud—just light. Her phone has no signal. Worried, she rises into the aisle, sees that the flight is empty, or nearly—one person sits alone in the back. A boy, maybe eighteen, slouched in his seat, eyes closed but probably awake.
“Excuse me,” she says. “Do you know how long till this flight gets in?”
“No way to tell,” he says, in lightly accented English. His clothes are expensive and his hair good but something about him says quant-with-money.
“Could you remind me where we’re going?” she asks with a little laugh, fighting down the first twinge of panic.
“It’s difficult to give an answer that isn’t mantic, since where we are going does not, in some strong sense, exist until we get there.” His smile is bright and empty, and his eyes, open now, are the blue of the gulf of sky.
Violent turbulence hits the plane then, and she’s flung to the floor. Wetness on her face; her hand comes away bloody. He’s kneeling beside her, saying, “I’m sorry for the difficulty of this transition.”
65
Babel
The concourse echoes with thousands of voices and the flight must have been rough because she has to stop and fight down dry heaves with her back pressed to a wall of curved glass like a solid expanse of neutral grey sky. Some boy from her flight has stopped, is watching her—he’s about eighteen, looks like tech money, some start-up wunderkind who’s never touched a girl.
She realizes he’s just asked her something.
“Sorry, what?” she says, light-headed, mouth dry, trying to focus.
“Do you remember what I was telling you?” he asks gently, cocking his head, his English imperceptibly foreign, and his calm is so profound that he must be older than she’d thought, his youth counterfeit or a trick of the light. “Irina?”
“I don’t…” she says, trying to remember the last ten minutes, but in vain, and her other memory gives her nothing, because it’s churning at full capacity, which must be an error because that only happens when she’s reading glyphs. The boy is staring at her, perhaps with concern, but she remembers she’s being hunted and snaps, “How do you know my name?”
“A friend sent me to help you,” he says patiently. “You’re disoriented because the load on your implant is so high. I’m trying to get you more power from the substrate, but it’ll be a minute.”
“What friend?” she asks, still suspicious, hoping it’s Philip but worried it’s Cromwell, though the boy doesn’t look like hit-man material.
“I suppose it was you, as much as anyone,” he says, seeming not to care if he’s believed. “More or less. Less, perhaps. But in any case I’m guessing I’m about to have to start again.”
“What the hell are—”
*
Wet concrete underfoot as she shuffles along with the crowd. The customs hall is cavernous and cold and smells like rain, and the crowd is so dense that nothing is possible except just going along, and her growing awareness of her own passivity irritates her enough that she makes a singular effort to pull herself out of a deep interior grey.