“Fifty to a hundred, yeah.” I smiled faintly. “I was listening last night. But she won’t be holding directly, it’ll be some subsidiary.”
“We can get warrants that—”
“She’s a fucking Meth, Kristin. She’ll beat it all without raising her pulse. Anyway, that’s not the issue here. As soon as I move against her, she’ll slam Sarah into virtual. How long do your far-ranging warrants take to get clearance?”
“Couple of days, if it’s UN-expedited.” The gloom crept across Ortega’s face as she was saying it. She leaned on the rail and stared downwards.
“Exactly. That’s the best part of a year in virtual. Sarah isn’t an Envoy, she doesn’t have any kind of conditioning. What Kawahara can do to her in eight or nine virtual months would turn a normal mind into pulp. She’d be screaming insane by the time we pulled her out. If we pulled her out, and anyway I’m not going to even fucking consider putting her through a single second of—”
“OK.” Ortega put a hand on my shoulder. “OK. I’m sorry.”
I shivered slightly, whether from the sea wind or the thought of Kawahara’s virtual dungeons I couldn’t be sure.
“Forget it.”
“I’m a cop. It’s in my nature to look for ways to bust the bad guys. That’s all.”
I looked up and gave her a bleak smile. “I’m an Envoy. It’s in my nature to look for ways to rip Kawahara’s throat out. I’ve looked. There are no ways.”
The smile she gave me back was uneasy, tinged with an ambivalence that I knew was going to get us sooner or later.
“Look, Kristin. I’ve found a way to do this. To lie convincingly to Bancroft and shut the case down. It’s illegal, very illegal, but no one that matters gets hurt. I don’t have to tell you about it. If you don’t want to know.”
She thought about it for a while, eyes probing the water alongside the yacht, as if the answer might be swimming there, keeping pace with us. I wandered along the rail to give her time, tilting my head back to scan the blue bowl of the sky overhead and thinking about orbital surveillance systems. Out in the middle of a seemingly endless ocean, cocooned in the high-tech safety of the yacht, it was easy to believe you could hide from the Kawaharas and Bancrofts of this world, but that kind of hiding died centuries ago.
If they want you, a youngish Quell had once written of the Harlan’s World ruling elite, sooner or later they’ll scoop you up off the globe, like specks of interesting dust off a Martian artefact. Cross the gulf between the stars, and they can come after you. Go into centuries of storage, and they’ll be there waiting for you, clone-new, when you re-sleeve. They are what we once dreamed of as gods, mythical agents of destiny, as inescapable as Death, that poor old peasant labourer, bent over his scythe, no longer is. Poor Death, no match for the mighty altered carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed against him. Once we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his sombre dignity, and beings like these won’t even let him in the tradesman’s entrance.
I grimaced. Compared to Kawahara, Death was a three-bout pushover.
I stopped at the prow and picked a point on the horizon to watch until Ortega made up her mind.
Suppose you know someone, a long time ago. You share things, drink deeply of each other. Then you drift apart, life takes you in different directions, the bonds are not strong enough. Or maybe you get torn apart by external circumstance. Years later, you meet that person again, in the same sleeve, and you go through it all over again. What’s the attraction? Is this the same person? They probably have the same name, the same approximate physical appearance, but does that make them the same? And if not, does that make the things that have changed unimportant or peripheral? People change, but how much? As a child I’d believed there was an essential person, a sort of core personality around which the surface factors could evolve and change without damaging the integrity of who you were. Later, I started to see that this was an error of perception caused by the metaphors we were used to framing ourselves in. What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or, slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change. The only way to beat that was to go on stack forever.
Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done.
Virginia Vidaura, pacing the seminar room, lost in lecture mode.
But the fact that a sextant will let you navigate accurately across an ocean does not mean that the sun and stars do rotate around us. For all that we have done, as a civilisation, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy. Some of you have served in Vacuum Command, and will no doubt think that out there you have confronted existence vertigo.
A thin smile.
I promise you that the Zen moments you may have enjoyed in hard space are not much more than the beginning of what you must learn here. All and anything you achieve as Envoys must be based on the understanding that there is nothing but flux. Anything you wish to even perceive as an Envoy, let alone create or achieve, must be carved out of that flux.
I wish you all luck.
If you couldn’t even meet the same person twice in one lifetime, in one sleeve, what did that say about all the families and friends waiting in Download Central for someone they once knew to peer out through the eyes of a stranger. How could that even be close to the same person?
And where did that leave a woman consumed with passion for a stranger wearing a body she once loved. Was that closer, or further away?
Where, for that matter, did it leave the stranger who responded?
I heard her coming along the rail towards me. She stopped a couple of paces away and cleared her throat quietly. I quelled a smile, and turned round.
“I didn’t tell you how Ryker came to have all this, did I?”
“It didn’t seem the time to ask.”
“No.” A grin that faded as if swept away by the breeze. “He stole it. A few years back, while he was still working Sleeve Theft. Belonged to some big-time clone marketeer from Sydney. Ryker caught the case because this guy was moving broken-down merchandise through the West Coast clinics. He got co-opted into a local taskforce and they tried to take the guy down at his marina. Big firefight, lots of dead people.”
“And lots of spoils.”
She nodded. “They do things differently down there. Most of the police work gets picked up by private contractors. The local government handle it by tying payment to the assets of the criminals you bring down.”
“Interesting incentive,” I said reflectively. “Ought to make for a lot of rich people getting busted.”
“Yeah, they say it works that way. The yacht was Ryker’s piece. He did a lot of the groundwork on the case, and he was wounded in the firefight.” Her voice was curiously undefensive as she related these details, and for once I felt that Ryker was a long way away. “That’s where he got the scar under the eye, that stuff on his arm. Cable gun.”