She was gaunt, where she had once been slim, and her voice bubbled through mucus. She still wore dark lipstick, but now its colour matched that of the burst veins beneath the stretched skin of her face. Her clothes—an expensive dark linen jacket and skirt—somehow did not hang properly on her.
“Why are you standing at that angle?”
“Arthritis. And incontinence pants.”
“You’re as convincing as the other one,” Cyr said. “Flesh tones, details, everything.”
“What other one?”
“You know that She made you and sent you here, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. What did you mean, Other One?”
A quiet movement to one side made them both look round. Thahl had discreetly re-routed Cyr’s Weapons functions to his own console, just in case.
They turned back, and locked eyes again.
“At least,” Cyr said, “the other one was a copy of someone who did exist, in the past. You’re sixty years in the future. You’re a copy of someone who hasn’t existed yet.”
“This is supposed to be news to me? I already told you that.”
“You didn’t,” Cyr said, “but I figured it out…Were you sent here to talk to me?”
“Oh, I see. Like the Other One. What am I, number two? Three more to go, then. Or four, if She does Joser too.”
“And what would She have told you to say? Something like, There Are Many Possible Futures?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Oh, you know, that the future isn’t fixed, that it can be altered, that I might not turn into you and get a face like a sanitary towel, but first I have to Change. Everything the Commonwealth pays me to do, everything I do best, everything involving weapons and killing, I have to stop liking it. Liking it makes me a loner and an outsider, even on this ship. I have to Change. I might seem beautiful now but inside I’m full of poison, and unless I Change, the inside will push through to the surface. Like it has with you. But I can still Change: I can still turn my life round and find another future…Is that what She told you to say?”
“Every word of that,” said Susanna Cyr, “is wrong, including And and The. Your future is fixed. You can’t change. You can’t turn your life around. You will become me. And you’re a loner and an outsider because…”
“Because I like it too much?”
“Because nobody will want you. The future is fixed. Nobody will want you: not as a lover, partner, companion, or even friend. You have only colleagues. Most of them, you frighten. The ones you don’t frighten—like these here—you sicken.”
Cyr wanted to look around her, but could not.
“Occasionally,” Susanna Cyr went on, “you think that Foord might want you, as much as you want him, and occasionally he does. He thinks you’re the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, but also the most sickening he’s ever known. You can make him ejaculate and vomit with equal ease, and in almost equal amounts….Yes, ejaculate. Sometimes in his cabin he thinks of you and masturbates.”
Susanna Cyr paused, and laughed; the same kind of laugh Cyr occasionally did, which made her ugly.
“Always the same Foord. He can never share it, even with you. He’d rather take it with him and go off somewhere on his own. And you know, sometimes he can’t ejaculate; that’s when he thinks of what’s between your ears, rather than what’s between your legs.”
Thahl was already moving towards Cyr, but maybe he hesitated; or maybe, for once, even he was not fast enough. She emptied her sidearm into Susanna Cyr’s body. Bits of torn parchment flesh and broken struts of bone and bloodsoaked dark linen erupted from Susanna Cyr’s midriff and chest and shoulders and thighs: real substances, not silver. She doubled over, then straightened. She did not fall, despite her arthritic hip, and the bits blown from her body floated around her in midair, stopped at the moment they left her. She looked like an exploded diagram. She smiled at Cyr.
“Why didn’t you just aim for my face?”
Cyr could not reply, even to shake her head. Thahl’s micromanipulator claws were around her neck, almost but not quite piercing her skin. She dropped the sidearm. Thahl’s claws retracted, and his hands left her.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” said Susanna Cyr. “I’m done here anyway. I’ll see you in sixty years. The future is fixed. Your life will be long and pointless. I know, I’ve lived it.”
Cyr sank to her knees. Thahl still stood behind her. He reached out to touch her shoulder, but she shrank away, even though his claws were sheathed.
Susanna Cyr’s figure had emptied. As the exploded pieces returned to it, it washed itself clear of her features and identity and posture, and became blank.
“Ghost of Christmas Future,” Cyr hissed. She locked eyes with Foord. Strangely, neither of them was embarrassed.
“Do you really do that? On your own?”
“Yes,” said Foord.
“Why?”
“Habit.”
Thahl looked from one to the other. He had only a partial understanding of human sexual dynamics, but a very good understanding of the nuances of human speech, and of things left unsaid.
“Kaang,” Foord said, “get us away from here. Hard to port, eighty percent. Maybe that signal will weaken with distance.”
She did so, though she didn’t believe him. Neither did any of the others.
•
They fled through the Gulf. She made no attempt to follow them, but Her white light still filled the Bridge, and they still felt cold.
For the first time since Joser’s death there were six and not five on the Bridge, but the sixth was blank and unmoving and empty. For those reasons Cyr—who knew it was essential to appear unaffected—hit on the rather spiteful device of calling the empty figure Joser. When she got unsteadily to her feet after Susanna Cyr left and Foord gave the order to run, she pointed to the figure. Forcing lightness into her voice, she asked Thahl
“Which of us will fill Joser next? You?”
When Thahl did not answer, she lowered her voice and said “Remember I was too quick for you. And please put the Weapons functions back to my console.”
Thahl glanced at Foord, who nodded.
Cyr, without taking her eyes off Thahl, said “He didn’t order you to reroute my Weapons functions. You don’t need him to order you to put them back.”
“The functions are back.”
“Thank you.”
“I would never have killed you, Cyr.”
“I know. But you tried to stop me doing what I wanted.”
And later, while they continued to run from Her in a silence broken only by operational remarks, Cyr turned to Foord and said “Is Joser still solid? Or does he seem to be turning back to vapour?”
The headups on the Bridge screen showed She was hundreds of miles away; soon it would be thousands. Her image had dwindled to almost nothing. In the absence of instructions, the screen had not seen fit to magnify it.
“I meant it, Commander. Look at him. Around his edges. Don’t you see it?”
Foord tore himself away from her gaze and looked again at the empty figure. It took him a few seconds to see what Cyr had already seen: the figure was less distinct. It started to sway. The motion was most pronounced at its head while its feet stayed unmoving, and as it swayed it left flakes of itself, like scurf, floating alongside it until they dissolved in the light. It was bleeding away into the light, in a reversal of the process by which it had first appeared.
“It is weakening with distance!” Foord shouted.