Back at the control terminal Fiore issues some more commands, and the gate begins chugging to itself. I glance over my shoulder. Yes, it's still doing thatjust some kind of long synthesis job. He heads for the staircase and
Shit! I whip round and reach for my bag. The A-gate cylinder is opening.
Knife in left hand, bag in right hand. Everything is crystal clear. Fiore suspected. He backed himself up, then set an ambush, and I've blown it. The cylinder turns and the interior cracks into view. White light, a smell of violets and some kind of weird volatile organics, a bit of steam. There's someone/something in there, moving.
I dart forward, bag raised, knife ready to block. They're sitting up, head turning. I'll only get one chance to do this. Heart pounding, I upend the empty shoulder bag over the head, lank black hairfat jowls wobbling indignantly hands coming upand I shove the knife blade up against his throat and yell, "Freeze!"
The duplicate Fiore freezes.
"This is a knife. If you move or make a sound or try to dislodge the bag over your head, I will cut your throat. If you understand, say yes."
His voice is muffled, but sounds almost amused. "What if I say no?"
"Then I cut your throat." I move the knife slightly.
"Yes," he says hurriedly.
"That's good." I adjust my grip. "Now let me tell you something. You are thinking you have a working netlink and you can call for help. You're wrong, because netlinks work via spread spectrum, and you're wearing a Faraday cage over your head, and although it's open at the bottom you're standing in a cellar. The signal's attenuated. Do you understand?"
Pause. "There's nobody there!" He sounds slightly panicky. Clever fellow.
"I'm glad you said that because if you hadn't, I'd have cut your throat," I tell him. "Like I said earlier, if you try and lose the bag, I'll kill you immediately."
He's shaking. Oh, I shouldn't be enjoying this, but I am. For everything you've done to us I ought to kill you a hundred times over. What have I turned into? I'm almost shaking with the intensity ofit's like hunger, the yearning. "Listen to these instructions. I will shortly tell you to stand up. When I do so, I want you to slowly rise, keeping your arms by your sides. If at any point you can't feel the knife, you'd better freeze, because if you keep moving, I'll kill you. When you're on your feet, you will step fifty centimeters forward, then slowly move your hands behind your back. You will then lace your fingers together. Now, slowly, stand up."
Fiore, to give him his due, has a cool enough head to do exactly as I tell him with no hesitation and no hysterics. Or maybe he just knows exactly what he can expect if he doesn't obey. He can't be under any illusions about how hated he is, can he?
"Forward one pace, then hands behind back," I say. He steps forward. I have to stretch to keep the knife around his neck, but I reach down with my free hand and follow his right arm round. Now is the moment of dangerif he were to kick straight back while blocking with his left shoulder he could hurt me badly and probably get away. But I'm betting Fiore knows very little indeed about serious one-on-one physical mayhem, and the bag over his head should keep him disoriented long enough for me to do this. I step to one side, reach into my pocket with my right hand until I find what I'm after, then squeeze the contents of the tube over his hands and fingers. Cyanoacrylate gluethe librarian's field-expedient handcuffs. "Don't move your hands," I tell him.
"What is it" He stops. Of course he can't help moving his hands and the stuff flows into small cracks. It's less viscous than water but it polymerizes in seconds. I move the knife round to the side of his neck and examine my handiwork. He might be able to get his hands apart if he's willing to leave skin behind, but he won't be able to take me by surprise while he's doing it.
"Okay, we're now going to take three slow steps forward. Yes, you can shuffle. I'll tell you when to stopeasy, easy, stop!"
I stop him in the middle of an open patch of floor. I need to think. He's breathing hoarsely inside the improvised hood, and he stinks of fear-sweat. Any moment now, he'll realize that I can't let him live, then he'll be uncontrollable. I've got maybe twenty seconds
"When my husband says * * * I can't hear him," I say conversationally. "What does that mean?"
"It means you're infected with Curious Yellow." He sounds oddly placid.
"You ran off a duplicate of yourself as a guard to see who was coming in here," I tell him. "That was smart. Were you afraid I was using the A-gate?"
"Yes," he says tersely.
"It's immune to the strain I'm infected with, isn't it?" I ask.
I can feel his muscles tensing. "Yes," he says reluctantly.
"And Yourdon didn't insist it was locked to your netlinks?" I ask, tensing as I gamble everything on the right answer.
He doesn't give it to me verbally, but he grunts and begins to pull his hands apart and I know I'm right, but I also know I've got about three seconds left. So I step in close behind him and run my right hand down his chest, caressing, and he freezes when I get to his crotch. A moment of reliefhe's anatomically orthohuman, and male. I grab his balls and squeeze viciously. He jackknifes forward, speechless and gasping, almost knocking me over with the violence of it, and the bag goes flying. But that's okay, because a moment later I grab his hair and while he's preoccupied with the terrible breath-sucking pain, I pull his head up and run the knife blade smoothly through his carotid artery and thyroid cartilage, just below the hyoid bone.
See, the difference between me and Fiore is that I don't enjoy killing, but I know how to do it. Whereas Fiore gets off on control fantasies and watching his score whores lynch lovers, but it didn't occur to him to tell the assembler to restore him holding a weapon, and it took him almost twenty seconds to realize that I was going to have to kill him regardless of anything he did or said. Basically, Fiore is your bureaucrat-type killer who runs push-button experiments by remote control, while I'm
I blank again.
THE civil war lasts two gigasecs, nearly sixty-four years by the reckoning of long-lost Urth. It's probably still raging in some far-flung corners of human space. When the longjump network was shattered in an attempt to firewall the damage, it split the interstellar net into disjoint domains separated by lightspeed communications lag. Isolated pockets of Curious Yellow are probably still running, out beyond the liberated light cone, in the eternal darkness and coldjust as there may be outposts of free posthumanity who dropped off the net when the Republic of Is disintegrated. Redaction, the deletion of memory, is Curious Yellow's deadliest weaponsome of those polities might have been deliberately forgotten, their proximal T-gate endpoints dropped into stars and the memories of their existence erased from everyone who used an infected A-gate. The true horror of Curious Yellow is that we have no way of knowing how much we have lost. Entire genocidal wars could have been wiped from our memories as if they never happened. Perhaps this explains the worm's peculiar vendetta against practicing historians and archaeologists. It, or its creator, is afraid we will remember something...
I spend my first gigasec among the Cats being a tank. There's very little that is human left in me once I get a clear picture of what's going on. It's not hard to generalize from the tales of random atrocities committed against people who specialize in the past; besides, the gigasecond of nonexistence I spent aboard Grateful for Duration is a small death in its own righttime enough for children to mature as adults, for spouses to despair, mourn, and move on. Even if by some miracle my family hasn't been targeted for liquidation because of my career, they're still lost to me. That sort of experience tends to make one bitter. Bitter enough to give up on humanity as a bad job, bitter enough to experiment with other, more sinister, identities.