"Oh yes! I grew up in a troupe, I had lots of brothers and sisters and parents. We were primate fundamentalists, you know? It's kind of embarrassing. But I still hear from some of the cousins now and thenwe exchange insights once in a while." She smiles wistfully. "When I was a ghoul, it was one of the few things that reminded me I had an alien side."
"But did you, when you were a ghoul, did you have... ?"
Her face freezes over: "No, I didn't." I look away, embarrassed for her. Why did I imagine I was the only liar at the table?
"About that food idea," I say, hastily changing the subject, "I'm still trying out some of the eateries around here. I mean, getting to know what's good and figuring out who hangs out where. I was thinking about going for a meal and maybe seeing if a few acquaintances are around afterward, Linn and Vhora. Do you know them? They're in rehab, too, only they've been out a bit longer than us. Linn's doing craft therapy, ad hoc environmental patching, while Vhora's learning to play the musette."
"Did you have anywhere in particular in mind to go and eat?" She unfreezes fast once we're off the sensitive subject.
"I was thinking a pavement cafe in the Green Maze that hangs off the back of the Reich Wing looked like a possibility. It's run by a couple of human cooks who design historically inauthentic Indonesian tapas in public. It's strictly recreational, a performance thing: They don't actually expect you to eat their prototypesnot unless you want to." I raise a finger. "If that doesn't interest you, there's a fusion shed, also in the Green Maze, that I cached yesterday. They do a decent pan-fried calzone, only they call it something like a dizer or dozer. And there's always sushi."
Kay nods thoughtfully. "Plausible," she agrees. Then she smiles. "I like the sound of your tapas. Shall we go and see how much we can eat? Then let's meet these friends of yours."
They're not friends so much as nodding acquaintances, but I don't tell her that. Instead, I pay up with a wave at the billpoint, and we head for the back door, out onto the beautiful silvery beach that the rehab club backs on to, then over to a rustic-looking door that conceals the gate to the green maze. Along the way, Kay pulls a pair of batik harem pants and a formally cut black-lace jacket out of her waist pouch, which is an artfully concealed gate opening on a personal storage space. Both of us are barefoot, for although there is a breeze and bright sunlight on our skin, we are fundamentally as deep indoors as it is possible for humans to get, cocooned in a network of carefully insulated habitats floating at intervals of light kiloseconds throughout a broad reach of the big black.
The Green Maze is one of those rectilinear manifolds that was all the fashion about four gigasecs ago, right after the postwar fragmentation bottomed out. The framework consists of green corridors, all straight, all intersecting at ninety-degree angles and held together by a bewildering number of T-gates. Actually, it's a sparse network, so you can go through a doorway on one side of the maze and find yourself on the far side, or several levels up, or even two twists, a hop, and a jump behind the back of your own head. Lots of apartment suites hang off it, including the back entrance to my own, along with an even more startling range of cubist-themed public spaces, entertainment nooks, eateries, resteries, entertainment venues, and a few real formal hedge mazes built in a style several tens of teraseconds older.
Needless to say, nobody knows their way around the Green Maze by memory or dead reckoningsome of the gates move from diurn to diurnbut my netlink knows where I'm going and throws up a firefly for me. It takes us about a third of a kilosec to walk there in companionable silence. I'm still trying to work out whether I can trust Kay, but I'm already sure I like her.
The tapas place is open plan, ancient cast-iron chairs and tables on a grassy deck beneath a dome under a pink sky streaked with clouds of carbon monoxide that scud across a cracked basalt wilderness. The sun is very bright and very small, and if the dome vanished, we'd probably freeze to death before the atmosphere poisoned us. Kay glances at the ornamental archway surrounding the T-gate, overgrowth with ivy, and picks a table close to it. "Anything wrong?" I ask.
"It reminds me of home." She looks as if she's bitten a durian fruit while expecting a mango. "Sorry. I'll try to ignore it."
"I didn't mean to"
"I know you didn't." A small, wry, smile. "Maybe I didn't erase enough."
"I'm worried that I erased too much," I say before I can stop myself. Then Frita, one of the two proprietor/cook/designers wanders over, and we're lost for a while in praise of his latest creations, and of course we have to sample the fruits of the first production run and make an elaborate business of reviewing them while Erci stands by strumming his mandolin and looking proud.
"Erased too much," Kay prods me.
"Yes." I push my plate away. "I don't know for sure. My old self left me a long, somewhat vague letter. Written and serialized, not an experiential; it was encoded in a way he knew I'd remember how to decrypt, he was very careful about that. Anyway, he hinted about all sorts of dark things. He knew too much, rambled on about how he'd worked for a Power and done bad things until his coworkers forced him into excision and rehab. And it was a thorough job of assisted forgetting they did on me. I mean, for all I know I might be a war criminal or something. I've completely lost over a gigasecond, and the stuff before then is full of holesI don't remember anything about what my vocation was, or what I did during the censorship, or any friends or family, or anything like that."
"That's awful." Kay rests a slim hand atop each of mine and peers at me across the wreckage of a remarkably good aubergine-and-garlic casserole.
"But that's not all." I glance at her wineglass, sitting empty beside the carafe. "Another refill?"
"My pleasure." She refills my glass and raises it to my lips while taking a sip from her own without releasing my hands. I smile as I swallow, and she smiles back. Maybe there's something to be said for her hexapedal body plan, although I'd be nervous about doing it to myselfshe must have had some pretty extensive spinal modifications to coordinate all those limbs with such unconscious grace. "Go on?"
"There are hints." I swallow. "Pretty blatant ones. He warned me to be on my guard against old enemiesthe kind who wouldn't be content with a simple duel to the death."
"What are we talking about?" She looks concerned.
"Identity theft, backup corruption." I shrug. "Or... I don't know. I mean, I don't remember. Either my old self was totally paranoid, or he was involved in something extremely dirty and opted to take the radical retirement package. If it's the latter, I could be in really deep trouble. I lost so much that I don't know how the sort of people he was involved with behave, or why. I've been doing some reading, history and so on, but that's not the same as being there." I swallow again, my mouth dry, because at this point she might very well stand up and walk out on me and suddenly I realize that I've invested quite a lot of self-esteem in her continued good opinion of me. "I mean, I think he may have been a mercenary, working for one of the Powers."
"That would be bad." She lets go of my hands. "Robin?"
"Yes?"
"Is that why you haven't had a backup since rehab? And why you're always hanging out in public places with your back to the most solid walls?"
"Yes." I've admitted it, and now I don't know why I didn't say it before. "I'm afraid of my past. I want it to stay dead."
She stands up, leans across the table to take my hands and hold my face, then kisses me. After a moment I respond hungrily. Somehow we're standing beside the table and hugging each otherthat's a lot of contact with Kayand I'm laughing with relief as she rubs my back and holds me tight. "It's all right," she soothes, "it's all right. " Well, no it isn'tbut she's all right, and suddenly my horizons feel as if they've doubled in size. I'm not in solitary anymore, there's someone I can talk to without feeling as if I might be facing a hostile interrogation. The sense of release is enormous, and far more significant than simple sex.