She tried to access realspace.
Nothing.
Code.
Nothing.
She’d been bagged, warehoused, shunted into virtual deadspace. She closed her eyes and rubbed her face, thinking. When she opened them again, she was no longer on-station.
She stood in a perfectly square, perfectly empty room. Blank white walls. Blank floors and ceilings. Nominal squares of windows opening on an eternity of white nothingness. Her heartbeat hammered in the silence like a kettledrum. She focused on a corner where floor met wall in order to stave off vertigo and waited, counting her heartbeats.
A door opened. One moment she was staring at a blank wall. The next someone had stepped into the room with her. But when she tried to recapture the moment of entry, it was missing, skipped over as if there had been a bad splice in her optical feed.
The new person in the room was small, dark, slender. It took Li a few heartbeats to focus on him after the long blank whiteness. When she did, she saw coltish, gangling legs below striped shorts. A red-and-black football jersey. Dark hair. Olive skin.
“Cohen?”
“Sshhhh!” he whispered.
He had nothing on his feet but tall striped socks with bulky shin guards poking out over their tops; his old-fashioned soccer cleats were tied together by the shoelaces and thrown over one bony shoulder. He circled the room, stopping several times to peer at sections of wall that looked, to Li’s eyes, completely unremarkable. He walked up one wall and sat down cross-legged a few feet below the ceiling. “Well, here we are,” he said.
“We? I don’t know who the hell you are, except that you look like Cohen. Which proves nothing.”
He grinned. “Looks don’t always deceive, my dear. Even mine.”
“Prove it.”
“How?”
“Tell me something.”
“Like what?” he said, sounding for all the world like the ten-year-old he appeared to be.
“Something no one else would know.”
He wrapped his arms around his legs and put his sharp little chin on his knees, thinking. “Right,” he said. “Well, you’re two centimeters shorter than you tell people you are.”
“You could pull that out of my transport files.”
“And you’re an evil-tempered beast in the morning.”
She snorted. “As opposed to the rest of the time?”
“Good point,” he said, and laughed.
He peered owlishly at her, rubbing at a fresh scab on his knee. “There’s always your deepest, darkest, awfulest secret.”
She froze. She tried for a laugh but couldn’t quite get there. “Which one?”
“That I love you.”
She looked up to find him watching her as if she were a suspicious package that might explode without warning. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said after a brief awkward silence. “You don’t have to look like you’re ready to chew your leg off to get away from me every time I say it.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Cohen.”
“It’s no exaggeration. Trust me.” He shot her a resentful look from under dark eyelashes. “And it’s ridiculous. It’s not like you’re some fainting virgin, for Heaven’s sake.”
“Now you just want to sleep with me? You’ve lowered your sights. Last time I was supposed to be wife number seven. Or was it eight? Christ, Cohen, you get married like normal people buy puppies!”
“Normal humans, you mean.” He gave her a long naked defenseless look. “That’s what it’s all about for you, isn’t it? Trying to pass. Getting the signed, sealed, and delivered human stamp of approval.” He laughed bitterly. “I’d really like to get inside your head and know what you think when you look in the mirror every morning.”
“You’ve got me all wrong, Cohen.”
“Do I? Then what are you so afraid of?”
“Nothing,” she snapped. “I’m just not interested in being the next stop on your tourist trip through the human psyche.”
He looked away and muttered something she couldn’t quite hear.
“What did you say?”
“I said that’s exceptionally nasty, even for you.”
The room suddenly felt too small, too hot. Li turned away and began checking the walls, trying to find some chink in them.
“Look,” she said after a long, uncomfortable pause. “I didn’t mean—”
“Forget it. It was stupid of me.”
“So what’s with the kid?” Li asked when the white silence had become too thickly oppressive to stand any longer.
“Ah.” Cohen undid the laces of his sneakers and started putting them back on his sock-clad feet. “I thought you knew that. This is Hyacinthe.”
“I thought you were Hyacinthe.”
“He’s one of the things I am. He’s my original, bedrock interface program. And, of course, the man who invented me.”
Li had a sudden urge to laugh. “As a ten-year-old?”
“Actually he was fourteen when this was done. It’s old video footage. He used it to create the original VR interface. I guess you could say it was my first ’face. I tend to fall back on it when I’m pushing the limits of my processing capacity. As at present, unfortunately.”
“Can’t we get out?” Li paced the room’s perimeter again.
“No. And sit down before you drive me incurably mad. You’re safe as long as I’m here.”
But just as he said the words—as if someone were playing a nasty joke on them—he was gone again.
Li was back in the dark place.
This time she knew she was underground, in the mine. But that was all she knew. Water dripped from an unseen ceiling, splashed in an unseen pool. A damp, chill air current wafted up from some underground river too far off for her to hear.
She cut to infrared. No good. She was instream; she saw only what the person controlling the simulation wanted her to see.
“Light a lamp,” Cohen’s voice whispered from somewhere near her left ear.
Her hand reached out to where it knew the lamp was. Picked it up. Primed it. But her fingers fumbled with the wick, as if they had become sudden strangers to this familiar task. As she adjusted the flame, she brushed the inside of her hand against the hot barrel of the oil reservoir and heard the sizzle of burning skin.
“Shit!” she said, putting her hand to her mouth instinctively, sucking at the blistered crescent of flesh.
“Sssh,” Cohen said. “You’re fine. Tell me what you see.”
She held up the lamp and saw an uneven floor of hewn rock running away in all directions. Pillars of light marched in long ranks from one end of the space to the other, gleaming like ivory in the lamplight. The ceiling arched overhead, supported by undulating veins that fanned from one Bose-Einstein node to another in an infinitely repeating, fractally complex spider’s web.
“It’s the glory hole,” she told Cohen. “Sharifi’s glory hole.”
But it was the glory hole intact, unburnt and unflooded and full of softly whirring and clicking equipment. The glory hole before the fire. A generator hummed in one corner. Optical cables snaked across the floor between thickets of diagnostic machinery. Crooked teeth of crystal jutted from floor and ceiling.
The mouths of the earth, Li thought. Wasn’t that what Compson had called them?
“Is this where the hijacker took you?” Cohen asked.
She raised the lamp and turned in a slow circle. To her left a steepening upslope followed the line of the vein, echoing the mined-out chamber on the level above. To her right, the portable virusteel ladder led to the chamber and drift above, and to the long slippery stairs out of the Trinidad.
“Is this it?” Cohen whispered—and she realized for the first time that the whisper was not behind her but inside her. “Is it your memory or someone else’s?”