“Go where behind his back?” Li asked. “Why didn’t she just buy it on her own credit if she wanted it so much?”
Cohen blinked, momentarily at a loss. “Right,” he said. “Um, we’ll discuss women’s rights and sexism when we have that talk about anti-Semitism, shall we?” He looked suspiciously at her. “Unless you’re pulling my leg.”
Li grinned. “Easy target.”
“Not nice, my dear,” Cohen said. But his smile took the sting out of it, and Roland’s long-lashed eyes sparkled with laughter.
This was one of those nights when Cohen was all there, Li realized. Really on. As always at these times, she felt she was at the blazing heart of a sun, basking in the heat of the AI’s personality, unable to remember the doubts and the shadows.
“Well, finish the story,” she said. She pulled out a cigarette and leaned in for Cohen to light it. “And make sure someone gets shot soon. You expect me to stay awake, you’d better play to the cheap seats.”
Cohen’s smile widened. “You’re in fine form tonight. So where was I? Ah, yes. It’s not clear whether the queen asked first or the cardinal offered first. But in the end, he agreed to buy the necklace for her on the understanding that she would repay him, covertly of course, with tax money.
“The rest of the story is brief and sordid. The upshot of it was that before the queen even got a chance to wear the infamous necklace it was stolen.”
“By who?”
“By whom, my love. No one knows. No one ever found out. But the die was already cast, even before the court case and the scandal sheets. For the cardinal, it was the end of everything. He lost his fortune, his credibility, and, worst of all, the patronage of his king. All for a necklace that the queen never got to wear and no one could pay him for.”
Li waited for Cohen to go on, but he didn’t. “So what’s your point?” she asked finally.
“Helen has asked you to produce something for her. Sharifi’s dataset, maybe. Maybe something else, something she thinks may fall into her hands once she has the data. If she’s asking you, it can only be because she can’t ask the General Assembly—or worse, because she’s already asked and gotten the wrong answer. Be careful what you pay for her little bauble. And make sure you’re not the one caught out in the cold when the bill comes due.”
Li felt her carefree mood slipping away. She dropped her head into her hands and scrubbed at her face with numb, cold fingers. “You’re telling me to steer clear of something I can’t see,” she said. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“You can’t,” Cohen said. He sounded particularly gentle; but maybe it was just the timbre of Roland’s young voice she was hearing. “Just don’t wait until you hear the surf on the rocks to start turning the ship, that’s all. In the meantime, find out who the players are, what they want—and how far they’ll go to get it.”
“That’s your advice?” she said, head still in her hands. “I could have gotten more out of a damn fortune cookie!”
“You could always resign,” Cohen said softly.
Li took her hands from her face and looked up at him. “Quit, you mean.” She felt a flush rising in her cheeks. “I don’t quit.”
Cohen put a hand over one of hers, held it there lightly. “I’m not saying you should,” he told her. “Just that you can, if things get bad. I’ll help. It’s there for the asking. Anything.”
Anything. Meaning money, of course. And taking it would make her no different than any of his other hangers-on.
“I’ve got it taken care of, if it comes to that,” she said awkwardly—and lying through her teeth, too. “And there’s other jobs out there. Security. Planetary militia. But… thanks, I guess.”
They sat for a moment, he with his hand still set lightly on hers, not quite looking at each other.
“You come here much?” Li asked, slipping her hand out from under his and scanning the room around them.
“Occasionally.”
“It’s ridiculous, you know. Everyone here’s ridiculous.”
“I know.”
“I guess you’re going to tell me that’s why you like it. Or… what was it? That I lack an existential sense of the absurd?”
He smiled. “Would I say such a thing?”
“You just enjoy watching people make fools of themselves, don’t you?” She spoke jokingly, but she suddenly felt a prickling urge to pick a fight with him.
He leaned back, responding to the feeling behind her words rather than the words themselves. “I make a fool of myself ten times a minute,” he said. “Fifty times a minute when you’re in the room. It’s called being alive, Catherine.”
“Right. You’re just the average guy, going about your average life. Just with a few billion times the processing speed.”
“Something like that.”
She snorted. “And this is how you use it? Forgive me if I’m not impressed.”
He shrugged. “I can’t help wanting to be around people. It’s the way I’m written.”
“So change it. Change your code. I would. I’d get shut of Nguyen and Sharifi and all this pathetic bullshit in a second if I could.”
“You just say that because you know you can’t. Now stop fussing and listen to this song. It’s a good one.”
The singer was still onstage, finishing out a set with a bittersweet country song. It was a good song, the kind of song that could have been written yesterday or three hundred years ago. “She write that?” Li asked, nodding across the room toward the spotlit figure.
“It was written before I was born.”
She listened closer, caught a stray word or two. “What’s a Pontchartrain?”
“The Pontchartrain. It’s a lake on the Mississippi, that used to flow through New Orleans.”
“Before the floods, you mean.”
“Before that, even. The river—the whole Mississippi Delta actually—shifted. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent, oh, a century dredging and channeling and building levees. Defiance of nature, on a megalomaniacal scale. People wrote books and printed articles and whole theses about it. The river finally had its way, of course. It jumped its banks right around the time the oceans really started rising. Shifted the delta halfway across the Gulf of Texas. I wish I could make you feel what it was to be in New Orleans, stranded in the middle of a man-made desert while the ice caps were melting and we were watching floods in New York and Paris on the news every night. It was… unforgettable.”
“I didn’t think Earth was ever wired for streamspace. They didn’t even have shunts back then, did they?”
“No. Just a kind of primitive version of VR. But it was enough. I have my own memories, and other people’s. Over time it becomes harder and harder to separate them. Which may not be all bad.” He smiled. “I’m probably the only person still alive who remembers driving across the Pontchartrain in a convertible.”
Li grinned. “With a beautiful blonde, no doubt.”
Cohen smiled back, but it was the sad-sweet smile of a man lost in an old memory. “With Hyacinthe’s widow. The first woman I ever fell in love with.”
Li waited, wanting to hear more but not comfortable pushing.
“I know,” he said, answering a question that hadn’t even occurred to her. “I suppose from a puritanical sort of perspective, you could say she was my mother.”
“Well, it’s not like you invented that particular complex.”
“It wasn’t like that, though. I am Hyacinthe, his very self, in ways that have nothing to do with being a child, or a student, or an invention. Besides.” Another sweet and solemn smile. “The heart is complicated, whether it’s made of flesh or circuitry. It doesn’t always love the way you think it should. Or the people you think it should.”