Ghost Spin (40 page)

“I didn’t realize the Drift worked like this. I thought it only went to parallel universes. Which—okay—that’s a whole other group of problems. Forget about them. But this … I mean, Boomerang’s not in another universe. It’s on the nav charts. You can fly around the Drift and get there in …”

“Seventy-two light-years, more or less.”

“So … that’s the most flagrant violation of causality I’ve ever heard of. It’s beyond flagrant. It’s ridiculous.”

“So maybe Boomerang
is
in another universe. But who cares? It works
as if
it’s in this universe. And the whole cosmology thing? Give me a break. Those guys have their heads so far up their theories they won’t let you cross the
street
without violating causality.”

Li rubbed the bridge of her nose, feeling a headache coming on. “No,” she said after a brief, pained silence. “That doesn’t get you anywhere. That doesn’t solve anything.”

“So?”

“What do you mean,
so
? It’s a serious question.”

“I’m not saying it’s not. I’m just saying it’s irrelevant. The Drift
exists
. We’ve sailed it. We’ve charted it. Is it my problem if that ruins some cosmologist’s day?”

She was right, of course. When you saw it spread out in black and white on a navigator’s map, the structure of the Drift was obvious. It was like a vast river, with currents and eddies and tidal pools. Depending on where you encountered the flood, it could suck you in, pull you downstream, spin you around, or simply spit you out on the shore a mere light-year or two away from where you’d gone in. And if the Drift really was what they said it was, then the limit of light speed was irrelevant. You weren’t traveling through the universe like a car driving down a highway. You were riding on the expansion of the universe itself, like a swimmer swept out to sea on a riptide. This was the source of Sital’s untroubled certainty. When you looked at it in practical terms, like a navigator charting a course, it was simply an ocean, no different than any of the other oceans humans had navigated in their long history.
Oceans had tides and currents. Atmospheres had jet streams. The universe had the Drift. No problem.

It was only when you tried to fit the Drift into any larger notion of reality that logic failed you and the whole house of cards came tumbling down around your ears.

“So to get to, say, Point Manifold, you’d dive in here”—Li tapped the appropriate point on the map—“and go through these two points. And that would bring you out here.” Neat trick. Twenty light-years in as many minutes.

But Sital looked doubtful. “Well, we could route the trip that way, I guess. But then we’d have to go through Wolf Tango Foxtrot.”

She tapped an entry point that was just a minuscule dot on the map, with only the thinnest scattering of navigational references. And it was indeed labeled Wolf Tango Foxtrot. WTF. Which couldn’t be anything but a joke; Navy lingo diverged widely from Peacekeeper slang, but some military acronyms were universal.

Li laughed. “Seriously? It’s called that?”

“Yeah. And for exactly the reason you think. We don’t even like to use that NavPoint. No one does. It’s got serious LGM cooties.”

Li raised her eyebrows. Little Green Men Cooties were what the Drift was all about, according to Router/​Decomposer, from the Novalis aliens to whoever had terraformed the other two as-yet-unnamed habitable planets. But still … she hadn’t expected to actually meet someone who claimed to have met them. She probed Sital’s face for incipient traces of looniness, but saw only the same stripped-down, sensible, results-oriented woman she’d always seen. Except …

“As long as you’re not going to tell me they talk to you,” she joked.

“Oh no,” Sital said blithely. “From what I’ve heard, they don’t even seem to notice us. This one guy I know almost got run over at Wolf Tango Foxtrot. Twice in one stopover. Two unknowns, bigger than any ship he’d ever seen. He said he felt like a squirrel trying to cross a highway.”

“Lovely.” Just what Li had always wanted: to be a squirrel on the intergalactic freeway. She could only judge aliens by her knowledge of humanity—and her knowledge of herself. But neither one gave her
much reason to think that actually meeting the Novalis aliens would mean anything but trouble.

“And besides,” Sital went on, warming to her subject, “
someone
must have built the Novalis Datatrap. Oh … you haven’t heard about it?” She shrugged. “I guess you haven’t been out here that long. Anyway, there’s supposed to be a giant datatrap, the size of a small planet, orbiting Novalis. Or at least sometimes it’s orbiting Novalis. It either migrates from system to system or it’s in permanent quantum superposition. It’s not on any of the standard maps, but a bunch of people have found it by accident, usually when they were running from the Navy. There’s a whole debate about whether it’s ours or someone else’s. But if it’s ours, then it was way too classified for me or Llewellyn or Okoro to know about it even before we turned pirate.”

Sital’s face made it clear how unlikely she thought that last possibility was, and Li wondered just how deep in she, Llewellyn, and Okoro had been, and whether it could possibly be a coincidence that the one stable Cohen ghost had ended up on
this
ship out of all the ships in all the ports in the multiverse.

“And what about this entry point?” Li tapped a NavPoint labeled “Yesterday.”

“Oh.” Sital cleared her throat. “I don’t even want to tell you. You’ll think I’m crazy.”

Li raised an eyebrow. “You just told me you believe in little green men, Sital. I think we’re a few klicks past crazy.”

Sital grinned. “Okay. So, we found that one ourselves. Uncharted entry point. No markers, no nothing. We bust in there hell-for-leather with a Navy destroyer on our tail, and it’s like, okay: Fish or cut bait. So we just … dove in.”

“And?”

“And just like the name says. We came out yesterday.”

Li shook her head.

“Well, not yesterday precisely. Thirty hours.”

“What?”

“The periodicity is thirty hours. You go in, and instead of putting you in the main current it spins you around like a revolving door and
spits you back out in the same place but thirty hours before your time of entry.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Not categorically. It’s only impossible in a nonspinning universe.”

Li squeezed the bridge of her nose. Around her, the normal activities of an interstellar navigation flowed on. But Li’s brain had stuttered to a halt as rational thought gave way before the Möbius-like paradox of time and memory in the Drift.

“But … even if … I mean, wouldn’t
this
universe have to be spinning in the opposite direction?”

“Yeah.” Sital laughed. “Crazy, huh?”

And crazy-making. What had Router/​Decomposer said? Don’t think about it, just plug the numbers in. As advice went, that was starting to sound pretty good to her.

THE PIT

As she rode the Duquesne Incline up the shovel-scarred pit wall that evening, Li thought about names and memory and the things you left behind when you started lying.

So is it Caitlyn or Catherine?
Dolniak had asked her. And she hadn’t known how to answer him. She still didn’t.

For the first sixteen years of her life she had been Caitlyn Perkins, a corporate-built genetic construct destined for a life of hard rock mining on a shithole Trusteeship. Then she’d pulled off the great escape—the one every construct in every mine or factory on every backwater planet in the Periphery dreamed of. She’d gotten out. And the price of the ticket had been something she was only too happy to get rid of: her memories.

She’d walked into a shantytown chop shop as a full construct with no legal right to vote, travel off-planet, or even walk off the job. And she’d walked out as a free woman named Catherine Li, her blood officially tainted with only an allowable quarter of corporate-owned genetic material.

That free woman had enlisted in the Peacekeepers. She’d lied her way through a battery of psychological exams and hard-memory backups. She hadn’t even thought about those lies at the time. They’d just been one more thing she needed to do to get where she wanted to go. She hadn’t noticed the difference after the first jump. And after the second and third jumps she’d started telling herself that she was immune
to jump amnesia and all those warnings and worries had been for nothing. Then she’d realized—was it after the eighth or ninth jump?—that she couldn’t remember her mother’s name, or her real birthday, or what her father looked like. She’d worried about it. And then she’d forgotten to worry. And then that shifting, slithering, treacherously unpredictable emptiness simply became part of who she was.

Only after many years and many jumps did she begin to truly understand the impossibility of building a life on that emptiness. But by then Cohen was there. And there was so much of him that it didn’t really matter how little of her there was.

She’d needed him. She’d craved his warmth, his strength, his unwavering conviction that she was worth bothering with. She’d craved the solidity of knowing who she was when she was with him. She’d never imagined life without him, and she still couldn’t. She didn’t know if that was love. She knew he’d deserved more from her. She’d always known that. She just didn’t have the pieces of a person that more would have to come from.

And now he was gone, and she was Caitlyn Perkins again, or whatever was left of Caitlyn. And as she crested the crumbling red dirt cliffs and got her first glimpse of the spaceport’s rust-pitted cranes and warehouses and docking gantries—so like the mining stations of Compson’s World—her stomach clenched in panic and she had a sudden trembling conviction that it was all slipping away from her.

And yet she’d told Dolniak to call her Caitlyn. And in doing so, she’d resurrected a dead girl—a person she’d been desperate to forget even before the psychtechs and memory washings. It had been an on-the-spot, nearly instantaneous decision, and when push came to shove it was the old name, unused for almost two decades, that had risen into her mouth. She’d told herself that it was merely a matter of practicality, but it was more than that.

When she thought about other copies of herself floating around in streamspace, she felt a terrible, bottomless, nauseating vertigo. She’d spent her life trying to be singular, individual, her own person rather than another in the endless ranks of Xenogen constructs. And now she’d been dragged back into being just a number and a body.

Were her other resurrections as spooked by the change as she was? Were they using the same childish tactics to stake out some little piece of private mental real estate? And how many of them were deciding to be Caitlyn instead of Catherine?

Any halfway decent psychtech would have told her to look for continuity, to lay claim to her personhood, to take ownership of Catherine Li’s memories. But somehow it was easier to cut the ties than to try to mend them. And anything was easier than this dizzying stuck-between-two-lives feeling.

So—even though she knew that the evasion was coded into her get-the-job-done-at-any-cost geneset—she had cut the ties and made herself Caitlyn. Better to go back to being the girl she barely remembered: an empty vessel into which she could pour whatever came out of this new incarnation. Catherine Li was complicated, multiple, conflicted. Caitlyn Perkins was simple and singular and … manageable.

She needed simple right now. She needed manageable. She needed to push through and get the job done. Cohen would have been furious at her. He would have told her she was ripping herself apart and asked who she expected to pick up the pieces later. And they’d been together so long, and so intimately, that she could feel his voice in her mind right down to the tone of controlled impatience that he always got when he thought she was stonewalling him. But she had an answer for that voice—the same answer she would have given Cohen had he still been alive, and the same answer she gave herself now. If she didn’t do her job on New Allegheny there wouldn’t
be
a later.

Dolniak’s house was perched Pit-side, midway up Polish Hill and just to the leeward of the Monongahela Incline. On one side the windows looked out over rain-lashed treetops. On the other side they came face-to-face with the giant girders and pulleys of the incline. His front door was cantilevered off the steep stairs that switchbacked up to the commuter stop, and while he welcomed her in and took her wet things from her, she could hear the voices and footsteps of shift workers on their way downslope to feed the insatiable maw of the Crucible.

“What’s for dinner?” she asked.

Then she walked into the tiny kitchen and smelled it. And saw the telltale vat-ration boxes littering the counter.

“No,” she said. “No, no, no, no, no. Friends don’t let friends eat vat rat. Put on your coat. We’re going grocery shopping.”

Dolniak stared at her incredulously. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m a farm boy. I’m all for real cooking. But do you seriously think you’re going to get fresh food in the Pit?”

“I do. Ever been to the UNSec PX?”

“On base? That’s where the Peacekeepers shop.”

“And anyone else who has e-currency.”

“Which sadly doesn’t include me,” he said, holding up a virgin palm that had never seen a credit chip implant.

“But it does include me. Look, we’ll go dutch. I buy, you cook. If that doesn’t work for you, we’re shit out of luck, because I can’t boil water without screwing it up.”

A slow smile spread across his face. “All right then. You want something to take the edge off before we go?”

She glanced at the stuff on the counter. “No. I must be getting old or something, but honestly you couldn’t pay me enough to eat that shit.”

“That’s what I like about you,” Dolniak said, grabbing his coat and following her out the door. “You’re so polite.”

The PX was deluxe, as all PXs are when the diplomats and administrators roll into town. Fresh produce flown in by jumpship or trucked down from the far-flung farms of the Monongahela Uplands. A lot of it was local, in fact. But, as Dolniak pointed out, that didn’t mean the locals could afford it.