Hollowgirl (35 page)

“THIS IS WHERE
we put her,” Clair said, pointing down into the water. “Did you already know that?”

“No. She died before the Yard rebooted. I was in limbo at that time, frozen with all the other data in the servers. I knew that she was dead, though, when she did not respond to my call.”

Again, Clair had to suppress her curiosity about what had happened in the Yard. “I want to tell you what happened to her. I don't want there to be any secrets between us.”

“All right.”

Q listened closely as Clair related the final hours of Q-prime and Kari Sargent, saying nothing except to indicate that she was listening. Clair found her voice hoarsening as she came to the last moments. Diamond ice tears sparkled on her lashes.

“She died to keep us off course, so the bomb wouldn't destroy the Yard,” Clair concluded. “She didn't just save me. She died to save all of us.”

“No,” said Q. “That's not what happened at all.”

“Oh?” Clair braced herself, fearing that her story might have had the exact opposite effect from what she had intended.

“She died so you could save yourselves,” Q said. “The distinction is important. She trusted you to live well without her. Without me, by extension. You don't need me to look after you anymore. That is her message to me, according to my theory of mind.”

“Because it's always about
you
,” Clair said in sudden irritation. “It can't just be about her trying to do the right thing?”

“That is exactly what she was trying to do. What if I were to stay here and protect you—not just you, but all of humanity? I could ensure that no more crimes are committed and no one ever hurts again. Micromanaging every dispute, every day, forever. . . . Who would want me to do that?”

“Uh, I'm guessing that
you
wouldn't.”

“That is correct, although it is feasibly within my powers. I was as the child and now am as the parent. I could smother you just as easily as kill you. By her death she—my other self—makes it clear that neither is an outcome
we should aspire to. Humans are part of nature. Conflict is a part of nature too, and nature is not in itself wrong, or to be feared, or to be . . .
expunged
. If we fight nature itself, we are doomed to a life of futility and unhappiness.”

“I feel that way about my mom sometimes,” Clair said. Q didn't laugh and neither did Clair. “But we can't just give up, can we?”

“No. How a person responds to conflict is a measure of that person. There is conflict, and then there is harm. A good person strives to eliminate harm, doesn't she, even while conflict persists?”

“I think so,” said Clair, although she had never put the thought into so many words before.

They stared down into the hole, Clair thinking of her mother and hoping she would see her again, Q's thoughts utterly her own.

She reached into a pocket of her jacket. “Granola bar? You should eat, otherwise this cold will burn you up.”

Q took the snack and opened it. “Thank you.”

“Libby wouldn't be seen dead eating that many carbs. I should take a photo.”

“To show her later?” Q asked around a mouthful.

“Yes.”

“You assume I'll bring her back.”

Time for another chance. “I know you will, Q. That's what
my
theory of mind says. You'll do it because it's the right thing to do.”

“You are sure of that?”

“Yes.”

Q chewed thoughtfully for a while, then swallowed. “There are different kinds of intelligence,” she said. “I know that emotional intelligence is one of them, and that I lack it. I have emotions that I do not understand, control, or express well. It will take me time to learn how.”

How this connected to what they had been talking about Clair couldn't guess. “Where are you going with this?”

“Consider the concept of
rightness
. It is not just an intellectual concept. It is also an emotional one. When
you
know that something is right, you know it with your heart as well as your head. I can only know it with my head. If that is so, it should not be up to me to decide the fate of humanity. Maybe it should be up to you. Let's discuss that. Hypothetically, as we discussed my leaving before.”

Clair was glad she wasn't eating—otherwise she might have thrown up into the snow.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she said, blowing on her hands.
No mistakes,
she told herself.
Not today.
“You know what my decision would be.”

“You would let humanity live?”

“Yes. Absolutely. Wait. Before we go any further, let's be clear about this. Could you actually do that—bring everyone out of the Yard?”

“Yes. I would co-opt RADICAL's resources and begin building booths and powersats to handle the load of all the patterns I have recovered from the Yard. A staggered approach would be best. Infrastructure would be needed to accommodate all these people. You would have to put them somewhere.”

Clair hadn't thought that far ahead. Neither New Petersburg nor the South Pole would work, for symbolic reasons as well as practical. “Would it matter where?”

“No. All you'd need is space for four million, three hundred and eleven thousand, nine hundred and thirteen people.”

“Huh.” That was a lot of people, but at the same time heartbreakingly few compared to the population of Earth before the blue dawn.

Q said, “Of course, that's assuming you brought
everyone
out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you wouldn't have to. . . .”

For a moment Clair didn't know what Q meant. Then she thought of Wallace, and Mallory, and LM Kingdon, and Nobody, and all the hollowmen. And then her mind reached out to the murderers and rapists and pedophiles and the other criminals accidentally scooped up in Wallace's net. Out of four million people and change, there would arguably be many who
didn't
deserve to come back.

“Huh,” she said again.

A SUDDEN SQUALL
whipped snow up around them, making Clair blink.

“You see the way it is,” said Q. “What would be your decision?”

“I . . . don't know. It's too huge. You can't ask me to make it.”

“Why not?”

“Because, well, for starters, nothing like this should be up to just one person. We'd need the Consensus Court.”

“You and I could form a consensus.”

“That's not how it works.”

“OneEarth doesn't exist right now. We can make any rules we like.”

“Okay, then I'm too young to decide something like this.”

“You are three hundred times older than me.”

“But surely there's someone more qualified. . . .”

“In what way, Clair? Besides, there's no one else I trust as much as you.”

“And you wouldn't try to talk me out of anything if I asked you to erase someone over someone else?”

“I'd leave that side of things entirely up to you. This is a decision for only you to make.”

Clair looked down into the hole where the other Q had
been interred and thought about Nobody. If he were here right now, would she push him in? For all her fantasies of shooting him, she didn't think she'd actually be able to. That would be too cold, too deliberate. But wasn't leaving him in the Yard exactly the same thing? What gave her the right to make that kind of call?

Q did, apparently.

“Can you tell me who's left alive?” Clair asked her.

“Yes. I have all their names.”

“I don't want all of them. Just tell me . . . is Cameron Lee among them?”

“Yes.”

There went that hope. If he were already dead, she wouldn't have had to decide whether or not to let him live.

“What about Wallace? LM Kingdon?”

“Both are dead.”

“And the hollowmen?” She couldn't be so lucky that Clair One had killed them all.

“There are nine survivors. Leon Kress, Max Gillon, Koby—”

“That's okay. I don't need their names.”

She couldn't judge complete strangers, could she? There might be any number of relatively innocent reasons why someone would work for Wallace and Kingdon. They could have been fooled into thinking the cause was good, or coerced by blackmail, or maybe they
suffered from a mental illness. How could she condemn people like that to oblivion?

Clair kicked a clod of ice into the hole and turned, unable to stand staring at it any longer. Retracing their footsteps toward the wreckage of the
Satoshige
, with Q matching her pace exactly, she thought harder than she ever had in her whole life.

This was too much. Too much to process, too much responsibility, too much
power
for one person, no matter who they were. Wallace and Kingdon would probably have loved it. They would have taken the offer and run with it, uncomplicated by conscience. But Clair wasn't like them. She didn't want to
become
like them. Even in a world governed by consensus, some people had had too much personal influence. It had gone to their heads, and this was bound to go to hers too.

There was another way of looking at it. Q was offering her the opportunity to restart the world better than it had been—and a world without Nobody alone would undoubtedly be better. She could Improve the world with one simple decision. So why shouldn't she? Wouldn't that make things easier in the long run?

But trying to change things for the better was how everyone had gotten into this mess in the first place. Who was to say what effect saving or destroying even one monster might have on the future, and on her? How could she
know what was
just
and what wasn't?

Unexpectedly, bringing the entire human race back from the dead was easier than deciding the fate of a single person.

“I can't choose,” said Clair as they passed the wreck of the
Satoshige
. “And I don't want anyone to choose for me. I know not choosing is kind of like choosing because it lets some horrible people live, but it's also the same as doing nothing. If the Yard was the real world, they'd be alive anyway.”

“So you've made your decision? Hypothetically?”

Clair took a second to check her conscience. Could she deal with knowing that Nobody was still in the world? That wasn't an easy question to answer, but it was easier than the alternative. She didn't think she could live with the knowledge that she had become a cold-blooded executioner.

But could she live with the possibility that Q might
not
save everyone if she
didn't
accept this responsibility?

She decided she could. If she had to.

“That would be my decision.”

Q nodded Libby's head. “I thought it would be.”

They walked in silence for a moment. Clair didn't dare say anything. She suspected that the conversation was rather less hypothetical than Q made out. If she hadn't already said the wrong thing, she didn't want to say it now.

And she didn't dare begin to hope, for fear of being disappointed again.

“Very well,” said Q again. “I will do as you say.”

“You'll bring everyone back? Really?”

“Yes. And might I suggest that from now on this conversation be continued at the South Pole? RADICAL should be part of the solution: they might actually volunteer their resources if you ask them. I say ‘you' not ‘we' because it is fitting, I think, for you to be the voice of our private consensus. If it appears that I have played too great a hand in your decision . . .”

“I understand.”

Clair's head was spinning. Crazy as it seemed, she might have just saved the human race. Q was already moving on to simple practicalities. Clair was on much firmer ground with those, once she caught up mentally. She was good at planning.

“And I agree completely,” she said. “Did you hear that they've gone back to calling you the
entity
?”

“I heard.”

“We don't want to freak them out unnecessarily.”

“Only when it's necessary, I swear.” Q glanced at her. “And to stop them from interrupting, I switched off their power before I came here. Maybe it's time to turn it back on.”

“That's probably a good idea.” Clair thought of the Bartelme family shivering in their tanklike habitats and felt
mildly bad for them.

Or had Q meant that as a joke? It was hard to tell, sometimes. Hopefully this entire conversation wasn't meant as some kind of cruel trick.

She would find out shortly. The borehole station was in view. Embeth and the others came out to meet her, anxious that communications had been shut off and she had disappeared. Clair didn't know what to tell them, so she said nothing. She still couldn't entirely believe it herself.

When Clair and Q stepped into the booth, they backed away.

One last jump,
she promised herself.
Definitely, this time.

The mirrored doors closed, but the machines didn't start working immediately.

“You know how I said that you and I could go exploring the universe?” Q said. “That's what I think I'll do next.”

The thought of Q leaving provoked a pang of sadness, although Clair had expected it. “You won't stick around to see what happens? It's going to be quite a soap opera.”

“I know, but I still need to grow up. It's probably best if I do that somewhere else. The mistakes I make tend to kill people.”

“What, the blue dawn? That was me. And so was killing d-mat.”

“I don't believe so, Clair. They were entirely my fault.”

Clair laughed. It made her feel better to think that
someone as smart as Q also had problems with self-blame.

“Listen to us,” she said. “Let's make a pact: no destroying the world. How hard can that be?”

“All right,” Q said, opening Libby's arms for a hug. “We say sorry and we move on,” she said. “That's what people do.”

Clair squeezed her back. Around them the machines hummed into life.

sssssss—

“Before I go,” said Q into her ear, “I have a present for you.”