Tony Daniel (9 page)

This is going to be tricky. I get ready.

Come and get me, triangles. Here I am just a girl. Come and eat me.

It zooms in. I stretch out my hands.

You are interfering with Hierarchy business. You will cease or be end-use-eventuated. You will—

We touch.

Instantly I reconstitute the Bendy water’s grist, tell it what I want it to do. The momentum of the triangles knocks me over, and I roll along the deck under its weight. Something in my wrist snaps, but I ignore that pain. Blood on my lips from where I have bitten my tongue. I have a bad habit of sticking it out when I am concentrating.

The clump of triangles finishes clobbering me, and it falls into the river. Oh, too bad, triangles. The river grist that I recoded tells all the river water what to do. Regular water is over eight pounds a gallon, but the water in the Bendy is thicker and more forceful than that. And it knows how to crush. It is mean water, and it wants to get things, and now I have told it how. I have put a little bit of me into the Bendy, and the water knows something that I know.

It knows never to cease. Never, never, never.

The triangle clump bobs for an instant before the whole river turns on it. Folds over it. Sucks it down. Applies all the weight of water twenty feet deep, many miles long. What looks like a waterspout rises above where the triangle clump fell, but this is actually a piledriver, a gelled column climbing up on itself. It collapses downward like a shoe coming down on a roach.

There is buzzing, furious buzzing, wet wings that won’t dry because it isn’t quite water that has gotten onto them, and it won’t quite shake off.

There is a deep-down explosion under us, and the hoy rocks. Again I’m thrown onto the deck, and I hold tight, hold tight. I don’t want to fall into that water right now. I stand up and look.

Bits of triangles float to the surface. The river quickly turns them back under.

“I think I got it,” I call to the others.

“Jill,” says TB. “Come here and show me you are still alive.”

I jump down through the pilot hole, and he hugs and kisses me. He kisses me right on the mouth, and for once I sense that he is not thinking about Alethea at all when he touches me. It feels very, very good.

“Oh your poor back,” says Molly Index. She looks pretty distraught and fairly useless. But at least she warned us. That was a good thing.

“It’s just a scratch,” I say. “And I took care of the poison.”

“You just took out a Met sweep enforcer,” Andre Sud says. “I think that was one of the special sweepers made for riot work, too.”

“What was that thing doing here?”

“Looking for Ben,” says Molly Index. “There’s more where that came from. Amés will send more.”

“I will kill them all if I have to.”

Everybody looks at me, and everyone is quiet for a moment, even Bob.

“I believe you, Jill,” Andre Sud finally says. “But it’s time to go.”

TB is sitting down at the table now. Nobody is piloting the boat, but we are drifting in midcurrent, and it should be all right for now.

“Go?” TB says. “I’m not going anywhere. They will not use me to make war. I’ll kill myself first. And I won’t mess it up this time.”

“If you stay here, they’ll catch you,” Andre Sud says.

“You’ve come to Amés’s attention,” Molly Index says. “I’m sorry, Ben.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“We have to get out of the Met,” Andre Sud says. “We have to get to the outer system.”

“
They’ll
use me, too. They’re not as bad as Amés, but nobody’s going to turn me into a weapon. I don’t make fortunes for soldiers.”

“If we can get to Triton, we might be okay,” Andre Sud replies. “I have a certain pull on Triton. I know the weatherman there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Trust me. It’s a good thing. The weatherman is the military commander, and he is very important on Triton. Also, he’s a friend of mine.”

“There is one thing I’d like to know,” says TB. “How in hell would we get to Triton from here?”

Bob stands up abruptly. He’s been rummaging around in TB’s larder while everybody else was talking. I saw him at it, but I knew he wasn’t going to find anything he would want.

“Why didn’t you say you wanted to go Out-ways?” he said. “All we got to do is follow the Bendy around to Makepeace Century’s place in the gas swamps.”

“Who’s that?”

“I thought you knew her, TB. She’s that witch that lives in the ditch’s aunt. I guess you’d call her a smuggler. Remember the old Seventy-Five from last year that you got so drunk on?”

“I remember,” TB says.

“Well, she’s where I got that from,” says Bob. “She’s got a lot of cats, too, if you want one.”

We head down the Bendy, and I keep a lookout for more of those enforcers, but I guess I killed the one they sent this time. I guess they thought one was enough. I can’t help but think about where I am going. I can’t help but think about leaving the Carbuncle. There’s a part of me that has never been outside, and none of me has ever traveled into the outer system. Stray code couldn’t go there. You had to pass through empty space. There weren’t any cables out past Jupiter.

“I thought you understood why I’m here,” TB says. “I can’t go.”

“You can’t go even to save your life, Ben?”

“It wouldn’t matter that I saved my life. If there is anything left of Alethea, I have to find her.”

“What about the war?”

“I can’t think about that.”

“You
have
to think about it.”

“Who says?
God? God is a bastard mushroom sprung from a pollution of blood.
” TB shakes his head sadly. “That was always my favorite koan in seminary—and the truest one.”

“So it’s all over?” Andre Sud says. “He’s going to catch you.”

“I’ll hide from them.”

“Don’t you understand, Ben? He’s taking over all the grist. After he does that, there won’t be anyplace to hide because Amés will
be
the Met.”

“I have to try to save her.”

The solution is obvious to me, but I guess they don’t see it yet. They keep forgetting I am not really sixteen. That in some ways, I’m a lot older than all of them.

You could say that it is the way that TB made me, that it is written in my code. You might even say that TB has somehow reached back from the future and made this so, made this the way things have to be. You could talk about fate and quantum mechanics.

All these things are true, but the truest thing of all is that I am free. The world has bent and squeezed me, and torn away every part of me that is not free. Freedom is all that I am.

And what I do, I do because I love TB and not for any other reason.

“Ah!” I moan. “My wrist hurts. I think it’s broken, TB.”

He looks at me, stricken.

“Oh I’m sorry, little one,” he says. “All this talking, and you’re standing there hurt.”

He reaches over. I put out my arm. In the moment of touching, he realizes what I am doing, but it is too late. I have studied him for too long and know the taste of his pellicle. I know how to get inside him. I am his daughter, after all. Flesh of his flesh.

And I am fast. So very fast. That’s why he wanted me around in the first place. I am a scrap of code that has been running from security for two hundred years. I am a projection of his innermost longings now come to life. I am a woman, and he is the man that made me. I know what makes TB tick.

“I’ll look for her,” I say to him. “I won’t give up until I find her.”

“No, Jill—” But it is too late for TB. I have caught him by surprise, and he hasn’t had time to see what I am up to.

“TB, don’t you see what I am?”

“Jill, you can’t—”

“I’m
you
, TB. I’m your love for her. Sometime in the future you have reached back into the past and made me. Now. So that the future can be different.”

He will understand one day, but now there is no time. I code his grist into a repeating loop and set the counter to a high number. I get into his head and work his dendrites down to sleep. Then, with my other hand, I whack him on the head. Only hard enough to knock him the rest of the way out.

TB crumples to the floor, but I catch him before he can bang into anything. Andre Sud helps me lay him gently down.

“He’ll be out for two days,” I say. “That should give you enough time to get him off the Carbuncle.”

I stand looking down at TB, at his softly breathing form. What have I done? I have betrayed the one who means the most to me in all creation.

“He’s going to be really hungry when he wakes up,” I say.

Andre Sud’s hand on my shoulder. “You saved his life, Jill,” he says. “Or he saved his own. He saved it the moment he saved
yours
.”

“I won’t give her up,” I say. “I have to stay so he can go with you and still have hope.”

Andre Sud stands with his hand on me a little longer. His voice sounds as if it comes from a long way off even though he is right next to me. “Destiny’s a brutal old hag,” he says. “I’d rather believe in nothing.”

“It isn’t destiny,” I reply. “It’s love.”

“There are moments when freedom and determinism are the same thing. There are people who are both at the same time . . .” Andre Sud looks at me, shakes his head, then rubs his eyes. It is as if he’s seeing a new me standing where I am standing. “It is probably essential that you find Alethea, Jill. She must be somewhere in the Met. I think Ben knows that. He would know if she were truly dead. She needs to forgive him, or not forgive him. Healing Ben and ending the war are the same thing . . . but we can’t think about it that way.”

“I care about TB. The war can go to hell.”

“Yes,” Andre Sud says, “The war can go to hell.”

After a while, I go up on deck to keep a watch out for more pursuit. Molly Index comes with me. We sit together for many hours. She doesn’t tell me anything about TB or Alethea, but instead she talks to me about what it was like growing up a human being. Then she tells me how glorious it was when she spread out into the grist and could see so far.

“I could see all the way around the sun,” Molly Index says. “I don’t know if I want to live now that I’ve lost that. I don’t know
how
I can live as just a
person
again.”

“Even when you are less than a person,” I tell her, “you still want to live.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Besides, Andre Sud wants to have sex with you. I can smell it on him.”

“Yes,” Molly Index says. “So can I.”

“Will you let him?”

“When the time comes.”

“What is it like?” I say.

“You mean with Andre?”

“What is it like?”

Molly Index touches me. I feel the grist of her pellicle against mine, and for a moment I draw back, but then I let it in, let it speak.

Her grist shows me what it is like to make love.

It is like being able to see all the way around the sun.

The next day, Molly Index is the last to say good-bye to me as Makepeace Century’s ship gets ready to go. Makepeace Century looks like Gladys if Gladys didn’t live in a ditch. She’s been trying for years to get Bob to come aboard as ship musician, and that is the price for taking them to Triton—a year of his service. I get the feeling she’s sort of sweet on Bob. For a moment, I wonder just who
he
is that a ship’s captain should be so concerned with him. But Bob agrees to go. He does it for TB.

TB is so deep asleep he is not even dreaming. I don’t dare touch him for fear of breaking my spell. I don’t dare tell him good-bye.

There is a thin place in the Carbuncle here, and they will travel down through it to where the ship is moored on the outer skin.

I only watch as they carry him away. I only cry until I can’t see him anymore.

Then they are gone. I wipe the tears off my nose. I never have had time for much of that kind of thing.

So what will I do now? I will take the Bendy River all the way around the Carbuncle. I’ll find a likely place to sink the hoy. I will set the ferrets free. Bob made me promise to look after his dumb ferret, Bomi, and show her how to stay alive without him.

And after that?

I’ll start looking for Alethea. Like Andre Sud said, she must be here somewhere. And if she is not in the Carbuncle, then I will leave this place and search for her in the Met. If anybody can find her there, I can. I will find her.

There is a lot I have to do, and now I’ve been thinking that I need help. Pretty soon Amés is going to be running all the grist, and all the code will answer to him. But there’s some code he can’t get to. Maybe some of those ferrets will want to stick around. Also, I think it’s time I went back to the mulmyard.

It’s time I made peace with those rats.

Then Amés had better watch out if he tries to stop me from finding her.

We will bite him.