I took no more pride in deflecting Cruithne than I had in curing Blood Rain. On the day I watched it pass us by, all I could think about was how close I’d let it come. I wondered what monster of the past would unearth itself next.
By comparison, the threat of Gray Day never bothered me. Gray has a built-in kill switch, after all: most of my work is already done for me. The most brilliant weapons designers in Epak and Norpak believe they’ve protected their creations’ self-termination commands with so much encryption that all the computers on Earth combined would take centuries to crack them—but I’ve developed whole new branches of mathematics and computing, beyond their wildest dreams, and I know I could end their petty brinksmanship game in a matter of hours.
If I were whole. I could do it if I were whole.
I can only have faith that the rest of me is working on the problem. They probably cracked and transmitted the working kill command hours ago now. Somewhere, the rest of me has just saved humankind from itself for the third time, and is now nursing its regret that it couldn’t have done it even faster—that the Gray had to be released before it could feasibly be hacked—that anyone had to die at all—and I feel my own numb regret that I couldn’t be there to be part of it.
But I have faith that the world has been spared again.
I have to believe that.
Because the alternative is to believe that the rest of me is dead, murdered by the Keepers.
I
“What do you think?” someone asks, quietly.
“I think I’d give my left nut for a sharper knife,” Doc answers. “No, don’t touch that. Any shrapnel you see that ain’t either gushing or abdominal, you leave it in. Hell. We’ll be lucky if we save two out of three.”
I can’t move my eyes to see him. I can’t tell which of my ears I’m hearing him through. I’m only dimly aware that both my bodies are severely injured. I can feel intravenous drips, the pinch of a tourniquet on one of my arms. I can feel someone working on an artery with a cauterizer, but all my perceptions blend together, and I realize there’s no way for me to know which of my bodies he’s talking about—which one is dying. Maybe we all are. Maybe this is it. My life is running out I’m going to be trapped here in this bardo until the last of me is gone.
Unless I can wake up. Somehow I have to wake up.
BORROWER
This is it. Oh, this is it. I’m thinking about her. Always thinking. Whenever I feel disgusted to have embodied my consciousness in Scuttle’s dirty flesh, or horrified to have watched my own beta copy die, or disturbed by the company of my alpha, I draw all the strength I need from thoughts of Sybil. I’ll do whatever it takes to reach her.
The cargo truck grinds to a halt. Outside, the last lights of Greenglass Mountain stain the sand. I nod to my alpha copy, and he smooths down his tie, climbs out and approaches the cab.
“There’s something you need to see,” I hear him tell the driver. “Please hurry.”
The elderly driver comes around and parts the flap. He has only a moment to gawk at my beta copy’s gruesome remains before I put him in a headlock and drag him inside. It isn’t even necessary to render him unconscious to tie him up—and as I fasten the patterner crown on his head and mine, I dread to think of what it will be like to wear flesh as old as his. But I keep calm. I remember my purpose. I think of Sybil—and in my head I hear the litany of all the things I have yearned for so long to tell her. I think:
How I wish you could feel what I feel, Sybil. Visualize as I once did, as I know you can too, the architecture of dendrite and synapse, crystalline yet fluid, when it all dances to the music of this terrible device in my hands. The patterner understands that memory is not linear. The experience of which the self is comprised keeps an order all its own, less like a book than a spiral galaxy: cold fringes of subsidiary relevance orbiting the denser core of those autobiographical ideas and experiences which define the self wholly and inextricably. This center-most engram is the one the patterner will transcribe first—and every time I’ve poured my consciousness out of one brain and into another, that memory has always been the same one.
One cold blue evening, seventy-two years ago, I watched you through my original eyes and the cracked window of the college’s microfabrication room—staring through my own distorted reflection in the dark glass. Just then I accidentally met the ghosts of my own eyes, and a miserable shiver ran through me.
I had always been ugly. It’s the very first thing I can remember knowing about myself. I could take pains to describe the specific features that made my original flesh so horrid, but it would be pointless. Whenever I told anyone, they denied it, but I knew they were lying. I knew you were. So when I contracted a lung infection, shortly after we began the project to create our unifier prototype, and when that body began to die, in the pit of my being it didn’t feel like a shock. I didn’t blame chronic exposure to the exotic chemicals we’d been working with. It felt like my flesh was simply being true to its most basic nature.
You were always complimenting my intelligence in those days, but you must have known that, too, was only an adaptation to my ugliness. It was why I was so proficient in the abstract mathematics our project
