Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [219]
‘Told you,’ says Ax. ‘They knew each other for years.’
Dee has known, at some level, that Reid is one of the originals, that he came physically from Earth, but it’s somehow still a shock to see what is – assuming the picture’s antiquity and provenance – visual evidence. More pages flip past. When the sheaf of pages is thin under her thumb, there’s a sharp, professional photograph that stops her thoughts. It has rough, scissored edges, a caption below and a scrawled attribution: Dumbarton Gazette 04/06/77 – some local zine, apparently. She stares at it, points at it dumbly. Behind her shoulder, Ax’s breath hisses in past his teeth.
A wedding-portrait of a couple: formal clothes, informal pose, almost cheek-to-cheek. The man, she sees now that the continuity has been established, is the younger self of the old man at the end of the book; is Wilde; is the man she saw yesterday. The woman’s face, above frilled shoulders and high collar in lace-trimmed white voile, is her own.
‘Let me guess,’ Ax says heavily. ‘That’s the guy who walked into the Malley Mile?’
‘Yes,’ she breathes. ‘No wonder he looked like he recognised me. My body is a clone all right – a clone of his wife!’
‘Creepy,’ says Ax. He peers closer at the caption. ‘Annette, that was her name.’
Dee can’t look at the picture any longer, and doesn’t need to: this image will stay in her mind forever unless she deletes it. It’s creepy, all right, and disturbing in a deeper sense: this distant twin, this woman whose physical ghost Dee is, looks happy in a way Dee has never been, with a personality Dee knows is different from her own. Only the physical body, and the underlying temperament which, Dee knows, is likewise genetic, are the same. She lets the last lot of pages fall over the picture, and stares unseeing at the title on the first page:
Jonathan Wilde, 1953–2046: A Critical Life
by Eon Talgarth
Ax is pacing the room, heedless of Dee’s angst, talking excitedly. Dee has to run the first few seconds past her again before she catches up: ‘So we have a puzzle,’ he’s been saying. ‘A couple of weeks ago, Wilde sees you on Reid’s screen. He gives no sign of recognition, but fires off an instructionset to get you loading up information, maybe with the intention of waking you up, maybe not. Yesterday, Wilde walks in, apparently having re-juved in the meantime, sees you and freaks out.’
Dee shakes her head.
‘The guy in the pub wasn’t a re-juve of the man I saw on the screen.’
Ax frowns. ‘You sound pretty sure of that.’
‘The re-juve doesn’t change the fact that you’ve lived longer. It always shows. Not on a picture, perhaps, but when you see someone move and speak it’s obvious.’ She smiles. ‘Don’t you find?’
‘Haven’t seen enough re-juves,’ Ax says. ‘It’s not a common procedure – most people stabilise at what they fancy is their best.’ He laughs. ‘Sometimes there’s a fashion for ageing, but it never lasts.’
‘I’ll tell you this,’ Dee says. ‘The Wilde I saw two weeks ago had lived a hell of a lot longer than the Wilde I saw last night.’
‘OK, assume there’s two of him. That’s no more of a mystery than there being even one of him, because he shouldn’t be here at all. He wasn’t in the crew, or the gangs.’ He flashes her a feral grin. ‘So Reid says, or at least the lists do. The company roll. I’ve checked. But like I said, people say they see him. And now, you have proof. He’s back!’
He picks up again the picture that Dee made. She can see his hands are shaking. He lights a cigarette after a couple of attempts, and stares at nothing for a while. His facial expression slowly changes, in a way that makes Dee think of how he must have got his names: it’s hard, and sharp, and…terminal.
‘Do you know what this means?’ he says.
Dee compresses her lips, shakes her head.
‘It means he’s back from the dead,’ Ax says. ‘It means everything’s going to change. It means all bets are off.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Dee