Glasshouse - Charles Stross [105]
“Okay, we’re now going to take three slow steps forward. Yes, you can shuffle. I’ll tell you when to stop—easy, easy, stop!”
I stop him in the middle of an open patch of floor. I need to think. He’s breathing hoarsely inside the improvised hood, and he stinks of fear-sweat. Any moment now, he’ll realize that I can’t let him live, then he’ll be uncontrollable. I’ve got maybe twenty seconds—
“When my husband says * * * I can’t hear him,” I say conversationally. “What does that mean?”
“It means you’re infected with Curious Yellow.” He sounds oddly placid.
“You ran off a duplicate of yourself as a guard to see who was coming in here,” I tell him. “That was smart. Were you afraid I was using the A-gate?”
“Yes,” he says tersely.
“It’s immune to the strain I’m infected with, isn’t it?” I ask.
I can feel his muscles tensing. “Yes,” he says reluctantly.
“And Yourdon didn’t insist it was locked to your netlinks?” I ask, tensing as I gamble everything on the right answer.
He doesn’t give it to me verbally, but he grunts and begins to pull his hands apart and I know I’m right, but I also know I’ve got about three seconds left. So I step in close behind him and run my right hand down his chest, caressing, and he freezes when I get to his crotch. A moment of relief—he’s anatomically orthohuman, and male. I grab his balls and squeeze viciously. He jackknifes forward, speechless and gasping, almost knocking me over with the violence of it, and the bag goes flying. But that’s okay, because a moment later I grab his hair and while he’s preoccupied with the terrible breath-sucking pain, I pull his head up and run the knife blade smoothly through his carotid artery and thyroid cartilage, just below the hyoid bone.
See, the difference between me and Fiore is that I don’t enjoy killing, but I know how to do it. Whereas Fiore gets off on control fantasies and watching his score whores lynch lovers, but it didn’t occur to him to tell the assembler to restore him holding a weapon, and it took him almost twenty seconds to realize that I was going to have to kill him regardless of anything he did or said. Basically, Fiore is your bureaucrat-type killer who runs push-button experiments by remote control, while I’m—
I blank again.
THE civil war lasts two gigasecs, nearly sixty-four years by the reckoning of long-lost Urth. It’s probably still raging in some far-flung corners of human space. When the longjump network was shattered in an attempt to firewall the damage, it split the interstellar net into disjoint domains separated by lightspeed communications lag. Isolated pockets of Curious Yellow are probably still running, out beyond the liberated light cone, in the eternal darkness and cold—just as there may be outposts of free posthumanity who dropped off the net when the Republic of Is disintegrated. Redaction, the deletion of memory, is Curious Yellow’s deadliest weapon—some of those polities might have been deliberately forgotten, their proximal T-gate endpoints dropped into stars and the memories of their existence erased from everyone who used an infected A-gate. The true horror of Curious Yellow is that we have no way of knowing how much we have lost. Entire genocidal wars could have been wiped from our memories as if they never happened. Perhaps this explains the worm’s peculiar vendetta against practicing historians and archaeologists. It, or its creator, is afraid we will remember something . . .
I spend my first gigasec among the Cats being a tank. There’s very little that is human left in me once I get a clear picture of what’s going on. It’s not hard to generalize from the tales of random atrocities committed against people who specialize in the past; besides, the gigasecond of nonexistence I spent aboard Grateful for Duration is a small death in its own right—time enough for children to mature as adults, for spouses to despair, mourn, and move on. Even if by some miracle my family hasn’t been targeted for liquidation because