Spin State - Chris Moriarty [178]
“You don’t see the same thing every time?”
“As time passes, I become more and more inclined to sacrifice retrievability for . . . other values. Surprising what surfaces. As if what I bring in with me sets the direction. Most AIs, including some of my own associates, find it ridiculously inefficient. But then”—he smiled complacently—“I’m not most AIs.”
She looked around. How far did this go on? And what, or who, was lurking in all those other memory palaces?
“What’s bothering you?”
She hesitated. “It seems so . . . human.”
“Well, in many ways Hyacinthe is human.”
“You talk about him as if he weren’t you.”
“He’s not all of me. But he is the first.”
“So he controls . . . the others?”
Cohen made a hairsplitting face. “Controls is too strong a word. I’d say he . . . mediates. I know you think I’m an inveterate navel-gazer, but to tell you the truth, I’ve never really thought much about it. Do you think about how you walk down the street? Or how your stomach works?”
“It’s just that I can’t square it with . . .”
“With what made you almost fall off the front porch before?” She thought he was waiting for her to smile at the front-porch quip, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “Do you have to reconcile it?”
She had no answer to that.
“If it’s any comfort to you, most of the sentients in my shared net have the same reaction. They can’t get any perspective on the system without my mediating. It doesn’t mean I control them. They have their own ideas and opinions. But they’re guests here. And as it’s my house, they follow my rules. Mostly.”
Li looked at him uncertainly, hesitating between the many questions jostling in her mind and not finding any she was willing to ask just yet. She wandered down the rows of drawers, opening a few of them, with Cohen always just behind her, watching, commenting. Slowly, without quite admitting to herself where she was going, she worked her way back toward the garden.
It was a curious garden, wild, heavy with the smell of earth and roses. The near end was well kept up, planted in neatly tended French beds of herbs and flowers, almost formal compared to Cohen’s realspace jungle. But at the far end the ground and even parts of the palace itself had been overrun by a fierce sprawling thicket of wild roses.
She eyed the thorny tangle over the heads of the neatly pruned dahlia beds. It looked as if some feral and not entirely friendly presence had established a beachhead in that corner of the garden and was only biding its time before it flung out its thorny suckers to swallow the whole cloister. “You ought to rip those out,” she said. “They’re taking over everything.”
“I know.” Cohen smiled wryly. “They’re weeds, really. And they have the most vicious thorns. The thing is, I like them.”
Li shrugged. “It’s your garden.”
“So it is,” Cohen said. He strolled down toward the wild end of the garden and settled himself on a low bench already half-engulfed by a particularly predatory moss rose.
Li circled the garden, poking into the boxes and cabinets that lined the cloister. She found memories of half a dozen people she knew: Nguyen; Kolodny; a few AIs she’d met on Corps missions. Even Sharifi. But not the one person she was looking for.
“Can’t find it?” Cohen asked. She looked over and saw he was laughing at her.
“Who says I’m looking for anything?”
“Have a rose,” he said.
He plucked a moss-petaled bloom off the bramble behind him and held it out to her. She took it from him—but as she wrapped her fingers around the stem it pricked her.
“Christ!” She looked at her finger and saw blood welling up from half a dozen punctures.
“It’s a real rose,” Cohen said. He bent and handed it to her again, holding it gingerly. “Real roses have thorns. That’s why they smell so sweet.”
She put it to her nose, smelling it. And realized that the rose itself was a memory. A memory of her.
There she was six years ago. Younger, thinner, but her. This was not Li as she knew herself, though; it was