Analog Science Fiction and Fact 04/01/11 Page 4

  “It just won’t be Andrea Cort.”

  I had trouble believing that she was being so thick. “No, but then there won’t be Porrinyards either. There’ll be—”

  “Somebody bigger and better. Yeah, yeah, I’m not an idiot. I’ve had more than enough of that crap from you already. I think I got more than enough from the prick who used to be Harriman. But you’re forgetting something. I know the individual who thinks of herself as Andrea Cort. I lived with the individual who thinks of herself as Andrea Cort. I tried like hell to get the individual who thinks of herself as Andrea Cort to drop her guard around me. And I finally had to accept that, like it or not, being guarded and angry and suspicious and difficult were all things that made Andrea Cort what she is.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “You say you’re happy for me, but you don’t want me to change—”

  “Don’t give me that infantile, self-pitying crap.”

  This stunned me.

  She lowered her voice and spoke with even greater urgency. “Of course I want you to change. For two years I sweated blood trying to help you find your own way to change. But I want you to change without giving up who you are, and what you are has always meant being defiant about who you are. The second that you, out of all the people I’ve ever met, start talking about relinquishing your very identity like it’s a suit that no longer fits, I start looking for another agenda—something that may be a little closer to what our defendants are looking for than you may be capable of admitting to yourself.”

  My calm had vanished. My heart pounding harder than it ever had at rest, I put a dangerous chill in my voice and challenged her. “Why don’t you tell me what you think that is.”

  Bengid delivered each of the next three words with excessive precision, clipping the syllables like bombs in danger of exploding if not handled with care. “A hiding place.”

  This was outrageous. I rose from my chair, ready to slam her with the rebuttal that would reduce that ridiculous charge to kindling.

  She didn’t let me utter a syllable. “Yeah, that’s the real truth, isn’t it? All the terrible crimes you were accused of, all the bad memories you’ve spent your life running from, all the bad things you’ve done since then that you’re afraid of anybody else finding out—you’ve always had more than your share of them, haven’t you, Andrea? And now you can be part of this magical new person—just how did you put it, before? Oh, yes—this magical new person ‘carrying the weight too great to be borne by one.’”

  Now standing, I glared at her with something like hatred. “How dare you? What gives you the right—”

  She stood up so abruptly that the chair rolled backward until it slammed against the limits of its inlaid track. “I paid the entrance fee, Andrea!”

  I drew back, speechless.

  She slammed me with the full force of her anger. “For two years I lived with your black moods, your shame, your self-hatred, your rejection of anybody who tried to get close to you, the way you somehow used all that pain to stay strong. When you waltz onto this ship grinning like a vapid young girl in the first throes of puppy love and tell me that you look forward to changing who you are, you know what it reminds me of, more than anything else? It reminds me of something a therapist friend once told me, a long time ago: that when a person who’s been more than half suicidal for as long as you’ve known her suddenly shows up calm and happy and smiling, the explanation might not be that she’s suddenly gotten a handle on all her troubles. The answer might be that she’s made up her mind to go ahead and end them already.”

  The anger hadn’t fled me, not entirely; my chest still hurt from the hammering of my heart, and the sheen of sweat on my forehead still burned, less like perspiration and more like something more primordial. But I felt stricken. “Is that’s what you think? That this is suicide?”

  “No. I think that part of you wants it to be suicide.”

  Knowing how I felt inside but understanding at last why Bengid would see any mere assurances on my part as inadequate, I could only say, “It’s not like that. I swear to you, I’m sure about this. I love them.”

  “I can see that.”

  “And they love me.”

  “And you know, Andrea, honestly, I’ve sensed that too.” She turned her back to me and approached the conference center door. As it slid open, revealing the brighter light of the corridor, she turned around and stood there backlit for several seconds, making up her mind whether to go further. Her last words before she walked out the door were, “But, you know . . . if their version of love really does require you to end the person you are . . . maybe you should consider that they might not be the only ones who give a damn about you. To everybody else but them, putting an end to yourself is a seriously shitty thing to do.”

  I found the Porrinyards in the guest quarters the Negev had allocated for us. It was a VIP suite and still as snug as a marsupial’s pouch, dominated by a bed that was big enough for two only if those two were so attuned to each others’ nocturnal movements that they were able to avoid beating the crap out of one another as they slept. Many ardent civilian couples, traveling aboard ships of this class, suffered through a few days of tormented attempts at shared domestic arrangements but then elected to sleep in shifts or beg for separate rooms.

  Our own private transport, still docked in the Negev’s hangar, featured shared quarters modified to fit all three of us in comfort, and would have been much more congenial for us than the one-size-fits-all design of a vessel designed for adult human beings who, by and large, rarely slept together in groups larger than two. But some things, like refusing the hospitality of a vessel where you’ve been summoned to give your expert opinion, just aren’t done—and besides, it had never been necessary, not with the special Porrinyard breed of grace extending to their uncanny unobtrusiveness while asleep. Even tucked between them, in beds small enough to call this one expansive, I never knew they were on either side of me unless they wanted me to.

  When I found them they were lying nude above the covers, Oscin’s larger form curled to mimic Skye’s. His bare rear end may have protruded over the edge of the mattress to such an extent that only the supported parts of his body kept him from falling out of bed, and she may have allowed only a couple of millimeters of clearance between the tip of her button nose and the wall on her side, but they had left room for me: a virtual outline, defined by the negative space between his body and hers. I didn’t have to listen to know that they were breathing in unison; I’d ended many of the nights I woke from traumatic nightmares finding comfort in the shared refrain of their breath, sounding in perfect unison on opposite sides of me.

  They were, together, the best person I’d ever met. They’d saved my life twice within three days of our first meeting, and many uncounted times since then. They’d saved my sanity just as often, and given me more than I’ve ever thought I could have, not least among those many gifts a reason to look forward to waking up in the morning. Their willingness—hell, that wasn’t even the right word—eagerness, to not only tolerate the baggage I’d brought into our relationship but claim it as part of their own, to become for the rest of their lives someone who would remember what it had been like to be Andrea Cort, struck me as breathtaking—more than I’d ever asked for and certainly more than I’d ever deserved.

  There was no doubt about it: With them, I’d finally become a lucky woman.

  But it was also true that I’d only known them as the shared creature they’d become. I’d never met the young man who had become Oscin or the young woman who had become Skye, and in fact knew very little about them. I knew that they’d both hailed from a world where people had settled the upper branches of mile-high trees; that they’d been in love but not very good at being in love; that they’d fought hard and fought often and spent almost as much time fighting as they had loving. I knew that the woman had been braver and more adventurous than the man; that he had prized caution to a degree that infuriated her and prompted more than one of
their breakups.

  I knew that they’d gotten into some kind of serious legal trouble on their home world, something that had prompted their decision to indenture themselves to the Dip Corps. I knew that their decision to link had as much to do with their inability to get along as singlets as it did with the hope that, offered as a unit, they would always be posted in the same places. I finally knew that once they were together as a single mind they were as much the solitary prisoner of two skulls as any individual person is in one; that their own lovemaking amounted to athletic self-gratification and that they’d always needed to seek out others, like me, for company.

  Somehow I’d always interpreted their story as a triumph of their commitment to one another. And it could be seen that way, but was it not also the ultimate failure of that commitment? Seen another way, the boy who became Oscin had, in fact, lost the girl who became Skye; she no longer existed, except as an integral part of himself. And she had, in turn, lost him.

  In a sense, so had I. I’d never had the chance to meet that Oscin and Skye. Would I have fallen in love with either that boy or that girl? Would I have even liked them? Would I have been upset to learn of their plans to meld the boy and the girl into a new personality, larger than them both? Would I have mourned?

  In the future we were now planning, the future where there would be no separate composite personality known as Oscin-and-Skye-Porrinyard and no separate individual personality known as Andrea Cort, but instead a new composite personality as yet unknown to us—would that new person miss being three people, and then two people, who had once been loved by others outside themselves? How long would it be before that linked triad found itself seeking out someone new, a fresh soul to fill the void that only grew ever more cavernous the more the souls that defined it were shared?

  Was Bengid right?

  “Andrea?” They had lifted their heads to look at me, each sleepy expression of concern identical to the other. “Are you all right?”

  I dabbed at my eye with a thumb. “Just watching you sleep, love.”

  “Sounds fascinating. It can’t be time to get up yet.”

  “No,” I said. “We still have a few hours.”

  “Then get your clothes off and come to bed, already. You have a busy day tomorrow.”

  I might have hesitated. I was too churned up inside, too unsure of my own feelings. But that would have raised questions I was not ready to answer right now. So I complied, peeling off my severe black suit, placing it folded on the counter by the stateroom entrance, and crawling on hands and knees into the empty space between my lovers. When I was in position and comfortable, the central parenthesis in a set of three, Oscin’s pulled close behind me, and Skye’s slighter one inched backward, between them forming an embrace I could feel on both sides. Oscin kissed me on the ear, and together they said, “It’ll be all right.”

  I’ve already said that when they speak together, they split the tones and phonemes, creating a stereo effect that makes their voice seem to originate from some undefined empty space between them.

  When they were as close to me as they were now that undefined empty space their voice filled was inside me.

  On most other nights, I took comfort in that.

  The next morning our wake-up call came with summons to a meeting about unspecified but ominous-sounding new developments.

  We rushed to dress, were last to the gathering in the courtroom, and entered with Bengid and myself the two leads in a tiny small melodrama played out in avoided eye contact. The subtle thaw in a relationship years old had been replaced by something like an open wound, one that neither one of us wanted to acknowledge in front of the half-dozen legal functionaries who comprised her staff and certainly not in front of Oscin and Skye.

  I could tell that the Porrinyards sensed something was wrong. As my assistants, they knew to keep quiet in professional situations when I couldn’t share information right away, but it was almost as impossible to hide the existence of a secret now as it would be in the future, when there would no longer be any such thing as a secret between us.

  Bengid said, “It turns out that we’re down to the wire. I’ve heard from some people very high up. I can’t tell you exactly how high up, but they consider themselves important enough to quash criminal investigations for the convenience of some crony’s pet project.”

  To my eyes, the fresh-faced male staffer who asked the next question seemed young enough to be mistaken for a zygote. “Are they?”

  “They might well be,” Bengid said.

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “It might well be, but there are some big dogs behind them, people who want Harriman and the Diyamens released into their custody, to resume the work the murder of al-Afiq interrupted. I gather that if that ends up happening, the incentive will amount to a de facto amnesty. It would be an outrage, of course, but they back it with all the talk of national interest I can stand. On our side there are a few old-fashioned people who believe that murder is wrong, and understand that in this case it’s not unreasonable to take a few extra days to fashion a proper prosecution that won’t reduce open-and-shut facts to legalistic travesty. Between them they’re not exactly ordering me to cover up al-Afiq’s murder, but they are saying that if I don’t structure these charges in a manner that takes the special nature of our culprits into account, anything I do will be subject to hostile judicial review, and our killer—killers, if you prefer—will likely end up being released on what amounts to their own recognizance.”

  “They might actually get away with it,” the zygote marveled.

  Bengid’s glare would not have been out of place on one of the mythological gorgons. “Yes. Yes, Marcus, we are in danger of that. And that seems to be what our piece-of-crap criminal seems to have been counting on all along.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Unless we can form a rock-solid precedent that takes all the identity issues into account and still leaves no doubt that we’re charging those three, that one, that however-you-want-to-count-them, in the proper proportion—leaving absolutely no doubt that none of the gestalt’s component personalities are being charged too much or too little—anything we do will go up in a puff of smoke, courtesy of all the parties with a vested interest in making this damn mess go away.”

  Another of Bengid’s people, this one a young redheaded woman who looked all of twelve, raised her tremulous hand. “How much more time do we have?”

  “End of the day to declare our intentions, end of tomorrow to submit the charges.”

  There was an explosion of dismay and anger over this. Somebody said that New London was rewriting its entire Constitution. Somebody else told him he was naïve for even believing in the Constitution. A dozen other voices protested only that “they” could not do this, a weak objection on the face of it since “they” clearly were.

  Bengid commanded silence with a raised palm. “I know it stinks, people. But if nobody comes up with an answer in the next eight hours, we’ll have to file an imperfect case and watch from a distance as it falls to pieces at the first strong wind from New London. I need brilliance, people. Go.”

  Her staff filed out, murmuring. I had worked for a prosecutor as high-powered as Bengid, once upon a time, and knew exactly what was passing through their heads: dark, defiant damns of the luck that had decided to position them at the front lines of this particular no-win situation. Wherever they went from here, a humiliating failure on what the future would see as a simple case botched by incompetent prosecution would remain in their records for the rest of their careers, if not destroying their ambitions, then at least slowing their rise.

  As the primary prosecutor, Bengid had even more to lose than the rest of them. She wouldn’t look at me, but still seemed to have aged almost ten years. “Could they have planned this?”

  “It’s possible,” the Porrinyards said. “Improved space for computation means improved calculation of variables. You should try to beat me at a good game of chess, someti
me.”

  Bengid emitted a forlorn laugh. “Never learned it.”

  I was sick and tired of waiting for her to look at me. “It’s time for some truth, Lyra.”

  “What truth did you have in mind?”

  “This didn’t just happen to come up out of the blue this morning, and you didn’t just happen to call me in to finesse some fine point of legal ambiguity. The truth is, you were under pressure to drop this case from the very moment it fell in your lap, and you called me because your other options had failed and you no longer had any other choice. It had nothing to do with finding the approach that best served justice and everything to do with not losing. Am I right?”

  She shuddered. “They’re not exactly incompatible, you know.” Then she looked up, a weary resignation lowering her eyelids to half mast. “But that’s a point. You have no official standing here, Andrea. If you have no ideas, there’s no reason you have to swallow any part of this poison pill yourself. You can leave right now if you want to.”

  “Go to hell,” I said. “Just to punish you for getting in my face, I’m going to go interview your person of interest again and solve your silly little problem in record time, while you watch.”

  She stared. She blinked. She looked at the Porrinyards and then at me and something happened to all that hopelessness and frustration on her face; it just dissipated, like a black storm cloud pierced by the rays of the sun. The corners of her lips twitched. “That . . . would be damned cruel of you, Andrea.”

  Beside me, Skye Porrinyard spoke alone. “What else would you expect, Counselor Bengid? She’s always been a vindictive bitch.”