The Secret Sharer

17.

For a few days everything seemed back to normal. We sped onward toward Cul-de-Sac. I went through the round of my regular tasks, however meaningless they seemed to me. Most of them did. I had not yet achieved any sense that the Sword of Orion was under my command in anything but the most hypothetical way. Still, I did what I had to do.

No one spoke of the missing matrix within my hearing. On those rare occasions when I encountered some other member of the crew while I moved about the ship, I could tell by the hooded look of his eyes that I was still under suspicion. But they had no proof. The matrix was no longer in any way evident on board. The ship’s intelligences were unable to find the slightest trace of its presence.

I was alone, and oh! it was a painful business for me.

I suppose that once you have tasted that kind of round-the-clock communion, that sort of perpetual jacking, you are never the same again. I don’t know: there is no real information available on cases of possession by free matrix, only shipboard folklore, scarcely to be taken seriously. All I can judge by is my own misery now that Vox was actually gone. She was only a half-grown girl, a wild coltish thing, unstable, unformed; and yet, and yet, she had lived within me and we had come toward one another to construct the deepest sort of sharing, what was almost a kind of marriage. You could call it that.

After five or six days I knew I had to see her again. Whatever the risks.

I accessed the virtuality and sent a signal into it that I was coming in. There was no reply; and for one terrible moment I feared the worst, that in the mysterious workings of the virtuality she had somehow been engulfed and destroyed. But that was not the case. I stepped through the glowing pink-edged field of light that was the gateway to the virtuality, and instantly I felt her near me, clinging tight, trembling with joy.

She held back, though, from entering me. She wanted me to tell her it was safe. I beckoned her in; and then came that sharp warm moment I remembered so well, as she slipped down into my neural network and we became one.

“I can only stay a little while,” I said. “It’s still very chancy for me to be with you.”

“Oh, Adam, Adam, it’s been so awful for me in here—”

“I know. I can imagine.”

“Are they still looking for me?”

“I think they’re starting to put you out of their minds,” I said. And we both laughed at the play on words that that phrase implied.

I didn’t dare remain more than a few minutes. I had only wanted to touch souls with her briefly, to reassure myself that she was all right and to ease the pain of separation. But it was irregular for a captain to enter a virtuality at all. To stay in one for any length of time exposed me to real risk of detection.

But my next visit was longer, and the one after that longer still. We were like furtive lovers meeting in a dark forest for hasty delicious trysts. Hidden there in that not-quite-real outstructure of the ship we would join our two selves and whisper together with urgent intensity until I felt it was time for me to leave. She would always try to keep me longer; but her resistance to my departure was never great, nor did she ever suggest accompanying me back into the stable sector of the ship. She had come to understand that the only place we could meet was in the virtuality.

We were nearing the vicinity of Cul-de-Sac now. Soon we would go to worldward and the shoreships would travel out to meet us, so that we could download the cargo that was meant for them. It was time to begin considering the problem of what would happen to Vox when we reached our destination.

That was something I was unwilling to face. However I tried, I could not force myself to confront the difficulties that I knew lay just ahead.

But she could.

“We must be getting close to Cul-de-Sac now,” she said.

“We’ll be there soon, yes.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. How I’m going to deal with that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a lost soul,” she said. “Literally. There’s no way I can come to life again.”

“I don’t under—”

“Adam, don’t you see?” she cried fiercely. “I can’t just float down to Cul-de-Sac and grab myself a body and put myself on the roster of colonists. And you can’t possibly smuggle me down there while nobody’s looking. The first time anyone ran an inventory check, or did passport control, I’d be dead. No, the only way I can get there is to be neatly packed up again in my original storage circuit. And even if I could figure out how to get back into that, I’d be simply handing myself over for punishment or even eradication. I’m listed as missing on the manifest, right? And I’m wanted for causing the death of that passenger. Now I turn up again, in my storage circuit. You think they’ll just download me nicely to Cul-de-Sac and give me the body that’s waiting for me there? Not very likely. Not likely that I’ll ever get out of that circuit alive, is it, once I go back in? Assuming I could go back in in the first place. I don’t know how a storage circuit is operated, do you? And there’s nobody you can ask.”

“What are you trying to say, Vox?”

“I’m not trying to say anything. I’m saying it. I have to leave the ship on my own and disappear.”

“No. You can’t do that!”

“Sure I can. It’ll be just like starwalking. I can go anywhere I please. Right through the skin of the ship, out into heaven. And keep on going.”

“To Cul-de-Sac?”

“You’re being stupid,” she said. “Not to Cul-de-Sac, no. Not to anywhere. That’s all over for me, the idea of getting a new body. I have no legal existence any more. I’ve messed myself up. All right: I admit it. I’ll take what’s coming to me. It won’t be so bad, Adam. I’ll go starwalking. Outward and outward and outward, forever and ever.”

“You mustn’t,” I said. “Stay here with me.”

“Where? In this empty storage unit out here?”

“No,” I told her. “Within me. The way we are right now. The way we were before.”

“How long do you think we could carry that off?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.

“Every time you have to jack into the machinery I’ll have to hide myself down deep,” she said. “And I can’t guarantee that I’ll go deep enough, or that I’ll stay down there long enough. Sooner or later they’ll notice me. They’ll find me. They’ll eradicate me and they’ll throw you out of the Service, or maybe they’ll eradicate you too. No, Adam. It couldn’t possibly work. And I’m not going to destroy you with me. I’ve done enough harm to you already.”

“Vox—”

“No. This is how it has to be.”