Hollowgirl (33 page)

Clair Two

THE TWO RONNIES
stared at each other and nodded in satisfaction. A flurry of sudden glitches swirled through the chamber—half-heard voices, smoky shapes stirring in the corners of Clair's eyes.

Reality flexed again, and then there were three Ronnies. The glitches worsened.

Before Clair could open her mouth to ask what was going on, a bump appeared in her infield.

“The suits are basically walking fabbers,” Ronnie One said. “That's what Jesse told us, remember? They can copy anything in their memories.”

“Well,
we're
all in the suits' memories,” said Ronnie Two, “and if making more than one of us creates glitches, and glitches screw with Q's mind, then I say we should go for it.”

“Hack attached,” said Ronnie Three. “Take it away.”

Three Ronnies became four, then six, then ten—and then Libby was joining in, multiplying herself all over the room. The glitches multiplied with them, sending shock waves through the very fabric of the Yard.

Clair's mouth was hanging open but nothing came out of it. She was standing in a sudden crowd of people,
Ronnies and Libbys and then Zeps and Evan Bartelmes as well. The meme spread fast, and so did the copies, because each of the copies could in turn copy itself: from one Libby could spring two, then from two four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Soon the chamber was full and the copies were spilling out through the building and to the concourse below.

As fast as they multiplied, the glitches multiplied too. Clair couldn't tell which Libby was real and which a strange phantom from her memory.

“Come on, it'll be jazzy.”

“You're Libby's finisher.”

“Remember that song we danced to at the crashlander ball?”

“‘Stay Beautiful.'”

A rising babble of voices deafened her, most of them glitches. Her infield quickly filled with bumps. Everyone was urging her to join in.

But she didn't. She had been copied too many times already. And she didn't want to think about what it might be doing to Q.

“We should be talking, not fighting!” she tried to shout over the racket.

The only person who listened was Wallace, who vigorously shook his head.

“No,” he said. “This is good. Q has to be stopped. If we can break her hold on the Yard, we can gain access to the
exit and seal it shut for good.”

“I'll never do that. Not with everyone inside.”

“You have to! If she gets out, who knows what else she could do?”

Clair didn't want to admit that this fear had occurred to her, too. If Q had seemed irritated before, heaven help them all if she was angry now.

“And I suppose you're offering to help?”

“I wasn't planning on dying today, Clair.”

Jesse pressed between them, his expression furious.

“Tell them to stop,” Jesse said.

“I did. They won't listen to me.”

“You mean this wasn't your idea?”

“Of course not! You can't just copy people like this.”

He relented. “I'm sorry. I thought—”

“Doesn't matter.” She shook her head. “I'll try again.”

Clair did, but no one was paying attention to her. She was just one of hundreds of voices, perhaps thousands, a greater percentage of them belonging to Libby than anyone else. Libby was too good at this. She liked being in the spotlight.

What she never wanted Libby to learn was that a spotlight could also be a target.

A series of piercing screams resounded through the chamber. One of the Libbys closest to Clair dropped to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Clair reached for her and was struck from behind by another
Libby. Both were dead, killed by forces unknown.

The mass of duplicates began to crowd into Clair as pressure waves of panic swept from wall to wall.

“What's happening?” asked Jesse, twisting his head from side to side, eyes wide with fright. “What's killing them?”

Clair took hold of him and held him tight lest they be separated forever.

A cull,
she thought. That was what this was. Q wasn't passively watching while the very fabric of the Yard came under assault. She was responding in kind, attacking both the copies and the psychology of the originals. Clair knew how it felt to watch yourself die. But this only made the copies come faster.

“Don't kill them, please!” she bumped to Q, in the vain hope that her message would get through the glitches.

To her amazement, she did receive a spoken reply, but it was choppy and difficult to understand.

“The yar ebreaki ngtheru les.”

“They're just trying to stop you from killing them. They're frightened!”

“With good reason, wouldn't you say?” said Wallace, who was standing too close, as though simple proximity to Clair might make him safer because Q would never target her.

The screams were mounting, and so was the number of bodies underfoot. Clair was buffeted from side to side.
Glitches sent strange images and sensory impressions in waves, until it felt like everything was crumbling around her. The race was on to see what would overwhelm her first.

“You get it?”

“You've been watching old movies again.”

“You'd never hate somewhere imaginary.”

“You can see me, right?”

“Clair! This way, quick!” Jesse was tugging her through the maddened throng. She followed blindly, unable to see for visions from her past and present all tangled up together—and not just her past and present, but Clair One's, too, and even some of Clair Three's. Everything she had done and felt was still stored in the Yard, and the storage tanks were bursting open.

Wallace followed. Clair couldn't stop him. She was finding it hard enough to stay upright. Jesse tripped and was knocked to the ground by one of the many Evan Bartelmes' elbows. Clair helped him to his feet and they pressed on. Somewhere along the way, Wallace was subsumed by the crowd with a scream and didn't come back up again.

“Where are you taking me?” Clair shouted in Jesse's ear.

“The exit.”

“Why? It doesn't work!”

“So Ant Wallace said. You don't have to believe him.”

“But Evan—”

“He said a lot of things too. Believe anything you want.
Knowledge is real, isn't it?”

She was sure it didn't work that way when it came to glitch singularities that led to the real world, but what use was arguing? It was almost impossible to move now. The pile of bodies on the floor was up to her knees. She was clambering over them, trying not to look at their slack faces, into their empty eyes. Her breath came and went in sobbing shudders that wracked her whole body. This was worse than the mound of dead Nobodys on the seastead. These were her
friends
.

A great fear rose up in her. If they took much longer, the arched doorway would be covered and they wouldn't be able to get in.

There it was. They forced their way through the struggling mass of arms and legs and tumbled down the other side, into the exit. The tunnel stretched ahead of them, empty apart from glitches that made it seem crowded with ghosts.

“One and Two.”

“All right, but who's One?”

“Neither's Clair, but the principle's the same.”

“That makes her Clair Three.”

Clair tried a final time to make her friends see reason.

“Ronnie, Libby, will you stop this, please? It's only going to break the Yard and then we'll all die!”

If anyone heard her, their reply was lost in an endless scream.

“Q, I don't care what you do. Just make it end!”

Her infield filled with bumps, all saying the same letter over and over again:

           
qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq

“Come on,” said Jesse, pulling Clair into a thicket of random memories and shades.

She braced herself for the end of the world, but it didn't come. Not then. Combining her and the exit wasn't the disaster RADICAL had feared it might be.

The real disaster was still unfolding outside.

“Whatever happens,” Jesse said, “we'll always have the Mystery Caves.”

She did remember, but it took her a moment to realize what he meant. That was where the two of them—
this
Clair and
this
Jesse—had first kissed. What happened to the others didn't matter. This was about them, and they were together.

“I love you,” she said.

Cheeks wet with tears, she pulled his head down till his lips met hers. Q and the Yard were being overloaded and there was nothing they could do about it. Hand in hand they stood in the entrance of a corridor that curved on and on, endlessly for all she could tell. She wept, but she had Jesse, and they were—

Clair Three

CLAIR'S STOMACH WAS
in her throat as the
Satoshige
dropped out of the sky. Its instruments told her that they were still flying, not falling, but that wasn't remotely how it felt. The icy surface of Lake Baikal came up at them with frightening speed.

“Q, you have to unlock the rudder,” Embeth shouted. “Otherwise we'll crash!”

“Q?” said Clair, adding her voice to the pleas of the pilot. “Can you hear me?”

From outside the
Satoshige
came nothing but the sound of rushing wind. It had been bumpy during their descent, as Embeth had predicted. One particularly bad patch had nearly sent Clair falling over the side of the bridge that no longer had a rail. Only the quick hand of one of the crew members had saved her. It was entirely possible—

Don't think it,
Clair told herself.

But maybe—

But don't.

If they hit the lake too hard and they all died, she didn't want her last thought to be
that
.

“Brace yourselves,” said Embeth.

Clair didn't need reminding. The
Satoshige
's landing lights threw back a bizarre landscape of frozen waves and shattered ice sheets ahead and below. They were blurring by at a terrifying pace. The balloon wasn't capable of great speed in the air, but it certainly seemed fast when they were coming down out of control.

Devin had assured them that they weren't going to crack through the surface of the lake and plunge into its icy depths. She hoped he knew what he was talking about. Drowning was not much better than being battered to death on the rough surface of the lake.

The
Satoshige
shuddered like a living creature knowing it was about to die.

A relatively level stretch appeared ahead. Embeth raised her left hand, defiantly crossing two fingers. Clair understood. There was nothing she or anyone could do to change course without setting off the bomb.

An alarm went off.

“Time to ditch it!” Clair called. Behind her, the three crew members who had volunteered for the task opened
a hatch, letting in a howl of icy wind. They bent down and picked up the bunker buster and, after a count of two, tossed it outside. It tumbled silently into the darkness.

That was the easy part.

When the
Satoshige
touched down, Clair needed both hands and both feet desperately braced against a stanchion to stop herself from being flung about the inside of the bridge. There was a deafening crash, then sudden silence as the airship bounced, followed by another sustained crash as it came back down again, and stayed down this time, dragging violently across the ice. Clair, eyes tightly shut in terror, was wrenched from side to side as the gondola acted as a brake, dragging the balloon over onto its side. For one brief but terrifying second it seemed as though the giant head might roll over and smash them onto the ice, but then with a tearing sound the balloon burst, and the gondola crashed back down in the wake of the deflating air sack.

Deafened by high-pitched shrieks of crushing metal and plastic, Clair only slowly realized that a desperate wail was coming from her own throat. She locked her teeth together and turned it into a moan. Then a deeper boom sounded from behind them—the bunker buster, beginning its pointless journey down into the depths, far off target. What primitive sensors it possessed would fail to find the Yard, Clair had been assured, so even if they died right now that job was done.

The
Satoshige
juddered across the frozen lake, pulled along by wind alone.

“Anchors!” called Embeth in a shaky voice. Clair relaxed her death grip and staggered back to deploy the makeshift grapnels they had fashioned. Devin had joked that Sandler Jones would do the job just as well. Clair, although sorely tempted, had decided to let the ringleader sleep unharmed. She would figure out what to do with him later.

Rope unspooled into the ice-spattered night and then snapped straight with a whip crack. The anchors dug into the ice, dragging the
Satoshige
to an unsteady halt, leaving the floor canted at an awkward angle. Clair's footing slipped, and she dropped a meter before finding something more secure to take her weight. When she was stable, she took stock of the situation.

The interior of the airship was a mess, but no one seemed critically injured. From outside came the howling of wind mixed with a loud flapping sound. The ragged remains of the balloon were like the wings of a giant bird, straining hopelessly to take off again.

Clair slid down the sloping floor to the open rear hatch and looked out across the scarred surface of the lake. By the few remaining navigation lights of the
Satoshige
, it looked bleak, hopeless, and very cold. A wide furrow stretched behind them, pointing in a straight line across the lake. There was no sign of any fractures.

There was no sign of Q, no matter how desperately she called.

“I'm going looking for her,” she said to Embeth, her teeth chattering now with more than just the cold.

“Take the compass and a flashlight. We'll stay and put things in order. If I find anything here, I'll let you know.”

Clair nodded. She trusted Embeth completely. No one else could have gotten her here in one piece. If she had wanted to betray Clair, she would've done so days earlier.

But she knew Embeth would find nothing, and that no amount of trust could fill the gaping hole in her chest. Q would never have let her crash had she been able to prevent it.

Putting on every warm item of clothing she had and tucking her head low out of the wind, Clair headed into the night, following the path of the fallen
Satoshige
across ice as solid as stone.

The crater left by the bunker buster was surprisingly small, a soot-edged hole barely two yards across. Clair skirted it, wary of the black water roiling in its depths. All around her she could hear the ice flexing and fracturing, strange squeaks and cracks that were sometimes as loud as gunshots. It was eerie. At any moment, she expected a giant insect to rise up over the frozen waves and snatch her up in its jaws. As far as waking nightmares went, it was tamer than many she'd had lately.

The drag mark left by the
Satoshige
had stopped not long before the crater. Using the direction of the former as a guide and the compass to keep her on course, she headed on into the night, sweeping the ground ahead of her with the torch.

“All quiet on the western front,” said Devin. “By which I mean there's nothing coming out of the Yard.”

She forced herself to talk, although she didn't want to. “So what's new?”

“I mean,
absolutely
nothing. Before, even when no one was talking, the channel was still there. It was open but empty, if that makes sense. Now there's not even that anymore. It's like everything's . . . closed up shop for good.”

Clair shook her head, knowing he couldn't see the gesture but needing to make a physical denial anyway.

“I can't think about that right now.” The ice was slippery and with snow as powdery and treacherous as ash. Her shoes were soaked and feet hurt. How much farther?

Devin was silent for a minute as she trudged on.

“You might also like to know that we've taken a more detailed inventory of the borehole station,” he said. “There's a booth. Nothing fancy, but it's there. Once the powersat breeder arrives, we can try to boot it up.”

“How long?” she asked.

“Eight hours.”

“Great.” Where would she go? If the Yard was closed and the world was dead . . . “As long as you can turn the
central heating on, I'll be happy.”

“Already done. It has enough battery power for a week. I'll turn on the lights so the others can find it. Won't take them longer than an hour to get there.”

“Home sweet home,” she said. Thinking,
Maybe literally.

Another silence, during which she traversed a treacherous patch with slabs of ice like crazy paving.

“What are you going to do with Sandler?”

“I don't
know
,” she snapped. “I haven't thought about it. I haven't thought about anything. Will you just let me do this?”

“Sure. Sorry. I thought you might need the company.”

“I do, but you don't need to say anything.”

He let her trudge on in silence.

Fifteen minutes later, a shape that wasn't ice or snow appeared in the beam of the flashlight.

Kari Sargent's body was unmoving and cold. She lay with one arm bent behind her back and her legs splayed, eyes closed and a peaceful expression on her face. Clair couldn't tell if the fall or the cold had killed her, but either way she was dead, and Q had died with her. There was no Air anymore to hold Q, not in the real world: just one frail human body that had fallen too far.

Clair pressed her face to Kari's chest and wept. For Q. And for Sargent, the last of her kind on Earth, who would have singlehandedly brought the peacekeeper
corps back from the dead. Or perhaps not singlehandedly: fighting lawbreakers might have been a fine career for Clair 7.0, if only they'd had the chance to do it together. But now it would never be. Kari and Q were dead, the Yard was silent, and nothing could ever be worse than this.

Clair wept until the cold started to hurt. Then she called Embeth to come meet her.

The pilot and one of the crew members improvised a sled from the wreckage of the
Satoshige
. Together, they brought the body back and wrapped it in a shroud made from the fabric of the balloon. Then they retraced their steps to the hole made by the bunker buster. The dark water was already beginning to freeze over.

They arranged the body and stood in a circle around the hole.

“You were a good friend,” Clair said. “Both of you. I wish I could think of a quote. . . .”

But her throat had frozen tight, her brain with it, and all she could do was nod.
Do it.

Embeth bent down and slid the body across the ice. It slipped through the hole and vanished from sight.

Clair went back to the
Satoshige
with the others, grateful for the darkness and the hood covering her head so she could cry in private. Her apparently never-ending supply of tears froze on her cheeks, and she wiped them away
every minute or so, wondering if she might weep forever, for Kari Sargent and Q, for Jesse and her other self, and for everyone else who would never see the weak sun that grudgingly eased over the horizon.

Hope had come to nothing. Plans were cold comfort this time.

Her tears dried up at last. A day of trudging back and forth between the borehole station and the wreckage lay ahead of them. At least the exercise would keep them warm. The temperature was well below freezing and, judging by the bank of clouds moving in from the west, wasn't likely to get much warmer any time that day.

“You can talk now,” she said to Devin.

“There's not much to tell you. Mom's doing what she can from this end, but it's really a waiting game from here on. We don't know if the channel has closed for good or if the entire Yard has crashed. It may just be a bug, but it could be a catastrophic failure that no one can ever fix.”

“Are you sure it wasn't the bunker buster?”

“The Yard shut down well before that thing went off. So it has to be something on the inside. If it is fixable, whatever it is, Mom-as-Dad will be working on it, and she won't stop at the first hurdle. Mom says she was a lot more driven when she was a he, if you can imagine it. That was one reason why she changed: too stressful, she says, being a man. The Yard is probably like paradise for the old her. She's probably got everyone wired up into a giant
superhuman brain ready to take over the world when she gets out.”

“I hope you're joking.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Clair thought about that.

“Do you ever get the feeling old people don't really understand how much danger we're in?” she said. “They either want to use technology to change everything, or they want to ban it forever. They're never anywhere in the middle.”

“Says the Abstainer.”

“Yes, but I'm not stupid. I know that d-mat isn't evil. It's just a tool. And tools don't kill people. People kill people. Tools won't save people either. Nothing will save us but . . . us.”

“Mom said, ‘Dream on.'”

Clair sighed a cloud of white mist. “That's the problem, isn't it? Instead of dreaming about what d-mat can do, why not dream about what
we
can do? Isn't that the better dream?”

“You have to sleep in order to dream,” said Devin. “Maybe that's the part these old guys forget. Sleeping means letting go. And they don't want to.”

“What does your mom say to that?”

“She just laughed. Hysterically. I don't think she realizes how profound we're being.” A slight pause; then Devin said, “Mom asked me to clarify that she's not laughing at
us, but at the thought that she wants to run the world. The new her, not the old. Too much responsibility, she says.”

“Honestly?”

“Yes. Mom never lies, but she said she used to. That's another reason why she changed. RADICAL has mellowed a lot since she was a dude, she says, and I believe her. I mean, she's still crazy, but at least she's willing to share. With me, with Trevin—and with everyone else, as long as they're not telling us we're monsters or anything. You're not saying that, are you?”

“No. We're just different.”

“That's a good thing. Diversity increases the human race's chance of survival, Mom said. The more of it, the better for all of us.”

Clair nodded, and despite her circumstances actually felt a little more hopeful. She was stuck on a frozen lake, where if she wasn't careful she might actually freeze to death. Her hopes of saving the world appeared to be dashed. But at least Eve Bartelme wasn't going to fight her for control of the ashes.