Tony Daniel by Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War Page B

anything he would want.
    “Why didn’t you say you wanted to go Out-ways?” he said. “All we got to do is follow the Bendy around to Makepeace Century’s place in the gas swamps.”
    “Who’s that?”
    “I thought you knew her, TB. She’s that witch that lives in the ditch’s aunt. I guess you’d call her a smuggler. Remember the old Seventy-Five from last year that you got so drunk on?”
    “I remember,” TB says.
    “Well, she’s where I got that from,” says Bob. “She’s got a lot of cats, too, if you want one.”
    We head down the Bendy, and I keep a lookout for more of those enforcers, but I guess I killed the one they sent this time. I guess they thought one was enough. I can’t help but think about where I am going. I can’t help but think about leaving the Carbuncle. There’s a part of me that has never been outside, and none of me has ever traveled into the outer system. Stray code couldn’t go there. You had to pass through empty space. There weren’t any cables out past Jupiter.
    “I thought you understood why I’m here,” TB says. “I can’t go.”
    “You can’t go even to save your life, Ben?”
    “It wouldn’t matter that I saved my life. If there is anything left of Alethea, I have to find her.”
    “What about the war?”
    “I can’t think about that.”
    “You have to think about it.”
    “Who says? God? God is a bastard mushroom sprung from a pollution of blood. ” TB shakes his head sadly. “That was always my favorite koan in seminary—and the truest one.”
    “So it’s all over?” Andre Sud says. “He’s going to catch you.”
    “I’ll hide from them.”
    “Don’t you understand, Ben? He’s taking over all the grist. After he does that, there won’t be anyplace to hide because Amés will be the Met.”
    “I have to try to save her.”
    The solution is obvious to me, but I guess they don’t see it yet. They keep forgetting I am not really sixteen. That in some ways, I’m a lot older than all of them.
    You could say that it is the way that TB made me, that it is written in my code. You might even say that TB has somehow reached back from the future and made this so, made this the way things have to be. You could talk about fate and quantum mechanics.
    All these things are true, but the truest thing of all is that I am free. The world has bent and squeezed me, and torn away every part of me that is not free. Freedom is all that I am.
    And what I do, I do because I love TB and not for any other reason.
    “Ah!” I moan. “My wrist hurts. I think it’s broken, TB.”
    He looks at me, stricken.
    “Oh I’m sorry, little one,” he says. “All this talking, and you’re standing there hurt.”
    He reaches over. I put out my arm. In the moment of touching, he realizes what I am doing, but it is too late. I have studied him for too long and know the taste of his pellicle. I know how to get inside him. I am his daughter, after all. Flesh of his flesh.
    And I am fast. So very fast. That’s why he wanted me around in the first place. I am a scrap of code that has been running from security for two hundred years. I am a projection of his innermost longings now come to life. I am a woman, and he is the man that made me. I know what makes TB tick.
    “I’ll look for her,” I say to him. “I won’t give up until I find her.”
    “No, Jill—” But it is too late for TB. I have caught him by surprise, and he hasn’t had time to see what I am up to.
    “TB, don’t you see what I am?”
    “Jill, you can’t—”
    “I’m you , TB. I’m your love for her. Sometime in the future you have reached back into the past and made me. Now. So that the future can be different.”
    He will understand one day, but now there is no time. I code his grist into a repeating loop and set the counter to a high number. I get into his head and work his dendrites down to sleep. Then, with my other hand, I whack him on the head. Only hard enough to knock him the rest of the