“And Cohen?” Li asked. “Is Nguyen warming a pair of slippers by the fire for him too?”

Ash shrugged. “I find it hard to believe that you’re really that happy with him. If it is a him. I mean…what are you exactly? His mistress? His bodyguard? His pet?”

But Li couldn’t answer that question, even though she’d been asking it of herself on and off for the last three years.

“Seriously,” Ash pursued. “What’s it like being part of …that?”

Li shrugged. Inarticulate in the best of circumstances, she truly had no words to describe the twists and turns and myriad contradictions of life on the intraface. And whatever words she might have put together over the course of the last three years had long ago dried up in the face of the obsessive hunger that every spinfeed reader on the Ring and beyond seemed to have for the most minute details of Cohen’s life, sexual and otherwise.

“He’s not just one person.” Was she actually about to talk to Ash about something she’d never talked about to anyone, including Cohen himself? Maybe it was just the sheer relief of dealing with someone who couldn’t reach into your head and rip the thoughts out of it before you had time to decide if you even wanted to share them or not. “He’s a lot of people. And…you kind of agree to pretend that there’s this single, identifiable, permanent person there. Just like you agree to pretend that that person doesn’t change every time he associates another network or autonomous agent. And after a while you start to wonder about yourself. If you’re just one person or many. If you ever really knew who that person was, and whether it’s really that simple for anyone.”

“It sounds terrifying.”

“No. Well, not most of the time. But you wonder sometimes. Sometimes I think I’m becoming a new species. Like…there’s a line somewhere where posthuman gets so far away from human that it needs a new name.” And she wasn’t sure she wanted to be the first person to cross that line.

Night had fallen while they were talking, and the shofarwas already blowing in some nearby synagogue. Christ, what a dismal noise! Ten days of it were going to be enough to drive Li well near crazy.

“Maybe the next ten days would be a good time to do a little Arithmetic of the Soul,” Ash suggested.

“According to the Interfaithers,” Li pointed out, “I don’t have a soul.”

Ash shrugged and began moving around the room, retrieving scattered toys and tossing them into a bin in the corner. “Don’t think the Interfaithers are that simple, Li.” Her voice sounded oddly muffled. “No one’s that simple.”

Ash turned to face her, the seriousness of her expression at odds with the purple plush stegosaurus clutched against her midriff. “Remember what you said about killing being personal? You were right. But this is personal too.”

Li waited.

“You were the general’s student. Her protegée. You hurt her deeply when you betrayed her. She’s giving you a chance to set things right now. To go back and remake past choices. Not many people get that kind of chance.”

“I’m grateful to her,” Li said. And in that moment, amazingly enough, she really was grateful. “But I did what I did on Compson’s World because I thought it wasright.”

Ash twisted the stuffed toy in her hands in a gesture that was either unconscious or supremely skilled acting. For some unfathomable reason it reminded Li of that brief glimpse of the silver stretch marks on that otherwise flawlessly engineered body. “What about what you did on Gilead?”

Li’s shooting eye twitched, and she rubbed fiercely at it. It was intolerable, she thought angrily, to have her own body give her away like that.

“I don’t remember Gilead,” she told Ash. “Or are you the only person in UN space who didn’t tune in to the trial of the century?”

“Nguyen said to tell you she can get you the real feed. But only on the understanding that it’s for private consumption.”

In other words, it would be yet another in the long series of “real feeds,” none of which could be parity checked or authenticated. “Thanks, but I’ve already walked down that hall of mirrors.”

“She said you’d say that. But she said you’d still want it when you’d had a chance to cool down and think about it.”

Li was thinking all right.

She was thinking of a clear blue morning sky on Gilead, and the soft wet sound of wind in the trees after the night’s rain, and the way you could hear songbirds all the time there, twittering back and forth from treetop to treetop; but only once in a while would you suddenly catch a bright flash of feather in the corner of your eye, gone before you’d had a chance to know anything except that it was beautiful.

“Good shot,” said the voice that haunted her shredded memories.

It could have been her voice. But then so could the next one.

“Not good enough. Fuck. I must have missed his spine by a millimeter. What do we do with him?”

“Mecklin? You getting anything but static? How far back is battalion?”

“I still can’t raise them, Sarge…uh…sir. Far as I know, they still haven’t made it across the river.”

“Chaff?”

“No chaff, sir. They’re just not picking up the phone.”

“And we got, what…twenty-eight prisoners?”

“Twenty-nine if this one lives.” A fourth voice, whose name hovered annoyingly on the tip of Li’s tongue. “Six A’s. Twenty-two tacticals. All Aziz except for this one. Must be their SigInt officer. Jesus Christ, what a mess! How the fuck can he still be alive anyway?”

“What do we do now, Sarge? Tag ’em for pickup?”

“Can’t. Orders. Prisoner pickup has to be cleared at the battalion level.”

Li remembered that particular order. Or thought she did. Good sharp solid block of soft memory of some blowhard bird colonel standing in the drop ship’s cavernous briefing room yakking on about crèche production schedules, and the impossibility of getting a draft resolution through the General Assembly in the current political climate, and how this was a war of attrition in which the key to victory was “draining the bathtub” faster than the Syndicates could fill it up again. Her lawyers, even the ones Cohen hired after she fired the idiot UNSec assigned her, hadn’t been able to dig up a shred of evidence that the guy had ever existed, let alone been deployed to Gilead. And when it came to he-said-she-said, machine memory beat meat memory every time.

“So what are we supposed to do if we can’t raise battalion? Take them with us? Gonna be like herding fucking cats. And there’s only eight of us.”

“Seven. Pradesh didn’t make it up the hill.”

Long pause there. Pradesh had been well liked.

“Has the medtech gone back to check on him?”

“Medtech didn’t make it up the hill either.”

Which feed was Li’s? The captain’s? The sniper’s? Had she been giving the orders that morning or just following them? If it had ever been possible to know, then the full-court press UNSec had put on for her court-martial had muddied her decohering memories beyond any hope of recovery.

She could just have been the sniper, she told herself for something like the eight thousandth time. She’d dropped into Gilead as a sniper. It was the best way to go to war if you had the skill and nerves for the job. You sat up above the carnage, too far away even to smell it if you were lucky. You did your breathing exercises, and you kept your trigger finger warm, and you let yourself float into the cool blue readout-flooded world behind your glareproof goggles. And if you were well and truly fucked up you could even convince yourself for pretty long stretches of time that you were just playing a bootleg beta release of a really kick-ass video game.

As long as the killing didn’t bother you.

Except that after a while the fact that the killing didn’t bother you started to bother you.

The shofarblew again. Li jumped as if someone had set off the air-raid sirens.