The Best of Michael Swanwick by Michael Swanwick Page A

“The spiders weren’t lying; they decapitated me in self-defense. What the holy hell did you think you were doing ?”
    “Just a precaution,” Paul said. “We wetwired you to trigger the stuff on command. That way we could have taken out the spider installation if they’d tried something funny.”
    “Um,” Dominguez said, “this is being recorded. What I’d like to know, Ms. Vanderhoek, is how you escaped being destroyed.”
    “I didn’t,” Abigail said. “The spiders killed me. Fortunately, they anticipated the situation and recorded the transmission. It was easy for them to re-create me—after they edited out the plastique.”
    Dominguez gave her an odd look. “You don’t—feel anything particular about this?”
    “Like what?”
    “Well—” He turned to Paul helplessly.
    “Like the real Abigail Vanderhoek died and you’re simply a very realistic copy,” Paul said.
    “Look, we’ve been through this garbage before,” Abigail began angrily.
    Paul smiled formally at Dominguez. It was hard to adjust to seeing the two in flat black-and-white. “She doesn’t believe a word of it.”
    “If you guys can pull yourselves up out of your navels for a minute,” Abigail said, “I’ve got a line on something the spiders have that you want. They claim they’ve sent probes through their black hole.”
    “Probes?” Paul stiffened. Abigail could sense the thoughts coursing through his skull, of defenses and military applications.
    “Carbon-hydrogen chain probes. Organic probes. Self-constructing transmitters. They’ve got a carbon-based secondary technology.”
    “Nonsense,” Dominguez said. “How could they convert back to coherent matter without a receiver?”
    Abigail shrugged. “They claim to have found a loophole.”
    “How does it work?” Paul snapped.
    “They wouldn’t say. They seemed to think you’d pay well for it.”
    “That’s very true,” Paul said slowly. “Oh, yes.”
    The conference took almost as long as her session with the spiders had. Abigail was bone weary when Dominguez finally said, “That ties up the official minutes. We now stop recording.” A line tracked across the screen, was gone. “If you want to speak to anyone off the record, now’s your chance. Perhaps there is someone close to you…”
    “Close? No.” Abigail almost laughed. “I’ll speak to Paul alone, though.”
    A spider floated by outside Clotho II. It was a golden crablike being, its body slightly opalescent. It skittered along unseen threads strung between the open platforms of the spider star-city. “I’m listening,” Paul said.
    “You turned me into a bomb, you freak.”
    “So?”
    “I could have been killed.”
    “Am I supposed to care?”
    “You damn well ought to, considering the liberties you’ve taken with my fair white body.”
    “Let’s get one thing understood,” Paul said. “The woman I slept with, the woman I cared for, is dead. I have no feelings toward or obligations to you whatsoever.”
    “Paul,” Abigail said. “ I’m not dead . Believe me, I’d know if I were.”
    “How could I possibly trust what you think or feel? It could all be attitudes the spiders wetwired into you. We know they have the technology.”
    “How do you know that your attitudes aren’t wetwired in? For that matter, how do you know anything is real? I mean, these are the most sophomoric philosophic questions there are. But I’m the same woman I was a few hours ago. My memories, opinions, feelings—they’re all the same as they were. There’s absolutely no difference between me and the woman you slept with on the Clarke .”
    “I know.” Paul’s eyes were cold. “That’s the horror of it.” He snapped off the screen.
    Abigail found herself staring at the lifeless machinery. God, that hurt , she thought. It shouldn’t, but it hurt . She went to her quarters.
    The spiders had done a respectable job of preparing for her. There were no green plants, but otherwise the room was the