The Best of Michael Swanwick by Michael Swanwick Page B

same as the one she’d had on the Clarke . They’d even been able to spin the platform, giving her an adequate down-orientation. She sat in her hammock, determined to think pleasanter thoughts. About the offer the spiders had made, for example. The one she hadn’t told Paul and Dominguez about.
    Banned by their chemistry from using black holes to travel, the spiders needed a representative to see to their interests among the stars. They had offered her the job.
    Or perhaps the plural would be more appropriate—they had offered her the jobs. Because there were too many places to go for one woman to handle them all. They needed a dozen, in time perhaps a hundred Abigail Vanderhoeks.
    In exchange for licensing rights to her personality, the right to make as many duplicates of her as were needed, they were willing to give her the rights to the self-reconstructing black-hole platforms.
    It would make her a rich woman—a hundred rich women—back in human space. And it would open the universe. She hadn’t committed herself yet, but there was no way she was going to turn down the offer. The chance to see a thousand stars. No, she would not pass it by.
    When she got old, too, they could create another Abigail from their recording, burn her new memories into it, and destroy her old body.
    I’m going to see the stars , she thought. I’m going to live forever . She couldn’t understand why she didn’t feel elated, wondered at the sudden sense of melancholy that ran through her like the precursor of tears.
    Garble jumped into her lap, offered his belly to be scratched. The spiders had recorded him, too. They had been glad to restore him to his unaltered state when she made the request. She stroked his stomach and buried her face in his fur.
    “Pretty little cat,” she told him. “I thought you were dead.”

Trojan Horse
    It’s all inside my head,” Elin said wonderingly. It was trite. A chimney swift flew overhead, and she could feel its passage through her mind. A firefly landed on her knee. It pulsed cold fire, then spread its wings and was gone, and that was a part of her too.
    “Please try not to talk too much.” The wetware tech tightened a cinch on the table, adjusted a bone inductor. His red-and-green facepaint loomed over her, receded. “This will go much faster if you cooperate.”
    Elin’s head felt light and airy. It was huge. It contained all of Magritte, from the uppermost terrace down to the trellis farms that circled the inner lake. Even the blue-and-white Earth that hovered just over one rock wall. They were all withinher. They were all, she realized, only a model, the pictureher mind assembled from sensory input. The exterior universe—the real universe—lay beyond.
    “I feel giddy.”
    “Contrast high.” The tech’s voice was neutral, disinterested. “This is a very different mode of perception from what you’re used to—you’re stoned on the novelty.”
    A catwalk leading into the nearest farm rattled within Elin’s mind as a woman in agricultural blues strode by, gourd-collecting bag swinging from her hip. It was night outside the crater, but biological day within, and the agtechs had activated tiers of arc lights at the cores of the farms. Filtered by greenery, the light was soft and watery.
    “I could live like this forever.”
    “Believe me, you’d get bored.” A rose petal fell on her cheek, and the tech brushed it off. He turned to face the two lawyers standing silently nearby. “Are the legal preliminaries over now?”
    The lawyer in orangeface nodded. The one in purple said, “Can’t her original personality be restored at all?”
    Drawing a briefcase from his pocket, the wetware tech threw up a holographic diagram between himself and the witnesses. The air filled with intricate three-dimensional tracery, red-and-green lines interweaving and intermeshing.
    “We’ve mapped the subject’s current personality.” He reached out to touch several junctions. “You will note