XXIII

Across the River

Turner stared at her. "You're joking, yes?"

"No." She sagged in her chair. "I never meant the idea of Charon for ill. At BioII I was blocked every way I turned with the ethics board. So I created a mesh persona, a crusader for EI rights. That's why Sunrise Alley let me in and why they always called Hud by the name Wildfire. They knew."

He shook his head. "This can't be."

Her words tumbled out. "I took the name as a symbol of the controversy about whether or not an EI was alive. If you live, you can die. But it isn't necessarily final for an EI. Charon was a symbol of dying that suggested the possibility of coming back. He's a ferryman. He takes souls of the properly buried across the water at the junction of the Acheron and the Cocytus, the rivers of woe and lamentation. An EI could take the ferry back to the land of the living." Her voice broke. "But not a human. Not my father."

Sadness filled his voice. "And he said it to you when he died, yes? About the ferryman."

"Yes." She felt as if she were shattering. "Three years ago, I repressed everything about his death. Including Charon. Especially Charon. The crusader on the meshes ceased to exist."

"Ah, Sam," Turner murmured. "No wonder Hud stole the identity. It would give him another way to own you."

"Linden was the only one I told." She wiped the tears off her face. "He and I shared many of the same views."

"Then Hud knew, too. After the real Charon vanished, there was the identity, tailor-made, a perfect cover for him to get support from the underground."

"But he twisted it." She felt as if she had been pulled through the wringer on an old-fashioned washing machine.

"He must have spent the last three years erasing your Charon from the mesh. He excised it from his memories in me, probably in his other copies as well. He wanted no record that Charon had ever been anyone other than him." Turner looked ill. "Maybe he even spied on your house in California. If I hadn't gone there, he would have shown up another time. He tried to absorb those he loved, to make them fully and utterly his. He started by taking your online identity. Then he tried to take you."

Sam spread her hands on the console, bracing herself against her turmoil. "Giles didn't know I was the original Charon, but he knew I followed the persona. It's why he expected me to be angry when it changed, and why he acted so odd when I said I'd never heard of Charon that night I called him about you." She felt raw with the memories. "That Hud would take it, turn it against me—" Her voice hardened. "I'm glad he's gone."

"You can denounce him as an imposter."

"I've a better idea." She sat up straight. "No more personas. No more hiding in the redwoods. It's time I tackled issues of bioethics in the public arena."

"If I can help, I will."

"Thank you," she said softly.

He hesitated. "I didn't used to fear heights."

"Hud probably coded it into you. But why?"

"Because of you, I'd guess." He snapped his fingers. "He didn't program it into me. He coded it into himself. It came from the copy of him I carried. I already had the fear of closed-in spaces, so the pathways must have been easier to access. It leaked into my own matrix."

She squinted at him. "But why code a phobia?"

"He wanted to absorb everything about you. That means your fears, too."

It had a sick sort of logic. "He took himself to his own hell."

He moved his chair alongside hers and drew her into his arms. "It's over. That's what matters now." With an undisguised gratitude, he whispered, "It's over."

She put her arms around him, her head on his shoulder. "I wish I could undo the miserable things Hud did to you."

"We all have darkness within us," Turner said. "It's what gives the light meaning."

Sam spoke against his shoulder. "Forgive me for getting philosophical, but I think, if the human soul is a sort of inner light that makes us more than a collection of atoms and molecules—then yours shines."

"It is beautiful to say, Sam." He rested his head against hers. "But a machine has no soul."

"You are no machine."

He spoke softly. "With you, I can believe that."