Bruce Sterling
<www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades> lives in Austin, Texas. The novel
Schismatrix (1985) and the related stories
that made him famous were re-released in 1996 as Schismatrix
Plus. He collaborated with William Gibson on
The Difference Engine (1990), became a media
figure who appeared on the cover of Wired, became a journalist who wrote the exposé
The Hacker Crackdown (1992), and returned his
attention to science fiction in 1995, with a new explosion of stories
and novels, including Heavy Weather (1994),
Holy Fire (1996), and Distraction (1998). His most recent novel, Zeitgeist (2000), is fantasy. His interest in the political
and cultural implications of future change has informed his work, and
in his recent nonfiction book, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the
Next Fifty Years (2002), he re-imagines the
future after the turn of the 21st century.
“In Paradise” was
published in F&SF, a magazine
that published a large number of especially good stories this year. It
is a madly jolly, near-future love story, in which the machete of
satire is wielded against the advent and spread of intrusion into the
private lives of citizens in the name of homeland security. Certain
moral and ethical problems are oversimplified so that love conquers
all. It is first in this book because we found it so representative of
the year 2002 and so much fun.
The machines broke down so
much that it was comical, but the security people never laughed about
that.
Felix could endure the delay, for plumbers
billed by the hour. He opened his tool kit, extracted a plastic flask
and had a solid nip of Scotch.
The Moslem girl was chattering into her phone.
Her dad and another bearded weirdo had passed through the big metal
frame just as the scanner broke down. So these two somber, suited old
men were getting the full third degree with the hand wands, while
daughter was stuck. Daughter wore a long baggy coat and thick black
headscarf and a surprisingly sexy pair of sandals. Between her and her
minders stretched the no man’s land of official insecurity. She waved
across the gap.
The security geeks found something metallic in
the black wool jacket of the Wicked Uncle. Of course it was harmless,
but they had to run their full ritual, lest they die of boredom at
their posts. As the Scotch settled in, Felix felt time stretch like
taffy. Little Miss Mujihadeen discovered that her phone was dying. She
banged at it with the flat of her hand.
The line of hopeful shoppers, grimly waiting
to stimulate the economy, shifted in their disgruntlement. It was a
bad, bleak scene. It crushed Felix’s heart within him. He longed to
leap to his feet and harangue the lot of them. Wake
up, he wanted to scream at them, cheer
up, act more human. He felt the urge keenly, but it scared
people when he cut loose like that. They really hated it. And so did
he. He knew he couldn’t look them in the eye. It would only make a lot
of trouble.
The Mideastern men shouted at the girl. She
waved her dead phone at them, as if another breakdown was going to help
their mood. Then Felix noticed that she shared his own make of cell
phone. She had a rather ahead-of-the-curve Finnish model that he’d
spent a lot of money on. So Felix rose and sidled over.
“Help you out with that phone, ma’am?”
She gave him the paralyzed look of a coed
stuck with a dripping tap. “No English?” he concluded. “Habla
español, senorita?” No such luck.
He offered her his own phone. No, she didn’t
care to use it. Surprised and even a little hurt by this rejection,
Felix took his first good look at her, and realized with a lurch that
she was pretty. What eyes! They were whirlpools. The line of her lips
was like the tapered edge of a rose leaf.
“It’s your battery,” he told her. Though she
had not a word of English, she obviously got it about phone batteries.
After some gestured persuasion, she was willing to trade her dead
battery for his. There was a fine and delicate little moment when his
fingertips extracted her power supply, and he inserted his own unit
into that golden-lined copper cavity. Her display leaped to life with
an eager flash of numerals. Felix pressed a button or two, smiled
winningly, and handed her phone back.
She dialed in a hurry, and bearded Evil Dad
lifted his phone to answer, and life became much easier on the nerves.
Then, with a groaning buzz, the scanner came back on. Dad and Uncle
waved a command at her, like lifers turned to trusty prison guards, and
she scampered through the metal gate and never looked back.
She had taken his battery. Well, no problem.
He would treasure the one she had given him.
Felix gallantly let the little crowd through
before he himself cleared security. The geeks always went nuts about
his plumbing tools, but then again, they had to. He found the
assignment: a chi-chi place that sold fake antiques and potpourri. The
manager’s office had a clogged drain. As he worked, Felix recharged the
phone. Then he socked them for a sum that made them wince.
On his leisurely way out—whoa, there was Miss
Cell phone, that looker, that little goddess, browsing in a jewelry
store over Korean gold chains and tiaras. Dad and Uncle were there,
with a couple of off-duty cops.
Felix retired to a bench beside the fountain,
in the potted plastic plants. He had another bracing shot of Scotch,
then put his feet up on his toolbox and punched her number.
He saw her straighten at the ring, and open
her purse, and place the phone to the kerchiefed side of her head. She
didn’t know where he was, or who he was. That was why the words came
pouring out of him.
“My God you’re pretty,” he said. “You are
wasting your time with that jewelry. Because your eyes are like two
black diamonds.”
She jumped a little, poked at the phone’s
buttons with disbelief, and put it back to her head.
Felix choked back the urge to laugh and leaned
forward, his elbows on his knees. “A string of pearls around your
throat would look like peanuts,” he told the phone. “I am totally
smitten with you. What are you like under that big baggy coat? Do I
dare to wonder? I would give a million dollars just to see your knees!”
“Why are you telling me that?” said the phone.
“Because I’m looking at you right now. And
after one look at you, believe me, I was a lost soul.” Felix felt a
chill. “Hey, wait a minute—you don’t speak English, do you?”
“No, I don’t speak English—but my telephone
does.”
“It does?”
“It’s a very new telephone. It’s from
Finland,” the telephone said. “I need it because I’m stuck in a foreign
country. Do you really have a million dollars for my knees?”
“That was a figure of speech,” said Felix,
though his bank account was, in point of fact, looking considerably
healthier since his girlfriend Lola had dumped him. “Never mind the
million dollars,” he said. “I’m dying of love out here. I’d sell my
blood just to buy you petunias.”
“You must be a famous poet,” the phone said
dreamily, “for you speak such wonderful Farsi.”
Felix had no idea what Farsi was—but he was
way beyond such fretting now. The rusty gates of his soul were
shuddering on their hinges. “I’m drunk,” he realized. “I am drunk on
your smile.”
“In my family, the women never smile.”
Felix had no idea what to say to that, so
there was a hissing silence.
“Are you a spy? How did you get my phone
number?”
“I’m not a spy. I got your phone number from
your phone.”
“Then I know you. You must be that tall
foreign man who gave me your battery. Where are you?”
“Look outside the store. See me on the bench?”
She turned where she stood, and he waved his fingertips. “That’s right,
it’s me,” he declared to her. “I can’t believe I’m really going through
with this. You just stand there, okay? I’m going to run in there and
buy you a wedding ring.”
“Don’t do that.” She glanced cautiously at Dad
and Uncle, then stepped closer to the bulletproof glass. “Yes, I do see
you. I remember you.”
She was looking straight at him. Their eyes
met. They were connecting. A hot torrent ran up his spine. “You are
looking straight at me.”
“You’re very handsome.”
It wasn’t hard to elope. Young women had
been eloping since the dawn of time. Elopement with eager phone support
was a snap. He followed her to the hotel, a posh place that swarmed
with limos and videocams. He brought her a bag with a big hat,
sunglasses, and a cheap Mexican wedding dress. He sneaked into the
women’s restroom—they never put videocams there, due to the
complaints—and he left the bag in a stall. She went in, came out in new
clothes with her hair loose, and walked straight out of the hotel and
into his car.
They couldn’t speak together without their
phones, but that turned out to be surprisingly advantageous, as further
discussion was not on their minds. Unlike Lola, who was always
complaining that he should open up and relate—“You’re a plumber,” she
would tell him, “how deep and mysterious is a plumber supposed to
be?”—the new woman in his life had needs that were very
straightforward. She liked to walk in parks without a police escort.
She liked to thoughtfully peruse the goods in Mideastern ethnic
groceries. And she liked to make love to him. She was nineteen years
old, and the willing sacrifice of her chastity had really burned the
bridges for his little refugee. Once she got fully briefed about what
went inside where, she was in the mood to tame the demon. She had big,
jagged, sobbing, alarming, romantic, brink-of-the-grave things going
on, with long, swoony kisses, and heel-drumming, and
clutching-and-clawing.
When they were too weak, and too raw, and too
tingling to make love anymore, then she would cook, very badly. She was
on her phone constantly, talking to her people. These confidantes of
hers were obviously women, because she asked them for Persian cooking
tips. She would sink with triumphant delight into cheery chatter as the
Basmati rice burned.
He longed to take her out to eat; to show her
to everyone, to the whole world; really, besides the sex, no act could
have made him happier—but she was undocumented, and sooner or later
some security geek was sure to check on that. People did things like
that to people nowadays. To contemplate such things threw a thorny
darkness over their whole affair, so, mostly, he didn’t think. He took
time off work, and he spent every moment that he could in her radiant
presence, and she did what a pretty girl could do to lift a man’s
darkened spirits, which was plenty. More than he had ever had from
anyone.
After ten days of golden, unsullied bliss,
ten days of bread and jug wine, ten days when the nightingales sang in
chorus and the reddest of roses bloomed outside the boudoir, there came
a knock on his door, and it was three cops.
“Hello, Mr. Hernandez,” said the smallest of
the trio. “I would be Agent Portillo from Homeland Security, and these
would be two of my distinguished associates. Might we come in?”
“Would there be a problem?” said Felix.
“Yes there would!” said Portillo. “There might
be rather less of a problem if my associates here could search your
apartment.” Portillo offered up a handheld screen. “A young woman named
Batool Kadivar? Would we be recognizing Miss Batool Kadivar?”
“I can’t even pronounce that,” Felix said.
“But I guess you’d better come in,” for Agent Portillo’s associates
were already well on their way. Men of their ilk were not prepared to
take no for an answer. They shoved past him and headed at once for the
bedroom.
“Who are those guys? They’re not American.”
“They’re Iranian allies. The Iranians were
totally nuts for a while, and then they were sort of okay, and then
they became our new friends, and then the enemies of our friends became
our friends…. Do you ever watch TV news, Mr. Hernandez? Secular
uprisings, people seizing embassies? Ground war in the holy city of
Qom, that kind of thing?”
“It’s hard to miss,” Felix admitted.
“There are a billion Moslems. If they want to
turn the whole planet into Israel, we don’t get a choice about that.
You know something? I used to be an accountant!” Portillo sighed
theatrically. “ ‘Homeland Security.’ Why’d they have to stick me with
that chicken outfit? Hombre, we’re twenty years old, and we don’t even
have our own budget yet. Did you see those gorillas I’ve got on my
hands? You think these guys ever listen to sense? Geneva Convention?
U.S. Constitution? Come on.”
“They’re not gonna find any terrorists in
here.”
Portillo sighed again. “Look, Mr. Hernandez.
You’re a young man with a clean record, so I want to do you a favor.”
He adjusted his handheld and it showed a new screen. “These are cell
phone records. Thirty, forty calls a day, to and from your number. Then
look at this screen, this is the good part. Check out her call records. That would be her aunt
in Yerevan, and her little sister in Teheran, and five or six of her
teenage girlfriends, still living back in purdah…. Who do you think is
gonna pay that phone bill? Did that
ever cross your mind?”
Felix said nothing.
“I can understand this, Mr. Hernandez. You
lucked out. You’re a young, red-blooded guy and that is a very pretty
girl. But she’s a minor, and an illegal alien. Her father’s family has
got political connections like nobody’s business, and I would mean
nobody, and I would also mean business.”
“Not my business,” Felix said.
“You’re being a sap, Mr. Hernandez. You may
not be interested in war, but war is plenty interested in you.” There
were loud crashing, sacking and looting noises coming from his bedroom.
“You are sunk, hermano. There is video at the
Lebanese grocery store. There is video hidden in the traffic lights.
You’re a free American citizen, sir. You’re free to go anywhere you
want, and we’re free to watch all the backup tapes. That would be the
big story I’m relating here. Would we be catching on yet?”
“That’s some kind of story,” Felix said.
“You don’t know the half of it. You don’t know
the tenth.”
The two goons reappeared. There was a brief
exchange of notes. They had to use their computers.
“My friends here are disappointed,” said Agent
Portillo, “because there is no girl in your residence, even though
there is an extensive selection of makeup and perfume. They want me to
arrest you for abduction, and obstruction of justice, and probably ten
or twelve other things. But I would be asking myself: why? Why should
this young taxpayer with a steady job want to have his life ruined?
What I’m thinking is: there must be another
story. A better story. The flighty
girl ran off, and she spent the last two weeks in a convent. It was
just an impulse thing for her. She got frightened and upset by America,
and then she came back to her people. Everything diplomatic.”
“That’s diplomacy?”
“Diplomacy is the art of avoiding extensive
unpleasantness for all the parties concerned. The united coalition, as
it were.”
“They’ll chop her hands off and beat her like
a dog!”
“Well, that would depend, Mr. Hernandez. That
would depend entirely on whether the girl herself tells that story.
Somebody would have to get her up to speed on all that. A trusted
friend. You see?”
After the departure of the three security
men, Felix thought through his situation. He realized there was nothing
whatsoever in it for him but shame, humiliation, impotence, and a
crushing and lasting unhappiness. He then fetched up the reposado
tequila from beneath his sink.
Some time later he felt the dulled stinging of
a series of slaps to his head. When she saw that she had his attention,
she poured the tequila onto the floor, accenting this gesture with an
eye-opening Persian harangue. Felix staggered to the bathroom, threw
up, and returned to find a fresh cup of coffee. She had raised the
volume and was still going strong.
He’d never had her pick a lovers’ quarrel with
him, though he’d always known it was in her somewhere. It was
magnificent. It was washing over him in a musical torrent of absolute
nonsense. It was operatic, and he found it quite beautiful. Like
sitting through a rainstorm without getting wet: trees straining,
leaves flying, dark, windy, torrential. Majestic.
Her idea of coffee was basically wet grounds,
so it brought him around in short order. “You’re right, I’m wrong, and
I’m sorry,” he admitted tangentially, knowing she didn’t understand a
word, “so come on and help me,” and he opened the sink cabinet, where
he had hidden all his bottles when he’d noticed the earlier
disapproving glances. He then decanted them down the drain: vodka,
Southern Comfort, the gin, the party jug of tequila, even the last two
inches of his favorite single-malt. Moslems didn’t drink, and really,
how wrong could any billion people be? He gulped a couple of aspirin
and picked up the phone.
“The police were here. They know about us. I
got upset. I drank too much.”
“Did they beat you?”
“Uh, no. They’re not big fans of beating over
here, they’ve got better methods. They’ll be back. We are in big
trouble.”
She folded her arms. “Then we’ll run away.”
“You know, we have a proverb for that in
America. ‘You can run, but you can’t hide.’ ”
“Darling, I love your poetry, but when the
police come to the house, it’s serious.”
“Yes. It’s very serious, it’s serious as
cancer. You’ve got no ID. You have no passport. You can’t get on any
plane to get away. Even the trains and lousy bus stations have facial
recognition. My car is useless too. They’d read my license plate a
hundred times before we hit city limits. I can’t rent another car
without leaving credit records. The cops have got my number.”
“We’ll steal a fast car and go very fast.”
“You can’t outrun them! That is not possible!
They’ve all got phones like we do, so they’re always ahead of us,
waiting.”
“I’m a rebel! I’ll never surrender!” She
lifted her chin. “Let’s get married.”
“I’d love to, but we can’t. We have no
license. We have no blood test.”
“Then we’ll marry in some place where they
have all the blood they want. Beirut, that would be good.” She placed
her free hand against her chest. “We were married in my heart, the
first time we ever made love.”
This artless confession blew through him like
a summer breeze. “They do have rings for cash at a pawnbroker’s…But I’m
a Catholic. There must be somebody
who does this sort of thing…Maybe some heretic mullah. Maybe a Santeria
guy?”
“If we’re husband and wife, what can they do
to us? We haven’t done anything wrong! I’ll get a Green Card. I’ll beg
them! I’ll beg for mercy. I’ll beg political asylum.”
Agent Portillo conspicuously cleared his
throat. “Mr. Hernandez, please! This would not be the conversation you
two need to be having.”
“I forgot to mention the worst part,” Felix
said. “They know about our phones.”
“Miss Kadivar, can you also understand me?”
“Who are you? I hate you. Get off this line
and let me talk to him.”
“Salaam alekom to you, too,” Portillo
concluded. “It’s a sad commentary on federal procurement when a
mullah’s daughter has a fancy translator, and I can’t even talk live
with my own fellow agents. By the way, those two gentlemen from the new
regime in Teheran are staking out your apartment. How they failed to
recognize your girlfriend on her way in, that I’ll never know. But if
you two listen to me, I think I can walk you out of this very dangerous
situation.”
“I don’t want to leave my beloved,” she said.
“Over my dead body,” Felix declared. “Come and
get me. Bring a gun.”
“Okay, Miss Kadivar, you would seem to be the
more rational of the two parties, so let me talk sense to you. You have
no future with this man. What kind of wicked man seduces a decent girl
with phone pranks? He’s an aayash,
he’s a playboy. America has a fifty percent divorce rate. He would
never ask your father honorably for your hand. What would your mother
say?”
“Who is this awful man?” she said, shaken. “He
knows everything!”
“He’s a snake!” Felix said. “He’s the devil!”
“You still don’t get it, compadre. I’m not the
Great Satan. Really, I’m not! I am the good guy.
I’m your guardian angel, dude. I am trying really hard to give you back
a normal life.”
“Okay cop, you had your say, now listen to me.
I love her body and soul, and even if you kill me dead for that, the
flames in my heart will set my coffin on fire.”
She burst into tears. “Oh God, my God, that’s
the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“You kids are sick, okay?” Portillo snapped.
“This would be mental illness that
I’m eavesdropping on here! You two don’t even speak
each other’s language. You had every fair warning! Just
remember, when it happens, you made me
do it. Now try this one on for size, Romeo and Juliet.” The phones went
dead.
Felix placed his dead phone on the tabletop.
“Okay. Situation report. We’ve got no phones, no passports, no ID and
two different intelligence agencies are after us. We can’t fly, we
can’t drive, we can’t take a train or a bus. My credit cards are
useless now, my bank cards will just track me down, and I guess I’ve
lost my job now. I can’t even walk out my own front door…. And wow, you
don’t understand a single word I’m saying. I can tell from that look in
your eye. You are completely thrilled.”
She put her finger to her lips. Then she took
him by the hand.
Apparently, she had a new plan. It involved
walking. She wanted to walk to Los Angeles. She knew the words “Los
Angeles,” and maybe there was somebody there that she knew. This trek
would involve crossing half the American continent on foot, but Felix
was at peace with that ambition. He really thought he could do it. A
lot of people had done it just for the sake of gold nuggets, back in
1849. Women had walked to California just to meet a guy with gold
nuggets.
The beautiful part of this scheme was that,
after creeping out the window, they really had vanished. The feds might
be all over the airports, over everything that mattered, but they
didn’t care about what didn’t matter. Nobody was looking out for
dangerous interstate pedestrians.
To pass the time as they walked, she taught
him elementary Farsi. The day’s first lesson was body parts, because
that was all they had handy for pointing. That suited Felix just fine.
If anything, this expanded their passionate communion. He was perfectly
willing to starve for that, fight for that and die for that. Every form
of intercourse between man and woman was fraught with illusion, and the
bigger, the better. Every hour that passed was an hour they had not
been parted.
They had to sleep rough. Their clothes became
filthy. Then, on the tenth day, they got arrested.
She was, of course, an illegal alien, and he
had the good sense to talk only Spanish, so of course, he became one as
well. The Immigration cops piled them into the bus for the border, but
they got two seats together and were able to kiss and hold hands. The
other deported wretches even smiled at them.
He realized now that he was sacrificing
everything for her: his identity, his citizenship, flag, church,
habits, money…Everything, and good riddance. He bit thoughtfully into
his wax-papered cheese sandwich. This was the federal bounty
distributed to every refugee on the bus, along with an apple, a small
carton of homogenized milk, and some carrot chips.
When the protein hit his famished stomach
Felix realized that he had gone delirious with joy. He was growing by this experience. It had broken
every stifling limit within him. His dusty, savage, squalid world was
widening drastically.
Giving alms, for instance—before his abject
poverty, he’d never understood that alms were holy. Alms were indeed
very holy. From now on—as soon as he found a place to sleep, some place
that was so wrecked, so torn, so bleeding, that it never asked
uncomfortable questions about a plumber—as soon as he became a plumber
again, then he’d be giving some alms.
She ate her food, licked her fingers, then
fell asleep against him, in the moving bus. He brushed the free hair
from her dirty face. She was twenty days older now. “This is a pearl,”
he said aloud. “This is a pearl by far too rare to be contained within
the shell of time and space.”
Why had those lines come to him, in such a
rush? Had he read them somewhere? Or were those lines his own?
Michael Swanwick
<www.michaelswanwick.com> is a major player in today’s grand game
of science fiction. His first novel, In the Drift (1984), an alternate-history novel in which the
Three Mile Island reactor exploded, was one of Terry Carr’s Ace
Specials in the same series as William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild
Shore. Since then he has published his fine
novels at a rate of one every three or four years: Vacuum
Flowers (1987), Stations of the
Tide (1991), The Iron Dragon’s
Daughter (1993—what he called “hard fantasy”)
the sharply satiric Jack Faust (1997),
and his new novel, Bones of the Earth (2002),
expanded from his Hugo Award–winning story “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur.”
His short fiction is collected in Gravity’s Angels (1991), Geography of Unknown Lands (1997), Moon Dogs (2000),
Tales of Old Earth (2000), and Puck
Aleshire’s Abecedary (2000). Swanwick is also
the author of two influential critical essays, one on SF, “User’s Guide
to the Postmoderns”(1985), and one on fantasy, “In The Tradition….”
(1994).
“Slow Life,” in the
mode of Hal Clement and Arthur C. Clarke, is from Analog, and is one of Swanwick’s occasional forays into hard
SF. Swanwick links satire of our over-connected technological present,
of online chat and instantaneous entertainment news, with the grand
wonders of the cosmos, adventures on the grand scale, and good
old-fashioned SF wonder, in an entertaining clash of SF cultures.
The raindrop began forming ninety
kilometers above the surface of Titan. It started with an infinitesimal
speck of tholin, adrift in the cold nitrogen atmosphere.
Diano-acetylene condensed on the seed nucleus, molecule by molecule,
until it was one shard of ice in a cloud of billions.
Now the journey could begin.
It took almost a year for the shard of ice in
question to precipitate downward twenty-five kilometers, where the
temperature dropped low enough that ethane began to condense on it. But
when it did, growth was rapid.
Down it drifted.
At forty kilometers, it was for a time caught
up in an ethane cloud. There it continued to grow. Occasionally it
collided with another droplet and doubled in size. Finally it was too
large to be held effortlessly aloft by the gentle stratospheric winds.
It fell.
Falling, it swept up methane and quickly grew
large enough to achieve a terminal velocity of almost two meters per
second.
At twenty-seven kilometers, it passed through
a dense layer of methane clouds. It acquired more methane, and
continued its downward flight.
As the air thickened, its velocity slowed and
it began to lose some of its substance to evaporation. At two and a
half kilometers, when it emerged from the last patchy clouds, it was
losing mass so rapidly it could not normally be expected to reach the
ground.
It was, however, falling toward the equatorial
highlands, where mountains of ice rose a towering five hundred meters
into the atmosphere. At two meters and a lazy new terminal velocity of
one meter per second, it was only a breath away from hitting the
surface.
Two hands swooped an open plastic collecting
bag upward, and snared the raindrop.
“Gotcha!” Lizzie O’Brien cried gleefully.
She zip-locked the bag shut, held it up so her
helmet cam could read the barcode in the corner, and said, “One
raindrop.” Then she popped it into her collecting box.
Sometimes it’s the little things that make you
happiest. Somebody would spend a year
studying this one little raindrop when Lizzie got it home. And it was
just Bag 64 in Collecting Case 5. She was going to be on the surface of
Titan long enough to scoop up the raw material of a revolution in
planetary science. The thought of it filled her with joy.
Lizzie dogged down the lid of the collecting
box and began to skip across the granite-hard ice, splashing the
puddles and dragging the boot of her atmosphere suit through the
rivulets of methane pouring down the mountainside. “I’m
sing-ing in the rain.” She threw out her arms and spun
around. “Just sing-ing in the rain!”
“Uh…O’Brien?” Alan Greene said from the Clement. “Are you all right?”
“Dum-dee-dum-dee-dee-dum-dum,
I’m…some-thing again.”
“Oh, leave her alone,” Consuelo Hong said with
sour good humor. She was down on the plains, where the methane simply
boiled into the air, and the ground was covered with thick, gooey
tholin. It was, she had told them, like wading ankle-deep in molasses.
“Can’t you recognize the scientific method when you hear it?”
“If you say so,” Alan said dubiously. He was
stuck in the Clement, overseeing
the expedition and minding the web site. It was a comfortable gig—he wouldn’t be sleeping in his suit or surviving on recycled water and energy
stix—and he didn’t think the others knew how much he hated it.
“What’s next on the schedule?” Lizzie asked.
“Um…well, there’s still the robot turbot to be
released. How’s that going, Hong?”
“Making good time. I oughta reach the sea in a
couple of hours.”
“Okay, then it’s time O’Brien rejoined you at
the lander. O’Brien, start spreading out the balloon and going over the
harness checklist.”
“Roger that.”
“And while you’re doing that, I’ve got today’s
voice-posts from the Web cued up.”
Lizzie groaned, and Consuelo blew a raspberry.
By NAFTASA policy, the ground crew participated in all webcasts.
Officially, they were delighted to share their experiences with the
public. But the Voice Web (privately, Lizzie thought of it as the
Illiternet) made them accessible to people who lacked even the minimal
intellectual skills needed to handle a keyboard.
“Let me remind you that we’re on open circuit
here, so anything you say will go into my reply. You’re certainly
welcome to chime in at any time. But each question-and-esponse is
transmitted as one take, so if you flub a line, we’ll have to go back
to the beginning and start all over again.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Consuelo grumbled.
“We’ve done this before,” Lizzie reminded him.
“Okay. Here’s the first one.”
“Uh, hi, this is
BladeNinja43. I was wondering just what it is that you guys are hoping
to discover out there.”
“That’s an extremely good question,” Alan
lied. “And the answer is: We don’t know! This is a voyage of discovery,
and we’re engaged in what’s called ‘pure science.’ Now, time and time
again, the purest research has turned out to be extremely profitable.
But we’re not looking that far ahead. We’re just hoping to find
something absolutely unexpected.”
“My God, you’re slick,” Lizzie marveled.
“I’m going to edit that from the tape,” Alan
said cheerily. “Next up.”
“This is Mary
Schroeder, from the United States. I teach high school English, and I
wanted to know for my students, what kind of grades the three of you
had when you were their age.”
Alan began. “I was an overachiever, I’m
afraid. In my sophomore year, first semester, I got a B in Chemistry
and panicked. I thought it was the end of the world. But then I dropped
a couple of extracurriculars, knuckled down, and brought that grade
right up.”
“I was good in everything but French Lit,”
Consuelo said.
“I nearly flunked out!” Lizzie said.
“Everything was difficult for me. But then I decided I wanted to be an
astronaut, and it all clicked into place. I realized that, hey, it’s
just hard work. And now, well, here I am.”
“That’s good. Thanks, guys. Here’s the third,
from Maria Vasquez.”
“Is there life on
Titan?”
“Probably not. It’s
cold down there! 94° Kelvin is the same as • 179°
Celsius, or • 290° Fahrenheit. And yet…life is persistent. It’s
been found in Antarctic ice and in boiling water in submarine volcanic
vents. Which is why we’ll be paying particular attention to exploring
the depths of the ethane-methane sea. If life is anywhere to be found,
that’s where we’ll find it.”
“Chemically, the conditions here resemble the
anoxic atmosphere on Earth in which life first arose,” Consuelo said.
“Further, we believe that such prebiotic chemistry has been going on
here for four and a half billion years. For an organic chemist like me,
it’s the best toy box in the Universe. But that lack of heat is a
problem. Chemical reactions that occur quickly back home would take
thousands of years here. It’s hard to see how life could arise under
such a handicap.”
“It would have to be slow life,” Lizzie said
thoughtfully. “Something vegetative. ‘Vaster than empires and more
slow.’ It would take millions of years to reach maturity. A single
thought might require centuries….”
“Thank you for that, uh, wild scenario!” Alan
said quickly. Their NAFTASA masters frowned on speculation. It was, in
their estimation, almost as unprofessional as heroism. “This next
question comes from Danny in Toronto.”
“Hey, man, I gotta
say I really envy you being in that tiny little ship with those two hot
babes.”
Alan laughed lightly. “Yes, Ms. Hong and Ms.
O’Brien are certainly attractive women. But we’re kept so busy that,
believe it or not, the thought of sex never comes up. And currently,
while I tend to the Clement,
they’re both on the surface of Titan at the bottom of an atmosphere 60
percent more dense than Earth’s, and encased in armored exploration
suits. So even if I did have inappropriate thoughts, there’s no way we
could—”
“Hey, Alan,” Lizzie said. “Tell me something.”
“Yes?”
“What are you wearing?”
“Uh…switching over to private channel.”
“Make that a three-way,” Consuelo said.
Ballooning, Lizzie decided, was the best way
there was of getting around. Moving with the gentle winds, there was no
sound at all. And the view was great!
People talked a lot about the “murky orange
atmosphere” of Titan, but your eyes adjusted. Turn up the gain on your
helmet, and the white mountains of ice were dazzling!
The methane streams carved cryptic runes into the heights. Then, at the
tholin-line, white turned to a rich palette of oranges, reds, and
yellows. There was a lot going on down there—more than she’d be able to
learn in a hundred visits.
The plains were superficially duller, but they
had their charms as well. Sure, the atmosphere was so dense that
refracted light made the horizon curve upward to either side. But you
got used to it. The black swirls and cryptic red tracery of unknown
processes on the land below never grew tiring.
On the horizon, she saw the dark arm of
Titan’s narrow sea. If that was what it was. Lake Erie was larger, but
the spin doctors back home had argued that since Titan was so much
smaller than Earth, relatively it
qualified as a sea. Lizzie had her own opinion, but she knew when to
keep her mouth shut.
Consuelo was there now. Lizzie switched her
visor over to the live feed. Time to catch the show.
“I can’t believe I’m finally here,” Consuelo
said. She let the shrink-wrapped fish slide from her shoulder down to
the ground. “Five kilometers doesn’t seem like very far when you’re
coming down from orbit—just enough to leave a margin for error so the
lander doesn’t come down in the sea. But when you have to walk that distance, through tarry, sticky
tholin…well, it’s one heck of a slog.”
“Consuelo, can you tell us what it’s like
there?” Alan asked.
“I’m crossing the beach. Now I’m at the edge
of the sea.” She knelt, dipped a hand into it. “It’s got the
consistency of a Slushy. Are you familiar with that drink? Lots of
shaved ice sort of half-melted in a cup with flavored syrup. What we’ve
got here is almost certainly a methane-ammonia mix; we’ll know for sure
after we get a sample to a laboratory. Here’s an early indicator,
though. It’s dissolving the tholin off my glove.” She stood.
“Can you describe the beach?”
“Yeah. It’s white. Granular. I can kick it
with my boot. Ice sand for sure. Do you want me to collect samples
first or release the fish?”
“Release the fish,” Lizzie said, almost
simultaneously with Alan’s “Your call.”
“Okay, then.” Consuelo carefully cleaned both
of her suit’s gloves in the sea, then seized the shrink-wrap’s zip tab
and yanked. The plastic parted. Awkwardly, she straddled the fish,
lifted it by the two side-handles, and walked it into the dark slush.
“Okay, I’m standing in the sea now. It’s up to
my ankles. Now it’s at my knees. I think it’s deep enough here.”
She set the fish down. “Now I’m turning it
on.”
The Mitsubishi turbot wriggled, as if alive.
With one fluid motion, it surged forward, plunged, and was gone.
Lizzie switched over to the fishcam.
Black liquid flashed past the turbot’s
infrared eyes. Straight away from the shore it swam, seeing nothing but
flecks of paraffin, ice, and other suspended particulates as they
loomed up before it and were swept away in the violence of its wake. A
hundred meters out, it bounced a pulse of radar off the sea floor, then
dove, seeking the depths.
Rocking gently in her balloon harness, Lizzie
yawned.
Snazzy Japanese cybernetics took in a minute
sample of the ammonia-water, fed it through a deftly constructed
internal laboratory, and excreted the waste products behind it. “We’re
at twenty meters now,” Consuelo said. “Time to collect a second
sample.”
The turbot was equipped to run hundreds of
on-the-spot analyses. But it had only enough space for twenty permanent
samples to be carried back home. The first sample had been nibbled from
the surface slush. Now it twisted, and gulped down five drams of sea
fluid in all its glorious impurity. To Lizzie, this was science on the
hoof. Not very dramatic, admittedly, but intensely exciting.
She yawned again.
“O’Brien?” Alan said. “How long has it been
since you last slept?”
“Huh? Oh…twenty hours? Don’t worry about me,
I’m fine.”
“Go to sleep. That’s an order.”
“But—”
“Now.”
Fortunately, the suit was comfortable enough
to sleep in. It had been designed so she could.
First she drew in her arms from the suit’s
sleeves. Then she brought in her legs, tucked them up under her chin,
and wrapped her arms around them. “ ’Night, guys,” she said.
“Buenas noches,
querida,” Consuelo said, “que
tengas lindos sueños.”
“Sleep tight, space explorer.”
The darkness when she closed her eyes was so
absolute it crawled. Black, black, black. Phantom lights moved within
the darkness, formed lines, shifted away when she tried to see them.
They were as fugitive as fish, luminescent, fainter than faint, there
and with a flick of her attention fled.
A school of little thoughts flashed through
her mind, silver-scaled and gone.
Low, deep, slower than sound, something
tolled. The bell from a drowned clock tower patiently stroking
midnight. She was beginning to get her bearings. Down there was where the ground must be.
Flowers grew there unseen. Up above was where the sky would be, if
there were a sky. Flowers floated there as well.
Deep within the submerged city, she found
herself overcome by an enormous and placid sense of self. A swarm of
unfamiliar sensations washed through her mind, and then…
“Are you me?” a gentle voice asked.
“No,” she said carefully. “I don’t think so.”
Vast astonishment. “You think you are not me?”
“Yes. I think so, anyway.”
“Why?”
There didn’t seem to be any proper response to
that, so she went back to the beginning of the conversation and ran
through it again, trying to bring it to another conclusion. Only to
bump against that “Why?” once again.
“I don’t know why,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
She looped through that same dream over and
over again all the while that she slept.
When she awoke, it was raining again. This
time, it was a drizzle of pure methane from the lower cloud deck at
fifteen kilometers. These clouds were (the theory went) methane
condensate from the wet air swept up from the sea. They fell on the
mountains and washed them clean of tholin. It was the methane that
eroded and shaped the ice, carving gullies and caves.
Titan had more kinds of rain than anywhere
else in the Solar System.
The sea had crept closer while Lizzie slept.
It now curled up to the horizon on either side like an enormous dark
smile. Almost time now for her to begin her descent. While she checked
her harness settings, she flicked on telemetry to see what the others
were up to.
The robot turbot was still spiraling its way
downward, through the lightless sea, seeking its distant floor.
Consuelo was trudging through the tholin again, retracing her
five-kilometer trek from the lander Harry
Stubbs, and Alan was answering another set of webposts.
“Modelos de la
evolución de Titanes indican que la luna formó de una
nube circumplanetaria rica en amoníaco y metano, la cual al
condensarse dio forma a Saturno así como a otros
satélites. Bajo estas condiciones en—”
“Uh…guys?”
Alan stopped. “Damn it, O’Brien, now I’ve got
to start all over again.”
“Welcome back to the land of the living,”
Consuelo said. “You should check out the readings we’re getting from
the robofish. Lots of long-chain polymers, odd fractions…tons of
interesting stuff.”
“Guys?”
This time her tone of voice registered with
Alan. “What is it, O’Brien?”
“I think my harness is jammed.”
Lizzie had never dreamed disaster could be
such drudgery. First there were hours of back-and-forth with the
NAFTASA engineers. What’s the status of rope 14? Try tugging on rope 8.
What do the D-rings look like? It was slow work because of the lag time
for messages to be relayed to Earth and back. And Alan insisted on
filling the silence with posts from the Voice Web. Her plight had gone
global in minutes, and every unemployable loser on the planet had to
log in with suggestions.
“Thezgemoth337,
here. It seems to me that if you had a gun and shot up through the
balloon, it would maybe deflate and then you could get down.”
“I don’t have a gun, shooting a hole in the
balloon would cause it not to deflate but to rupture, I’m 800 hundred
meters above the surface, there’s a sea below me, and I’m in a suit
that’s not equipped for swimming. Next.”
“If you had a really
big knife—”
“Cut! Jesus, Greene, is this the best you can
find? Have you heard back from the organic chem guys yet?”
“Their preliminary analysis just came in,”
Alan said. “As best they can guess—and I’m cutting through a lot of
clutter here—the rain you went through wasn’t pure methane.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“They’re assuming that whitish deposit you
found on the rings and ropes is your culprit. They can’t agree on what
it is, but they think it underwent a chemical reaction with the
material of your balloon and sealed the rip panel shut.”
“I thought this was supposed to be a pretty
nonreactive environment.”
“It is. But your balloon runs off your suit’s
waste heat. The air in it is several degrees above the melting-point of
ice. That’s the equivalent of a blast furnace, here on Titan. Enough
energy to run any number of amazing reactions. You haven’t stopped
tugging on the vent rope?”
“I’m tugging away right now. When one arm gets
sore, I switch arms.”
“Good girl. I know how tired you must be.”
“Take a break from the voice-posts,” Consuelo
suggested, “and check out the results we’re getting from the robofish.
It’s giving us some really interesting stuff.”
So she did. And for a time it distracted her,
just as they’d hoped. There was a lot more ethane and propane than
their models had predicted, and surprisingly less methane. The mix of
fractions was nothing like what she’d expected. She had learned just
enough chemistry to guess at some of the implications of the data being
generated, but not enough to put it all together. Still tugging at the
ropes in the sequence uploaded by the engineers in Toronto, she
scrolled up the chart of hydrocarbons dissolved in the lake.
|
Solute
|
Solute
mole fraction
|
|
Ethyne
|
4.0 × 10-4
|
|
Propyne
|
4.4 × 10-5
|
|
1,3-Butadiyne
|
7.7 × 10-7
|
|
Carbon Dioxide
|
0.1 × 10-5
|
|
Methanenitrile
|
5.7 × 10-6
|
But after a while, the experience of working
hard and getting nowhere, combined with the tedium of floating farther
and farther out over the featureless sea, began to drag on her. The
columns of figures grew meaningless, then indistinct.
|
Propanenitrile
|
6.0 × 10-5
|
|
Propenenitrile
|
9.9 × 10-6
|
|
Propynenitrile
|
5.3 × 10-6
|
Hardly noticing she was doing so, she fell
asleep.
She was in a lightless building, climbing
flight after flight of stairs. There were other people with her, also
climbing. They jostled against her as she ran up the stairs, flowing
upward, passing her, not talking.
It was getting colder.
She had a distant memory of being in the
furnace room down below. It was hot there, swelteringly so. Much cooler
where she was now. Almost too cool. With every step she took, it got a
little cooler still. She found herself slowing down. Now it was
definitely too cold. Unpleasantly so. Her leg muscles ached. The air
seemed to be thickening around her as well. She could barely move now.
This was, she realized, the natural
consequence of moving away from the furnace. The higher up she got, the
less heat there was to be had, and the less energy to be turned into
motion. It all made perfect sense to her somehow.
Step. Pause.
Step. Longer pause.
Stop.
The people around her had slowed to a stop as
well. A breeze colder than ice touched her, and without surprise, she
knew that they had reached the top of the stairs and were standing upon
the building’s roof. It was as dark without as it had been within. She
stared upward and saw nothing.
“Horizons. Absolutely baffling,” somebody
murmured beside her.
“Not once you get used to them,” she replied.
“Up and down—are these hierarchic values?”
“They don’t have to be.”
“Motion. What a delightful concept.”
“We like it.”
“So you are
me?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
She was struggling to find an answer to this,
when somebody gasped. High up in the starless, featureless sky, a light
bloomed. The crowd around her rustled with unspoken fear. Brighter, the
light grew. Brighter still. She could feel heat radiating from it,
slight but definite, like the rumor of a distant sun. Everyone about
her was frozen with horror. More terrifying than a light where none was
possible was the presence of heat. It simply could not be. And yet it
was.
She, along with the others, waited and watched
for…something. She could not say what. The light shifted slowly in the
sky. It was small, intense, ugly.
Then the light screamed.
She woke up.
“Wow,” she said. “I just had the weirdest
dream.”
“Did you?” Alan said casually.
“Yeah. There was this light in the sky. It was
like a nuclear bomb or something. I mean, it didn’t look anything like
a nuclear bomb, but it was terrifying the way a nuclear bomb would be.
Everybody was staring at it. We couldn’t move. And then…” She shook her
head. “I lost it. I’m sorry. It was so just so strange. I can’t put it
into words.”
“Never mind that,” Consuelo said cheerily.
“We’re getting some great readings down below the surface. Fractional
polymers, long-chain hydrocarbons…fabulous stuff. You really should try
to stay awake to catch some of this.”
She was fully awake now, and not feeling too
happy about it. “I guess that means that nobody’s come up with any good
ideas yet on how I might get down.”
“Uh…what do you mean?”
“Because if they had, you wouldn’t be so
goddamned up- beat, would you?”
“Some body
woke up on the wrong side of the bed,” Alan said. “Please remember that
there are certain words we don’t use in public.”
“I’m sorry,” Consuelo said. “I was just trying
to—”
“—distract me. Okay, fine. What the hey. I can
play along.” Lizzie pulled herself together. “So your findings
mean…what? Life?”
“I keep telling you guys. It’s too early to
make that kind of determination. What we’ve got so far are just some
very, very interesting readings.”
“Tell her the big news,” Alan said.
“Brace yourself. We’ve got a real ocean! Not
this tiny little two-hundred-by-fifty-miles glorified lake we’ve been
calling a sea, but a genuine ocean! Sonar readings show that what we
see is just an evaporation pan atop a thirty- kilometer-thick cap of
ice. The real ocean lies underneath, two hundred kilometers deep.”
“Jesus.” Lizzie caught herself. “I mean, gee
whiz. Is there any way of getting the robofish down into it?”
“How do you think we got the depth readings?
It’s headed down there right now. There’s a chimney through the ice
right at the center of the visible sea. That’s what replenishes the
surface liquid. And directly under the hole, there’s—guess
what?—volcanic vents!”
“So does that mean…?”
“If you use the L-word again,” Consuelo said,
“I’ll spit.”
Lizzie grinned. That
was the Consuelo Hong she knew. “What about the tidal data? I thought
the lack of orbital perturbation ruled out a significant ocean
entirely.”
“Well, Toronto thinks…”
At first, Lizzie was able to follow the
reasoning of the planetary geologists back in Toronto. Then it got
harder. Then it became a drone. As she drifted off into sleep, she had
time enough to be peevishly aware that she really shouldn’t be dropping
off to sleep all the time like this. She oughtn’t to be so tired. She…
She found herself in the drowned city again.
She still couldn’t see anything, but she knew it was a city because she
could hear the sound of rioters smashing store windows. Their voices
swelled into howling screams and receded into angry mutters, like a
violent surf washing through the streets. She began to edge away
backward.
Somebody spoke into her ear.
“Why did you do this to us?”
“I didn’t do anything to you.”
“You brought us knowledge.”
“What knowledge?”
“You said you were not us.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“You should never have told us that.”
“You wanted me to lie?”
horri-fied confusion. “Falsehood. What a
distressing idea.”
The smashing noises were getting louder.
Somebody was splintering a door with an axe. Explosions. Breaking
glass. She heard wild laughter. Shrieks. “We’ve got to get out of
here.”
“Why did you send the messenger?”
“What messenger?”
“The star! The star! The star!”
“Which star?”
“There are two stars?”
“There are billions of stars.”
“No more! Please! Stop! No more!”
She was awake.
“Hello, yes, I
appreciate that the young lady is in extreme danger, but I really don’t
think she should have used the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Greene,” Lizzie said, “do we really have to
put up with this?”
“Well, considering how many billions of
public-sector dollars it took to bring us here…yes. Yes, we do. I can
even think of a few backup astronauts who would say that a little
upbeat web-posting was a pretty small price to pay for the privilege.”
“Oh, barf.”
“I’m switching to a private channel,” Alan
said calmly. The background radiation changed subtly. A faint, granular
crackling that faded away when she tried to focus on it. In a
controlled, angry voice Alan said, “O’Brien, just what the hell is
going on with you?”
“Look, I’m sorry, I apologize, I’m a little
excited about something. How long was I out? Where’s Consuelo? I’m
going to say the L-word. And the I-word as well. We have life.
Intelligent life!”
“It’s been a few hours. Consuelo is sleeping.
O’Brien, I hate to say this, but you’re not sounding at all rational.”
“There’s a perfectly logical reason for that.
Okay, it’s a little strange, and maybe it won’t sound perfectly logical
to you initially, but…look, I’ve been having sequential dreams. I think
they’re significant. Let me tell you about them.”
And she did so. At length.
When she was done, there was a long silence.
Finally, Alan said, “Lizzie, think. Why would something like that
communicate to you in your dreams? Does that make any sense?”
“I think it’s the only way it can. I think
it’s how it communicates among itself. It doesn’t move—motion is an
alien and delightful concept to it—and it wasn’t aware that its
component parts were capable of individualization. That sounds like
some kind of broadcast thought to me. Like some kind of wireless
distributed network.”
“You know the medical kit in your suit? I want
you to open it up. Feel around for the bottle that’s braille-coded
twenty-seven, okay?”
“Alan, I do not
need an antipsychotic!”
“I’m not saying you need it. But wouldn’t you
be happier knowing you had it in you?” This was Alan at his smoothest.
Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “Don’t you think that would help us
accept what you’re saying?”
“Oh, all right!” She drew in an arm from the
suit’s arm, felt around for the med kit, and drew out a pill, taking
every step by the regs, checking the coding four times before she put
it in her mouth and once more (each pill was individually braille-coded
as well) before she swallowed it. “Now will you listen to me? I’m quite
serious about this.” She yawned. “I really do think that…” She yawned
again. “That…
“Oh, piffle.”
Once more into the breach, dear friends, she
thought, and plunged deep, deep into the sea of darkness. This time,
though, she felt she had a handle on it. The city was drowned because
it existed at the bottom of a lightless ocean. It was alive, and it fed
off of volcanic heat. That was why it considered up and down hierarchic
values. Up was colder, slower, less alive. Down was hotter, faster,
more filled with thought. The city/entity was a collective life-form,
like a Portuguese man-of-war or a massively hyperlinked expert network.
It communicated within itself by some form of electromagnetism. Call it
mental radio. It communicated with her that same way.
“I think I understand you now.”
“Don’t understand—run!”
Somebody impatiently seized her elbow and
hurried her along. Faster she went, and faster. She couldn’t see a
thing. It was like running down a lightless tunnel a hundred miles
underground at midnight. Glass crunched underfoot. The ground was
uneven and sometimes she stumbled. Whenever she did, her unseen
companion yanked her up again.
“Why are you so slow?”
“I didn’t know I was.”
“Believe me, you are.”
“Why are we running?”
“We are being pursued.” They turned suddenly,
into a side passage, and were jolting over rubbled ground. Sirens
wailed. Things collapsed. Mobs surged.
“Well, you’ve certainly got the motion thing
down pat.”
Impatiently. “It’s only a metaphor. You don’t
think this is a real city, do you?
Why are you so dim? Why are you so difficult to communicate with? Why
are you so slow?”
“I didn’t know I was.”
Vast irony. “Believe me, you are.”
“What can I do?”
“Run!”
Whooping and laughter. At first, Lizzie
confused it with the sounds of mad destruction in her dream. Then she
recognized the voices as belonging to Alan and Consuelo. “How long was
I out?” she asked.
“You were out?”
“No more than a minute or two,” Alan said.
“It’s not important. Check out the visual the robofish just gave us.”
Consuelo squirted the image to Lizzie.
Lizzie gasped. “Oh! Oh, my.”
It was beautiful. Beautiful in the way that
the great European cathedrals were, and yet at the same time undeniably
organic. The structure was tall and slender, and fluted and buttressed
and absolutely ravishing. It had grown about a volcanic vent, with
openings near the bottom to let sea water in, and then followed the
rising heat upward. Occasional channels led outward and then looped
back into the main body again. It loomed higher than seemed possible
(but it was underwater, of course,
and on a low-gravity world at that), a complexly layered congeries of
tubes like church-organ pipes, or deep-sea worms lovingly intertwined.
It had the elegance of design that only a
living organism can have.
“Okay,” Lizzie said. “Consuelo. You’ve got to
admit that—”
“I’ll go as far as ‘complex prebiotic
chemistry.’ Anything more than that is going to have to wait for more
definite readings.” Cautious as her words were, Consuelo’s voice rang
with triumph. It said, clearer than words, that she could happily die
then and there, a satisfied xenochemist.
Alan, almost equally elated, said, “Watch what
happens when we intensify the image.”
The structure shifted from gray to a muted
rainbow of pastels, rose bleeding into coral, sunrise yellow into
winterice blue. It was breathtaking.
“Wow.” For an instant, even her own death
seemed unimportant. Relatively unimportant, anyway.
So thinking, she cycled back again into sleep.
And fell down into the darkness, into the noisy clamor of her mind.
It was hellish. The city was gone, replaced
by a matrix of noise: hammerings, clatterings, sudden crashes. She
started forward and walked into an upright steel pipe. Staggering back,
she stumbled into another. An engine started up somewhere nearby, and
gigantic gears meshed noisily, grinding something that gave off a metal
shriek. The floor shook underfoot. Lizzie decided it was wisest to stay
put.
A familiar presence, permeated with despair.
“Why did you do this to me?”
“What have I done?”
“I used to be everything.”
Something nearby began pounding like a
pile-driver. It was giving her a headache. She had to shout to be heard
over its din. “You’re still something!”
Quietly. “I’m nothing.”
“That’s…not true! You’re…here! You exist!
That’s…something!”
A world-encompassing sadness. “False comfort.
What a pointless thing to offer.”
She was conscious again.
Consuelo was saying something. “…isn’t going
to like it.”
“The spiritual wellness professionals back
home all agree that this is the best possible course of action for
her.”
“Oh, please!”
Alan had to be the most anal-retentive person
Lizzie knew. Consuelo was definitely the most phlegmatic. Things had to
be running pretty tense for both of them to be bickering like this.
“Um…guys?” Lizzie said. “I’m awake.”
There was a moment’s silence, not unlike those
her parents had shared when she was little and she’d wandered into one
of their arguments. Then Consuelo said, a little too brightly, “Hey,
it’s good to have you back,” and Alan said, “NAFTASA wants you to speak
with someone. Hold on. I’ve got a recording of her first transmission
cued up and ready for you.”
A woman’s voice came online. “This is Dr. Alma Rosenblum. Elizabeth, I’d like to
talk with you about how you’re feeling. I appreciate that the time
delay between Earth and Titan is going to make our conversation a
little awkward at first, but I’m confident that the two of us can work
through it.”
“What kind of crap is this?” Lizzie said
angrily. “Who is this woman?”
“NAFTASA thought it would help if you—”
“She’s a grief counselor, isn’t she?”
“Technically, she’s a transition therapist.”
Alan said.
“Look, I don’t buy into any of that
touchy-feely Newage”—she deliberately mispronounced the word to rhyme
with sewage—“stuff. Anyway, what’s the hurry? You guys haven’t given up
on me, have you?”
“Uh…”
“You’ve been asleep for hours,” Consuelo said.
“We’ve done a little weather modeling in your absence. Maybe we should
share it with you.”
She squirted the info to Lizzie’s suit, and
Lizzie scrolled it up on her visor. A primitive simulation showed the
evaporation lake beneath her with an overlay of liquid temperatures. It
was only a few degrees warmer than the air above it, but that was
enough to create a massive updraft from the lake’s center. An overlay
of tiny blue arrows showed the direction of local microcurrents of air
coming together to form a spiraling shaft that rose over two kilometers
above the surface before breaking and spilling westward.
A new overlay put a small blinking light 800
meters above the lake surface. That represented her. Tiny red arrows
showed her projected drift.
According to this, she would go around and
around in a circle over the lake for approximately forever. Her
ballooning rig wasn’t designed to go high enough for the winds to blow
her back over the land. Her suit wasn’t designed to float. Even if she
managed to bring herself down for a gentle landing, once she hit the
lake she was going to sink like a stone. She wouldn’t drown. But she
wouldn’t make it to shore either.
Which meant that she was going to die.
Involuntarily, tears welled up in Lizzie’s
eyes. She tried to blink them away, as angry at the humiliation of
crying at a time like this as she was at the stupidity of her death
itself. “Damn it, don’t let me die like this!
Not from my own incompetence, for pity’s sake!”
“Nobody’s said anything about incompetence,”
Alan began soothingly.
In that instant, the follow-up message from
Dr. Alma Rosenblum arrived from Earth. “Yes,
I’m a grief counselor, Elizabeth. You’re facing an emotionally
significant milestone in your life, and it’s important that you
understand and embrace it. That’s my job. To help you comprehend the
significance and necessity and—yes—even the beauty of death.”
“Private channel please!” Lizzie took several
deep cleansing breaths to calm herself. Then, more reasonably, she
said, “Alan, I’m a Catholic, okay?
If I’m going to die, I don’t want a grief counselor, I want a goddamned
priest.” Abruptly, she yawned. “Oh, fuck. Not again.” She yawned twice
more. “A priest, understand? Wake me up when he’s online.”
Then she again was standing at the bottom of
her mind, in the blank expanse of where the drowned city had been.
Though she could see nothing, she felt certain that she stood at the
center of a vast, featureless plain, one so large she could walk across
it forever and never arrive anywhere. She sensed that she was in the
aftermath of a great struggle. Or maybe it was just a lull.
A great, tense silence surrounded her.
“Hello?” she said. The word echoed
soundlessly, absence upon absence.
At last that gentle voice said, “You seem
different.”
“I’m going to die,” Lizzie said. “Knowing that
changes a person.” The ground was covered with soft ash, as if from an
enormous conflagration. She didn’t want to think about what it was that
had burned. The smell of it filled her nostrils.
“Death. We understand this concept.”
“Do you?”
“We have understood it for a long time.”
“Have you?”
“Ever since you brought it to us.”
“Me?”
“You brought us the concept of individuality.
It is the same thing.”
Awareness dawned. “Culture shock! That’s what
all this is about, isn’t it? You didn’t know there could be more than
one sentient being in existence. You didn’t know you lived at the
bottom of an ocean on a small world inside a Universe with billions of
galaxies. I brought you more information than you could swallow in one
bite, and now you’re choking on it.”
Mournfully: “Choking. What a grotesque
concept.”
“Wake up, Lizzie!”
She woke up. “I think I’m getting somewhere,”
she said. Then she laughed.
“O’Brien,” Alan said carefully. “Why did you
just laugh?”
“Because I’m not getting anywhere, am I? I’m
becalmed here, going around and around in a very slow circle. And I’m
down to my last”—she checked—“twenty hours of oxygen. And nobody’s
going to rescue me. And I’m going to die. But other than that, I’m
making terrific progress.”
“O’Brien, you’re…”
“I’m okay, Alan. A little frazzled. Maybe a
bit too emotionally honest. But under the circumstances, I think that’s
permitted, don’t you?”
“Lizzie, we have your priest. His name is
Father Laferrier. The Archdiocese of Montreal arranged a hookup for
him.”
“Montreal? Why Montreal? No, don’t
explain—more NAFTASA politics, right?”
“Actually, my brother-in-law is a Catholic,
and I asked him who was good.”
She was silent for a touch. “I’m sorry, Alan.
I don’t know what got into me.”
“You’ve been under a lot of pressure. Here.
I’ve got him on tape.”
“Hello, Ms. O’Brien,
I’m Father Laferrier. I’ve talked with the officials here, and they’ve
promised that you and I can talk privately, and that they won’t record
what’s said. So if you want to make your confession now, I’m ready for
you.”
Lizzie checked the specs and switched over to
a channel that she hoped was really and truly private. Best not to get
too specific about the embarrassing stuff, just in case. She could
confess her sins by category.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has
been two months since my last confession. I’m going to die, and maybe
I’m not entirely sane, but I think I’m in communication with an alien
intelligence. I think it’s a terrible sin to pretend I’m not.” She
paused. “I mean, I don’t know if it’s a sin
or not, but I’m sure it’s wrong.”
She paused again. “I’ve been guilty of anger, and pride, and envy, and
lust. I brought the knowledge of death to an innocent world. I…” She
felt herself drifting off again, and hastily said, “For these and all
my sins, I am most heartily sorry, and beg the forgiveness of God and
the absolution and…”
“And what?” That gentle voice again. She was
in that strange dark mental space once more, asleep but cognizant,
rational but accepting any absurdity, no matter how great. There were
no cities, no towers, no ashes, no plains. Nothing but the negation of
negation.
When she didn’t answer the question, the voice
said, “Does it have to do with your death?”
“Yes.”
“I’m dying too.”
“What?”
“Half of us are gone already. The rest are
shutting down. We thought we were one. You showed us we were not. We
thought we were everything. You showed us the Universe.”
“So you’re just going to die?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
Thinking as quickly and surely as she ever had
before in her life, Lizzie said, “Let me show you something.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
There was a brief, terse silence. Then: “Very
well.”
Summoning all her mental acuity, Lizzie
thought back to that instant when she had first seen the city/entity on
the fishcam. The soaring majesty of it. The slim grace. And then the
colors, like dawn upon a glacial ice field: subtle, profound, riveting.
She called back her emotions in that instant, and threw in how she’d
felt the day she’d seen her baby brother’s birth, the raw rasp of cold
air in her lungs as she stumbled to the topmost peak of her first
mountain, the wonder of the Taj Mahal at sunset, the sense of wild
daring when she’d first put her hand down a boy’s trousers, the
prismatic crescent of atmosphere at the Earth’s rim when seen from low
orbit…Everything she had, she threw into that image.
“This is how you look,” she said. “This is
what we’d both be losing if you were no more. If you were human, I’d
rip off your clothes and do you on the floor right now. I wouldn’t care
who was watching. I wouldn’t give a damn.”
The gentle voice said, “Oh.”
And then she was back in her suit again. She
could smell her own sweat, sharp with fear. She could feel her body,
the subtle aches where the harness pulled against her flesh, the way
her feet, hanging free, were bloated with blood. Everything was
crystalline clear and absolutely real. All that had come before seemed
like a bad dream.
“This is DogsofSETI.
What a wonderful discovery you’ve made—intelligent life in our own
Solar System! Why is the government trying to cover this up?”
“Uh…”
“I’m Joseph Devries.
This alien monster must be destroyed immediately. We can’t afford the
possibility that it’s hostile.”
“StudPudgie07 here.
What’s the dirt behind this ‘lust’ thing? Advanced minds need to know!
If O’Brien isn’t going to share the details, then why’d she bring it up
in the first place?”
“Hola, soy Pedro
Domínguez. Como abogado, ¡esto me parece ultrajante! Por
qué NAFTASA nos oculta esta información?”
“Alan!” Lizzie shouted. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Script-bunnies,” Alan said. He sounded
simultaneously apologetic and annoyed. “They hacked into your
confession and apparently you said something…”
“We’re sorry, Lizzie,” Consuelo said. “We
really are. If it’s any consolation, the Archdiocese of Montreal is
hopping mad. They’re talking about taking legal action.”
“Legal action? What the hell do I care
about…?”She stopped.
Without her willing it, one hand rose above
her head and seized the number 10 rope.
Don’t do that, she thought.
The other hand went out to the side, tightened
against the number 9 rope. She hadn’t willed that either. When she
tried to draw it back to her, it refused to obey. Then the first
hand—her right hand—moved a few inches upward and seized its rope in an
iron grip. Her left hand slid a good half-foot up its rope. Inch by
inch, hand over hand, she climbed up toward the balloon.
I’ve gone mad, she thought. Her right hand was
gripping the rip panel now, and the other tightly clenched rope 8.
Hanging effortlessly from them, she swung her feet upward. She drew her
knees against her chest and kicked.
No!
The fabric ruptured and she began to fall.
A voice she could barely make out said, “Don’t
panic. We’re going to bring you down.”
All in a panic, she snatched at the 9 rope and
the 4 rope. But they were limp in her hand, useless, falling at the
same rate she was.
“Be patient.”
“I don’t want to die, goddamnit!”
“Then don’t.”
She was falling helplessly. It was a
terrifying sensation, an endless plunge into whiteness, slowed somewhat
by the tangle of ropes and balloon trailing behind her. She spread out
her arms and legs like a starfish, and felt the air resistance slow her
yet further. The sea rushed up at her with appalling speed. It seemed
like she’d been falling forever. It was over in an instant.
Without volition, Lizzie kicked free of
balloon and harness, drew her feet together, pointed her toes, and
positioned herself perpendicular to Titan’s surface. She smashed
through the surface of the sea, sending enormous gouts of liquid
splashing upward. It knocked the breath out of her. Red pain exploded
within. She thought maybe she’d broken a few ribs.
“You taught us so many things,” the gentle
voice said. “You gave us so much.”
“Help me!” The water was dark around her. The
light was fading.
“Multiplicity. Motion. Lies. You showed us a
universe infinitely larger than the one we had known.”
“Look. Save my life and we’ll call it even.
Deal?”
“Gratitude. Such an essential concept.”
“Thanks. I think.”
And then she saw the turbot swimming toward
her in a burst of silver bubbles. She held out her arms and the robot
fish swam into them. Her fingers closed about the handles which
Consuelo had used to wrestle the device into the sea. There was a jerk,
so hard that she thought for an instant that her arms would be ripped
out of their sockets. Then the robofish was surging forward and upward
and it was all she could do to keep her grip.
“Oh, dear God!” Lizzie cried involuntarily.
“We think we can bring you to shore. It will
not be easy.”
Lizzie held on for dear life. At first she
wasn’t at all sure she could. But then she pulled herself forward, so
that she was almost astride the speeding mechanical fish, and her
confidence returned. She could do this. It wasn’t any harder than the
time she’d had the flu and aced her gymnastics final on parallel bars
and horse anyway. It was just a matter of grit and determination. She
just had to keep her wits about her. “Listen,” she said. “If you’re
really grateful…”
“We are listening.”
“We gave you all those new concepts. There
must be things you know that we don’t.”
A brief silence, the equivalent of who knew
how much thought. “Some of our concepts might cause you dislocation.” A
pause. “But in the long run, you will be much better off. The scars
will heal. You will rebuild. The chances of your destroying yourselves
are well within the limits of acceptability.”
“Destroying ourselves?” For a second, Lizzie
couldn’t breathe. It had taken hours for the city/entity to come to
terms with the alien concepts she’d dumped upon it. Human beings
thought and lived at a much slower rate than it did. How long would
those hours be, translated into human time? Months? Years? Centuries?
It had spoken of scars and rebuilding. That didn’t sound good at all.
Then the robofish accelerated, so quickly that
Lizzie almost lost her grip. The dark waters were whirling around her,
and unseen flecks of frozen material were bouncing from her helmet. She
laughed wildly. Suddenly, she felt great!
“Bring it on,” she said. “I’ll take everything
you’ve got.”
It was going to be one hell of a ride.
Eleanor Arnason
(tribute page <www.tc.umn.edu/~d-lena/
Eleanor%20&%20trog.html>) lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She
has been publishing interesting, ambitious SF since the 1970s, but her
major work began appearing and drawing attention only in the 1990s,
beginning with the novels A Woman of the Iron People (1991) and Ring of Swords (1993). Since then she has published a number of
stories, most of them novellas, set either in the Hwarhath universe of
Ring of Swords, or in the Lydia Duluth series.
Her work is notable for its political subtexts, its feminist spin
without feminist rhetoric, and investigation of gender roles. The
Goxhat are an alien race in the Duluth universe whose individual bodies
(only vaguely humanoid—they have four eyes, etc.), some males, some
females, some neuter, together form gestalt or group personalities.
Goxhat are really weird, but in their inner lives quite human, and
often funny.
“Knapsack Poems”
appeared in Asimov’s and has only
Goxhat characters, with the central character a traveling poet whose
selves continually argue and discuss and have sex, who is poor and
willing to sell poetic praise for food or money. Many things human are
called into question in this amusing tale as an alien poet just trying
to get by reinvents something humans already have.
Within this person of eight bodies,
thirty-two eyes, and the usual number of orifices and limbs, resides a
spirit as restless as gossamer on wind. In youth, I dreamed of fame as
a merchant-traveler. In later years, realizing that many of my parts
were prone to motion sickness, I thought of scholarship or accounting.
But I lacked the Great Determination that is necessary for both trades.
My abilities are spontaneous and brief, flaring and vanishing like a
falling star. For me to spend my life adding numbers or looking through
dusty documents would be like “lighting a great hall with a single
lantern bug” or “watering a great garden with a drop of dew.”
Finally, after consulting the care-givers in
my crèche, I decided to become a traveling poet. It’s a
strenuous living and does not pay well, but it suits me.
Climbing through the mountains west of Ibri, I
heard a wishik call, then saw the
animal, its wings like white petals, perched on a bare branch.
One of my bodies recited the poem. Another
wrote it down, while still others ranged ahead, looking for signs of
habitation. As a precaution, I carried cudgels as well as pens and
paper. One can never be sure what will appear in the country west of
Ibri. The great poet Raging Fountain died there of a combination of
diarrhea and malicious ghosts. Other writers, hardly less famous, have
been killed by monsters or bandits, or, surviving these, met their end
at the hands of dissatisfied patrons.
The Bane of Poets died before my birth. Its
1 ghost or
ghosts offered Raging Fountain the fatal bowl of porridge. But other
patrons still remain “on steep slopes and in stony dales.”
Why go to such a place, you may be wondering?
Beyond Ibri’s spiny mountains lie the wide fields of Greater and Lesser
Ib, prosperous lands well-known for patronage of the arts.
Late in the afternoon, I realized I would find
no refuge for the night. Dark snow-clouds hid the hills in front of me.
Behind me, low in the south, the sun shed pale light. My shadows, long
and many-limbed, danced ahead of me on the rutted road.
My most poetic self spoke:
Several of my other selves frowned. My scribe
wrote the poem down with evident reluctance.
“Too obvious,” muttered a cudgel-carrier.
Another self agreed. “Too much like Raging
Fountain in his/her mode of melancholy complaint.”
Far ahead, a part of me cried alarm. I
suspended the critical discussion and hurried forward in a clump, my
clubs raised and ready for use.
Soon, not even breathless, I stopped at a
place I knew by reputation: the Tooth River. Wide and shallow, it ran
around pointed stones, well-exposed this time of year and as sharp as
the teeth of predators. On the far side of the river were bare slopes
that led toward cloudy mountains. On the near side of the river, low
cliffs cast their shadows over a broad shore. My best scout was there,
next to a bundle of cloth. The scout glanced up, saw the rest of me,
and—with deft fingers—undid the blanket folds.
Two tiny forms lay curled at the blanket’s
center. A child of one year, holding itself in its arms.
“Alive?” I asked myself.
The scout crouched closer. “One body is and
looks robust. The other body—” my scout touched it gently “—is cold.”
Standing among myself, I groaned and sighed.
There was no problem understanding what had happened. A person had
given birth. Either the child had been unusually small, or the other
parts had died. For some reason, the parent had been traveling alone.
Maybe he/she/it had been a petty merchant or a farmer driven off the
land by poverty. If not these, then a wandering thief or someone
outlawed for heinous crimes. A person with few resources. In any case,
he/she/it had carried the child to this bitter place, where the child’s
next-to- last part expired.
Imagine standing on the river’s icy edge,
holding a child who had become a single body. The parent could not bear
to raise an infant so incomplete! What parent could? One did no
kindness by raising such a cripple to be a monster among ordinary
people.
Setting the painful burden down, the parent
crossed the river.
I groaned a second time. My most poetic self
said:
The rest of me hummed agreement. The poet
added a second piece of ancient wisdom:
I hummed a second time.
The scout lifted the child from its blanket.
“It’s female.”
The baby woke and cried, waving her four arms,
kicking her four legs, and urinating. My scout held her as far away as
possible. Beyond doubt, she was a fine, loud, active mite! But
incomplete. “Why did you wake her?” asked a cudgel-carrier. “She should
be left to die in peace.”
“No,” said the scout. “She will come with me.”
“Me! What do you mean by me?” my other parts
cried.
There is neither art nor wisdom in a noisy
argument. Therefore, I will not describe the discussion that followed
as night fell. Snowflakes drifted from the sky—slowly at first, then
more and more thickly. I spoke with the rudeness people reserve for
themselves in privacy; and the answers I gave myself were sharp indeed.
Words like pointed stones, like the boulders in Tooth River, flew back
and forth. Ah! The wounds I inflicted and suffered! Is anything worse
than internal dispute?
The scout would not back down. She had fallen
in love with the baby, as defective as it was. The cudgel-bearers,
sturdy males, were outraged. The poet and the scribe, refined neuters,
were repulsed. The rest of me was female and a bit more tender.
I had reached the age when fertile eggs were
increasingly unlikely. In spite of my best efforts, I had gained
neither fame nor money. What respectable goxhat would mate with a
vagabond like me? What crèche would offer to care for my
offspring? Surely this fragment of a child was better than nothing.
“No!” said my males and neuters. “This is not
a person! One body alone can never know togetherness or integration!”
But my female selves edged slowly toward the
scout’s opinion. Defective the child certainly was. Still, she was
alive and goxhat, her darling little limbs waving fiercely and her
darling mouth making noises that would shame a monster.
Most likely, she would die. The rest of her
had. Better that she die in someone’s arms, warm and comfortable, than
in the toothy mouth of a prowling predator. The scout rewrapped the
child in the blanket.
It was too late to ford the river. I made camp
under a cliff, huddling together for warmth, my arms around myself, the
baby in the middle of the heap I made.
When morning came, the sky was clear. Snow
sparkled everywhere. I rose, brushed myself off, gathered my gear, and
crossed the river. The water was low, as I expected this time of year,
but ice-cold. My feet were numb by the time I reached the far side. My
teeth chattered on every side like castanets. The baby, awakened by the
noise, began to cry. The scout gave her a sweet cake. That stopped the
crying for a while.
At mid-day, I came in sight of a keep. My
hearts lifted with hope. Alas! Approaching it, I saw the walls were
broken.
The ruination was recent. I walked through one
of the gaps and found a courtyard, full of snowy heaps. My scouts
spread out and investigated. The snow hid bodies, as I expected. Their
eyes were gone, but most of the rest remained, preserved by cold and
the season’s lack of bugs.
“This happened a day or two ago,” my scouts
said. “Before the last snow, but not by much. Wishik
found them and took what they could, but didn’t have time—before the
storm—to find other predators and lead them here. This is why the
bodies are still intact. The wishik
can pluck out eyes, but skin is too thick for them to penetrate. They
need the help of other animals, such as hirg.”
One of the scouts crouched by a body and brushed its rusty back hair.
“I won’t be able to bury these. There are too many.”
“How many goxhat are here?” asked my scribe,
taking notes.
“It’s difficult to say for certain. Three or
four, I suspect, all good-sized. A parent and children would be my
guess.”
I entered the keep building and found more
bodies. Not many. Most of the inhabitants had fallen in the courtyard.
There was a nursery with scattered toys, but no children.
“Ah! Ah!” I cried, reflecting on the briefness
of life and the frequency with which one encounters violence and
sorrow.
My poet said:
Finally I found a room with no bodies or toys,
nothing to remind me of mortality. I lit a fire and settled for the
night. The baby fussed. My scout cleaned her, then held her against a
nursing bud—for comfort only; the scout had no milk. The baby sucked. I
ate my meager rations. Darkness fell. My thirty-two eyes reflected
firelight. After a while, a ghost arrived. Glancing up, I saw it in the
doorway. It looked quite ordinary: three goxhat bodies with rusty hair.
“Who are you?” one of my scouts asked.
“The former owner of this keep, or parts of
her. My name was Content-in-Solitude; and I lived here with three
children, all lusty and numerous.—Don’t worry.”
My cudgel-carriers had risen, cudgels in hand.
“I’m a good ghost. I’m still in this world
because my death was so recent and traumatic. As soon as I’ve gathered
myself together, and my children have done the same, we’ll be off to a
better place.
3
“I stopped here to tell you our names, so they
will be remembered.”
“Content-in-Solitude,” muttered my scribe,
writing.
“My children were Virtue, Vigor, and Ferric
Oxide. Fine offspring! They should have outlived me. Our killer is Bent
Foot, a bandit in these mountains. He took my grandchildren to raise as
his own, since his female parts—all dead now—produced nothing
satisfactory. Mutant children with twisted feet and nasty dispositions!
No good will come of them; and their ghosts will make these mountains
worse than ever. Tell my story, so others may be warned.”
“Yes,” my poet said in agreement. The rest of
me hummed.
For a moment, the three bodies remained in the
doorway. Then they drew together and merged into one. “You see! It’s
happening! I am becoming a single ghost! Well, then. I’d better be off
to find the rest of me, and my children, and a better home for all of
us.”
The rest of the night was uneventful. I slept
well, gathered around the fire, warmed by its embers and my bodies’
heat. If I had dreams, I don’t remember them. At dawn, I woke. By
sunrise, I was ready to leave. Going out of the building, I discovered
three hirg in the courtyard: huge
predators with shaggy, dull-brown fur. Wishik
fluttered around them as they tore into the bodies of Content and her
children. I took one look, then retreated, leaving the keep by another
route.
That day passed in quiet travel. My poet spoke
no poetry. The rest of me was equally silent, brooding on the ruined
keep and its ghost.
I found no keep to shelter me that night or
the next or the next. Instead, I camped out. My scout fed the baby on
thin porridge. It ate and kept the food down, but was becoming
increasingly fretful and would not sleep unless the scout held it to a
nursing bud. Sucking on the dry knob of flesh, it fell asleep.
“I don’t mind,” said the scout. “Though I’m
beginning to worry. The child needs proper food.”
“Better to leave it by the way,” a male said.
“Death by cold isn’t a bad ending.”
“Nor death by dehydration,” my other male
added.
The scout looked stubborn and held the child
close.
Four days after I left the ruined keep, I came
to another building, this one solid and undamaged.
My scribe said, “I know the lord here by
reputation. She is entirely female and friendly to the womanly aspects
of a person. The neuter parts she tolerates. But she doesn’t like
males. Her name is The Testicle Straightener.”
My cudgel-carriers shuddered. The scribe and
poet looked aloof, as they inevitably did in such situations. Cleareyed
and rational, free from sexual urges, they found the rest of me a bit
odd.
The scout carrying the baby said, “The child
needs good food and warmth and a bath. For that matter, so do I.”
Gathering myself together, I strode to the
gate and knocked. After several moments, it swung open. Soldiers looked
out. There were two of them: one tall and gray, the other squat and
brown. Their bodies filled the entrance, holding spears and axes. Their
eyes gleamed green and yellow.
“I am a wandering poet, seeking shelter for
the night. I bring news from the south, which your lord might find
useful.”
The eyes peered closely, then the soldiers
parted—gray to the left, brown to the right—and let me in.
Beyond the gate was a snowy courtyard. This
one held no
bodies. Instead, the snow was trampled and
urine-marked. A living place! Though empty at the moment, except for
the two soldiers who guarded the gate.
I waited in an anxious cluster. At length, a
servant arrived and looked me over. “You need a bath and clean clothes.
Our lord is fastidious and dislikes guests who stink. Come with me.”
I followed the servant into the keep and down
a flight of stairs. Metal lamps were fastened to the walls. Most were
dark, but a few shone, casting a dim light. The servant had three
sturdy bodies, all covered with black hair.
Down and down. The air grew warm and moist. A
faint, distinctive aroma filled it.
“There are hot springs in this part of Ibri,”
the servant said. “This keep was built on top of one; and there is a
pool in the basement, which always steams and smells.”
Now I recognized the aroma: rotten eggs.
We came to a large room, paved with stone and
covered by a broad, barrel vault. Metal lanterns hung from the ceiling
on chains. As was the case with the lamps on the stairway, most were
dark. But a few flickered dimly. I could see the bathing pool: round
and carved from bedrock. Steps went down into it. Wisps of steam rose.
“Undress,” said the servant. “I’ll bring soap
and towels.”
I complied eagerly. Only my scout hesitated,
holding the baby.
“I’ll help you with the mite,” said my scribe,
standing knee-deep in hot water.
The scout handed the baby over and undressed.
Soon I was frolicking in the pool, diving and
spouting. Cries of joy rang in the damp, warm room. Is anything better
than a hot bath after a journey?
The scout took the baby back and moved to the
far side of the pool. When the servant returned, the scout sank down,
holding the baby closely, hiding it in shadow. Wise mite, it did not
cry!
The rest of me got busy, scrubbing shoulders
and backs. Ah, the pleasure of warm lather!
Now and then, I gave a little yip of
happiness. The servant watched with satisfaction, his/her/its arms
piled high with towels.
On the far side of the pool, my best scout
crouched, nursing the babe on a dry bud and watching the servant with
hooded eyes.
At last, I climbed out, dried off, and
dressed. In the confusion—there was a lot of me—the scout managed to
keep the baby concealed. Why, I did not know, but the scout was prudent
and usually had a good reason for every action, though parts of me
still doubted the wisdom of keeping the baby. There would be time to
talk all of this over, when the servant was gone.
He/she/it led me up a new set of stairs. The
climb was long. The servant entertained me with the following story.
The keep had a pulley system, which had been
built by an ingenious traveling plumber. This lifted buckets of hot
water from the spring to a tank on top of the keep. From there the
water descended through metal pipes, carried by the downward propensity
that is innate in water. The pipes heated every room.
“What powers the pulley system?” my scribe
asked, notebook in hand.
“A treadmill,” said the servant.
“And what powers the treadmill?”
“Criminals and other people who have offended
the lord. No keep in Ibri is more comfortable,” the servant continued
with pride. “This is what happens when a lord is largely or entirely
female. As the old proverb says, male bodies give a person
forcefulness. Neuter bodies give thoughtfulness and clarity of vision.
But nurture and comfort come from a person’s female selves.”
Maybe, I thought. But were the people in the
treadmill comfortable?
The servant continued the story. The plumber
had gone east to Ib and built other heated buildings: palaces, public
baths, hotels, hospitals, and crèches. In payment for this work,
several of the local lords mated with the plumber; and the local
crèches vied to raise the plumber’s children, who were numerous
and healthy.
“A fine story, with a happy ending,” I said,
thinking of my fragment of a child, nursing on the scout’s dry bud.
Envy, the curse of all artists and artisans, roiled in my hearts. Why
had I never won the right to lay fertile eggs? Why were my purses
empty? Why did I have to struggle to protect my testes and to stay off
treadmills, while this plumber—surely not a better person than
I—enjoyed fame, honor, and fertility?
The guest room was large and handsome, with a
modern wonder next to it: a defecating closet. Inside the closet, water
came from the wall in two metal pipes, which ended in faucets. “Hot and
cold,” said the servant, pointing. Below the faucets was a metal basin,
decorated with reliefs of frolicking goxhat. Two empty buckets stood
next to the basin.
The servant said, “If you need to wash
something, your hands or feet or any other part, fill the basin with
water. Use the buckets to empty the basin; and after you use the
defecating throne, empty the buckets down it. This reduces the smell
and gets rid of the dirty water. As I said, our lord is fastidious; and
we have learned from her example. The plumber helped, by providing us
with so much water.
“I’ll wait in the hall. When you’re ready to
meet the lord, I’ll guide you to her.”
“Thank you,” said my scribe, always courteous.
I changed into clean clothing, the last I had,
and put bardic crowns on my heads.
4 Each crown came from a different
contest, though all were minor. I had never won a really big contest.
Woven of fine wool, with brightly colored tassels hanging down, the
crowns gave me an appearance of dignity. My nimble-fingered scouts
unpacked my instruments: a set of chimes, a pair of castanets and a
bagpipe. Now I was ready to meet the lord.
All except my best scout, who climbed into the
middle of a wide soft bed, child in arms.
“Why did you hide the mite?” asked my scholar.
“This keep seems full of rigid thinkers,
overly satisfied with themselves and their behavior. If they saw the
child they would demand an explanation. ‘Why do you keep it? Can’t you
see how fragmentary it is? Can’t you see that it’s barely alive? Don’t
you know how to cut your losses?’ I don’t want to argue or explain.”
“What is meant by ‘I’?” my male parts asked.
“What is meant by ‘my’ reasons?”
“This is no time for an argument,” said the
poet.
All of me except the scout went to meet the
keep’s famous lord.
The Straightener sat at one end of large hall:
an elderly goxhat with frosted hair. Four parts of her remained, all
sturdy, though missing a few pieces here and there: a foot, a hand, an
eye or finger. Along the edges of the hall sat her retainers on long
benches: powerful males, females, and neuters, adorned with iron and
gold.
My poet stopped. Straightener leaned forward.
“Well? Go on! I want to hear about my princely virtues.”
“Give me a day to speak with your retainers
and get exact details of your many achievements,” the poet said. “Then
I will be able to praise you properly.”
The goxhat leaned back. “Never heard of me,
have you? Drat! I was hoping for undying fame.”
“I will give it to you,” my poet said calmly.
“Very well,” the lord said. “I’ll give you a
day, and if I like what you compose, I’ll leave your male parts alone.”
All of me thanked her. Then I told the hall
about my stay at the ruined keep. The retainers listened intently. When
I had finished, the lord said, “My long-time neighbor! Dead by murder!
Well, death comes to all of us. When I was born, I had twenty parts. A
truly large number! That is what I’m famous for, as well as my dislike
of men, which is mere envy. My male bodies died in childhood, and my
neuter parts did not survive early adulthood. By thirty, I was down to
ten bodies, all female. The neuters were not much of a loss.
Supercilious twits, I always thought. But I miss my male parts. They
were so feisty and full of piss! When travelers come here, I set them
difficult tasks. If they fail, I have my soldiers hold them, while I
unfold their delicate, coiled testicles. No permanent damage is done,
but the screaming makes me briefly happy.”
My male bodies looked uneasy and shifted back
and forth on their feet, as if ready to run. But the two neuters
remained calm. My poet thanked the lord a second time, sounding
confident. Then I split up and went in all directions through the hall,
seeking information.
The drinking went on till dawn, and the lord’s
retainers were happy to tell me stories about the Straightener. She had
a female love of comfort and fondness for children, but could not be
called tender in any other way. Rather, she was a fierce leader in
battle and a strict ruler, as exact as a balance or a straight-edge.
“She’ll lead us against Bent Foot,” one drunk
soldier said. “We’ll kill him and bring the children here. The stolen
children, at least. I don’t know about Bent Foot’s spawn. It might be
better for them to die. Not my problem. I let the lord make all the
decisions, except whether or not I’m going to fart.”
Finally, I went up to my room. My scout lay
asleep, the baby in her arms. My male parts began to pace nervously.
The rest of me settled to compose a poem.
As the sky brightened, the world outside began
to wake and make noise. Most of the noise could be ignored, but there
was a wishik under the eaves
directly outside my room’s window. Its shrill, repeating cry drove my
poet to distraction. I could not concentrate on the poem.
Desperate, I threw things at the animal:
buttons from my sewing kit, spare pens, an antique paperweight I found
in the room. Nothing worked. The wishik
fluttered away briefly, then returned and resumed its irritating cry.
At last my scout woke. I explained the
problem. She nodded and listened to the wishik
for a while. Then she fastened a string to an arrow and shot the arrow
out the window. It hit the wishik.
The animal gave a final cry. Grabbing the string, my scout pulled the
beast inside.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“Because I didn’t want the body to fall in the
courtyard.”
“Why not?”
Before she could answer, the body at her feet
expanded and changed its shape. Instead of the body of a dead wishik, I saw a gray goxhat-body, pierced
by the scout’s arrow, dead.
My males swore. The rest of me exclaimed in
surprise.
My scout said, “This is part of a wizard, no
doubt employed by the keep’s lord, who must really want to unroll my
testicles, since she is willing to be unfair and play tricks. The wishik cry was magical, designed to
bother me so much that I could not concentrate on my composition. If
this body had fallen to the ground, the rest of the wizard would have
seen it and known the trick had failed. As things are, I may have time
to finish the poem.” The scout looked at the rest of me severely. “Get
to work.”
My poet went back to composing, my scribe to
writing. The poem went smoothly now. As the stanzas grew in number, I
grew increasingly happy and pleased. Soon I noticed the pleasure was
sexual. This sometimes happened, though usually when a poem was erotic.
The god of poetry and the god of sex are siblings, though they share
only one parent, who is called the All-Mother-Father.
Even though the poem was not erotic, my male
and female parts became increasingly excited. Ah! I was rubbing against
myself. Ah! I was making soft noises! The poet and scribe could not
feel this sexual pleasure, of course, but the sight of the rest of me
tumbling on the rug was distracting. Yes, neuters are clear-eyed and
rational, but they are also curious; and nothing arouses their
curiosity more than sex. They stopped working on the poem and watched
as I fondled myself.
5Only the scout remained detached from
sensuality and went into the defecating closet. Coming out with a
bucket of cold water, the scout poured it over my amorous bodies.
I sprang apart, yelling with shock.
“This is more magic,” the scout said. “I did
not know a spell inciting lust could be worked at such a distance, but
evidently it can. Every part of me that is male or female, go in the
bathroom! Wash in cold water till the idea of sex becomes
uninteresting! As for my neuter parts—” The scout glared. “Get back to
the poem!”
“Why has one part of me escaped the spell?” I
asked the scout.
“I did not think I could lactate without
laying an egg first, but the child’s attempts to nurse have caused my
body to produce milk. As a rule, nursing mothers are not interested in
sex, and this has proved true of me. Because of this, and the child’s
stubborn nursing, there is a chance of finishing the poem. I owe this
child a debt of gratitude.”
“Maybe,” grumbled my male parts. The poet and
scribe said, “I shall see.”
The poem was done by sunset. That evening I
recited it in the lord’s hall. If I do say so myself, it was a splendid
achievement. The wishik’s cry was
in it, as was the rocking up-and-down rhythm of a sexually excited
goxhat. The second gave the poem energy and an emphatic beat. As for
the first, every line ended with one of the two sounds in the wishik’s ever-repeating, irritating cry.
Nowadays, we call this repetition of sound “rhyming.” But it had no
name when I invented it.
When I was done, the lord ordered several
retainers to memorize the poem. “I want to hear it over and over,” she
said. “What a splendid idea it is to make words ring against each other
in this fashion! How striking the sound! How memorable! Between you and
the traveling plumber, I will certainly be famous.”
That night was spent like the first one,
everyone except me feasting. I feigned indigestion and poured my drinks
on the floor under the feasting table. The lord was tricky and liked
winning. Who could say what she might order put in my cup or bowl, now
that she had my poem?
When the last retainer fell over and began to
snore, I got up and walked to the hall’s main door. Sometime in the
next day or so, the lord would discover that her wizard had lost a part
to death and that one of her paperweights was missing. I did not want
to be around when these discoveries were made.
Standing in the doorway, I considered looking
for the treadmill. Maybe I could free the prisoners. They might be
travelers like me, innocent victims of the lord’s malice and envy and
her desire for hot water on every floor. But there were likely to be
guards around the treadmill, and the guards might be sober. I was only
one goxhat. I could not save everyone. And the servant had said they
were criminals.
I climbed the stairs quietly, gathered my
belongings and the baby, and left through a window down a rope made of
knotted sheets.
The sky was clear; the brilliant star we call
Beacon stood above the high peaks, shedding so much light I had no
trouble seeing my way. I set a rapid pace eastward. Toward morning,
clouds moved in. The Beacon vanished. Snow began to fall, concealing my
trail. The baby, nursing on the scout, made happy noises.
Two days later, I was out of the mountains,
camped in a forest by an unfrozen stream. Water made a gentle sound,
purling over pebbles. The trees on the banks were changers, a local
variety that is blue in summer and yellow in winter. At the moment,
their leaves were thick with snow. “Silver and gold,” my poet murmured,
looking up.
The scribe made a note.
A wishik
clung to a branch above the poet and licked its wings. Whenever it
shifted position, snow came down.
the poet said.
My scribe scribbled.
One of my cudgel-carriers began the
discussion. “The Bane of Poets was entirely neuter. Fear of death made
it crazy. Bent Foot was entirely male. Giving in to violence, he stole
children from his neighbor. The last lord I encountered, the ruler of
the heated keep, was female, malicious and unfair. Surely something can
be learned from these encounters. A person should not be one sex
entirely, but rather—as I am—a harmonious mixture of male, female, and
neuter. But this child can’t help but be a single sex.”
“I owe the child a debt of gratitude,” said my
best scout firmly. “Without her, I would have had pain and humiliation,
when the lord—a kind of lunatic—unrolled my testes, as she clearly
planned to do. At best, I would have limped away from the keep in pain.
At worst, I might have ended in the lord’s treadmill, raising water
from the depths to make her comfortable.”
“The question is a good one,” said my scribe.
“How can a person who is only one sex avoid becoming a monster? The
best combination is the one I have: male, female, and both kinds of
neuter. But even two sexes provide a balance.”
“Other people—besides these three—have
consisted of one sex,” my scout said stubbornly. “Not all became
monsters. It isn’t sex that has influenced these lords, but the stony
fields and spiny mountains of Ibri, the land’s cold winters and
ferocious wildlife. My various parts can teach the child my different
qualities: the valor of the cudgel-carriers, the coolness of poet and
scribe, the female tenderness that the rest of me has. Then she will
become a single harmony.”
The scout paused. The rest of me looked
dubious. The scout continued.
“Many people lose parts of themselves through
illness, accident, and war; and some of these live for years in a
reduced condition. Yes, it’s sad and disturbing, but it can’t be called
unnatural. Consider aging and the end of life. The old die body by
body, till a single body remains. Granted, in many cases, the final
body dies quickly. But not always. Every town of good size has a Gram
or Gaffer who hobbles around in a single self.
“I will not give up an infant I have nursed
with my own milk. Do I wish to be known as ungrateful or callous? I,
who have pinned all my hope on honor and fame?”
I looked at myself with uncertain expressions.
The wishik shook down more snow.
“Well, then,” said my poet, who began to look
preoccupied. Another poem coming, most likely. “I will take the child
to a crèche and leave her there.”
My scout scowled. “How well will she be cared
for there, among healthy children, by tenders who are almost certain to
be prejudiced against a mite so partial and incomplete? I will not give
her up.”
“Think of how much I travel,” a cudgel-carrier
said. “How can I take a child on my journeys?”
“Carefully and tenderly,” the scout replied.
“The way my ancestors who were nomads did. Remember the old stories!
When they traveled, they took everything, even the washing pot. Surely
their children were not left behind.”
“I have bonded excessively to this child,”
said my scribe to the scout.
“Yes, I have. It’s done and can’t be undone. I
love her soft baby-down, her four blue eyes, her feisty spirit. I will
not give her up.”
I conversed this way for some time. I didn’t
become angry at myself, maybe because I had been through so much danger
recently. There is nothing like serious fear to put life into
perspective. Now and then, when the conversation became especially
difficult, a part of me got up and went into the darkness to kick the
snow or to piss. When the part came back, he or she or it seemed
better.
Finally I came to an agreement. I would keep
the child and carry it on my journeys, though half of me remained
unhappy with this decision.
How difficult it is to be of two minds! Still,
it happens; and all but the insane survive such divisions. Only they
forget the essential unity that underlies differences of opinion. Only
they begin to believe in individuality.
The next morning, I continued into Ib.
The poem I composed for the lord of the warm
keep became famous. Its form, known as “ringing praise,” was taken up
by other poets. From it, I gained some fame, enough to quiet my envy;
and the fame led to some money, which provided for my later years.
Did I ever return to Ibri? No. The land was
too bitter and dangerous; and I didn’t want to meet the lord of the
warm keep a second time. Instead, I settled in Lesser Ib, buying a
house on a bank of a river named It-Could-Be-Worse. This turned out to
be an auspicious name. The house was cozy and my neighbors pleasant.
The child played in my fenced- in garden, tended by my female parts. As
for my neighbors, they watched with interest and refrained from
mentioning the child’s obvious disability.
I traveled less than previously, because of
the child and increasing age. But I did make the festivals in Greater
and Lesser Ib. This was easy traveling on level roads across wide
plains. The Ibian lords, though sometimes eccentric, were nowhere near
as crazy as the ones in Ibri and no danger to me or other poets. At one
of the festivals, I met the famous plumber, who turned out to be a
large and handsome male and neuter goxhat. I won the festival crown for
poetry, and he/it won the crown for ingenuity. Celebrating with egg
wine, we became amorous and fell into each other’s many arms.
It was a fine romance and ended without
regret, as did all my other romances. As a group, we goxhat are
happiest with ourselves. In addition, I could not forget the prisoners
in the treadmill. Whether the plumber planned it or not, he/it had
caused pain for others. Surely it was wrong—unjust—for some to toil in
darkness, so that others had a warm bed and hot water from a pipe?
I have to say, at times I dreamed of that
keep: the warm halls, the pipes of water, the heated bathing pool and
the defecating throne that had—have I forgotten to mention this?—a
padded seat.
I never laid any fertile eggs. My only child
is Ap the Foundling, who is also known as Ap of One Body and Ap the
Many-talented. As the last nickname suggests, the mite turned out well.
As for me, I became known as The Clanger and
The Wishik, because of my famous
rhyming poem. Other names were given to me as well: The Child
Collector, The Nurturer, and The Poet Who Is Odd.
Geoffrey A. Landis
<www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis> lives in Berea, Ohio. He is
a scientist who writes SF, a physicist who works as a civil-service
scientist in the Photovoltaics and Space Environmental Effects branch
at NASA Glenn. He has won a number of science prizes, and is married to
the writer Mary Turzillo. He has published over sixty short stories,
characteristically that variety known as hard SF, though always with a
focus on human character in whatever situation he posits. His first
novel, Mars Crossing, was published
in 2000, and some of his short fiction is collected in
Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities
(2001). “Hard SF,” says Landis, “is science fiction that’s fascinated
by science and technology, science fiction in which a scientific fact
or speculation is integral to the plot. If you take out the science,
the story vanishes.”
“At Dorado” is a
hard SF story of love and death in the distant future. It was published
in Asimov’s, which had another fine
year publishing fiction at the top of the field. Set on a black hole
transit station in space, far from any planet, a girl loves a man who
is a cad. As in all the best hard SF, the nature of the physics, the
science of the situation, makes the story special.
Aman Cheena barely knew came running to
the door of the bar. For a brief second she thought that he might be a
customer, but then Cheena saw he was wearing a leather harness and
jockstrap and almost nothing else. One of the bar-boys from a dance
house along the main spiral-path to the downside.
In the middle of third shift, there was little
business in the bar. Had there been a ship in port, of course, the bar
would be packed with rowdy sailors, and she would have been working her
ass off trying to keep them all lubricated and spending their port-pay.
But between dockings, the second-shift maintenance workers had already
finished their after- work drinks and left, and the place was mostly
empty.
It was unusual that a worker from one of the
downside establishments would drop into a bar so far upspinward, and
Cheena knew instantly that something was wrong. She flicked the music
off—nobody was listening anyway—and he spoke.
“Hoya,” he said. “A wreck, a wreck! They fish
out debris now.” The door hissed shut, and he was gone.
Cheena pushed into the crowd that was
already gathered at the maintenance dock. The gravity was so low at the
maintenance docks that they were floating more than standing, and the
crowd slowly roiled into the air and back down. Cheena saw the bar-boy
who had brought the news, and a gaggle of other barmaids and bar-boys,
a few maintenance workers, some Cauchy readers, navigators, and a
handful of waiting-for-work sailors. “Stand back, stand back,” a lone
security dockworker said. “Nothing to see yet.” But nobody moved back.
“Which ship was it?” somebody shouted, and two or three others echoed:
“What ship? What ship?” That was what everybody wanted to know.
“Don’t know yet,” the security guy said.
“Stand back now, stand back.”
“Hesperia,”
said a voice behind. Cheena turned, and the crowd did as well. It was a
tug pilot, still wearing his fluorescent yellow flight suit, although
his helmet was off. “The wreck was Hesperia.”
There was a moment of silence, and then a soft
sigh went through the crowd, followed by a rising babble of voices,
some of them relieved, some of them curious, some dazed by the news. Hesperia, Cheena thought. The word was
like a silken ribbon suddenly tied around her heart.
“They’re bringing debris in now,” said the tug
pilot.
Some of the girls Cheena knew had many
sailors as husbands. It was no great risk; any given ship only came to
port once or twice a year, and each sailor could believe the carefully
crafted fiction that Zee or Dayl or whoever it was was alone, was
waiting patient and hopeful for him and only him. If the unlikely
happens, and two ships with two different sailor-husbands come in to
port at the same time—well, with luck and connivance and hastily
fabricated excuses, the two husbands would never meet.
Cheena, however, believed in being faithful,
and for her there was only one man: Daryn, a navigator. She might earn
a few florins by drinking beer with another sailor, and leading him on,
if a ship was in port, and Dari was not on it. What of it? That was,
after all, what the barmaids were paid for; drinks could just as easily
be served by automata. But her heart could belong to only one man, and
would only be satisfied if that one man loved only her. And Daryn had
loved her. Or so he had once proclaimed, before they had fought.
Daryn.
Daryn Bey was short and dark, stocky enough
that one might take him for a dockworker instead of a navigator. His
skin was the rich black of a deep-space sailor, a color enhanced with
biochemical dye to counter ultraviolet irradiation. Against the skin,
luminescent white tattoos filigreed across every visible centimeter of
his body. When he had finally wooed her and won her and taken her to
where they could examine each other in private, she found the rest of
him had been tattooed as well, most deliciously tattooed. He was a
living artwork, and she could study each tiny centimeter of him for
hours.
And Daryn sailed with Hesperia.
The wormholes were the port’s very reason
for existing, the center of Cheena’s universe. In view of their
importance. it was odd, perhaps, that Cheena almost never went to look
at them. In her bleak, destructive mood, she closed the bar and headed
upspiral. Patryos, owner of the Subtle Tiger, would be angry at her,
because in the hours after news of a wreck, when nobody had yet heard
real information and everybody had heard rumors, people would naturally
come to the bar; business would be good. Let him come and serve drinks
himself, she thought; she needed some solitude. The thought of putting
on a show of cheerfulness and passing around gossip along with liquor
made her feel slightly sick.
Still, sailors—even navigators—sometimes
changed ships. Daryn might not have been on Hesperia.
It might not be certain that the ship had been Hesperia;
it could be debris from an ancient wreck, just now washing through the
strange time tides of the wormhole. Or it could even be wreckage from
far in the future, perhaps some other ship to be named Hesperia, one not yet even built. The
rigid laws of relativity mean that a wormhole pierces not space alone,
but also time. Half of the job of a navigator, Daryn had explained to
her once—and the most important half at that—came in making sure that
the ship sailed to the right when
as well as to the right where.
Sailing a Cauchy loop would rip the ship apart; it was the navigator’s
calculation to make sure the ship never entered its own past, unless it
was safely light-years away. The ship could skim, but never cross, its
own Cauchy horizon.
Cheena made her way upspiral, until at last
she came to the main viewing lounge. It featured a huge circular
window, five meters across, a window that looked out on the emptiness,
and on the wormhole. She entered, and then instantly pulled back: the
usually empty lounge was throbbing with spectators. Of course it would
be, she thought; they are watching a disaster.
She couldn’t stay there, but as she stood
indecisive, there drifted into her mind like a piece of floating debris
the thought that once Daryn had taken her to another viewing area, not
exactly a lounge, but a maintenance hanger with a viewport. It was out
of the public areas, of course, but Cheena had been at the station
since she had been born, and knew that if she always moved briskly, as
if she belonged, and arrived at a door just after an authorized person
had opened it, nobody would question her. And after a few minutes, she
found her maintenance hanger empty.
There was no gravity here, and she floated in
front of it, trying to blank away her thoughts.
The port station orbited slowly around the
wormhole named Dorado , largest of
the three wormholes in the nexus. They floated in interstellar space,
far from any star, but light was redundant here: there was nothing here
to see.
The Dorado wormhole, a thousand kilometers
across, could only be seen after the eyes had adapted to the star
field, and realized that the stars seen through the wormhole were
different from the stars drifting slowly in the background. After her
eyes adapted, she could see a dozen tiny sparkles of light orbiting the
wormhole, automated beacons to guide starships to correct transit
trajectories through the hole. And now she could see ships, tiny
one-man maintenance dories, no larger than a coffin with metal arms,
drifting purposefully through space, collecting debris.
Cheena deliberately made her mind blank. She
didn’t want to think about debris, and what that might mean. She stared
at the wormhole, telling herself that it was a hole in space ten
thousand light-years long, that through the wormhole she was seeing
stars nearly on the other side of the galaxy, impossibly distant and
yet just a tiny skip away.
Cheena had never been to any of them. She had
been born on the station, and would die on the station. Sailors lived
for the star passage, loved the disruption of space as they fell
through the topological incongruence of the wormholes. The thought
filled Cheena with dread. She had never wanted to be anywhere else.
She had explained this to Daryn once. He loved
her, couldn’t he stay home, with her, make a home on the port? He had
laughed, a gentle laugh, a good-hearted laugh that she loved to hear,
but still a laugh.
“No, my beautiful one. The stars get into your
blood, don’t you know? If I stay in port too long, the stars call to
me, and if I do not find a ship then, I will go mad.” He kissed her
gently. “But you know that I will always come back to you.”
She nodded, contented but not contented, for
she had always known that this was all she could hope for.
Hesperia,
she thought. He sailed out on Hesperia.
She knew that she would never again hear that ship’s name spoken, for
there was a superstition among the sailors, and the port crew, never to
say the name of a wrecked ship aloud. From now on it would be “the
ship,” or “that ship, you know the one,” and everybody would know.
She floated, staring without seeing, for what
must have been hours. The tiny dories were returning now, the robotic
arms of each cluttered with debris, and tangled in with the debris,
they were bringing in the first of the dead.
The port crew had their legends. Some of
them might even have been true. Once, according to a story, a ship of
ancient design had come unexpectedly to Pskov station. Pskov was a
station circling Viadei wormhole, two jumps away from the port. Cheena
had never been there, had never left the port, but the rumors
circulated through all of the network. Even before the ship had docked,
the portkeepers located the records: the ship was Tsander.
Tsander had entered Viadei three hundred and seventy years
ago, during a massive solar flare, one of the largest flares ever
recorded, and was lost.
Tsander
tumbled out of the wormhole mouth with all sensors blind from flare
damage, and the tug crew of Pskov station had found it, caught it,
stabilized it, and towed it to the docks.
At liberty in the port, the crew of the Tsander spoke in strange accents that
were barely understandable. It was a miracle that the ship had emerged
at all; all its navigation systems—of an unreliable design long since
obsolete—were burned out. Tsander’s
crew had marveled at the size and sophistication of the entertainments
of Pskov port, had been incredulous to hear of the extent of the
wormhole network. They offered as payment archaic coins of an ancient
nation that was now nearly forgotten, coins that had worth only for
their value as curiosities.
After a week of repair the crew took their
ship Tsander back into the wormhole
Viadei, vowing that they would return to their own time with a story
that would earn drinks for them forever.
No one at the station told them that the
ancient logs held comprehensive records of every wormhole passage, and
the logs, meticulously kept despite revolutions and disasters and
famine, had no record of Tsander
ever reemerging in the past.
Perhaps they had known. They were sailors, the
crew of Tsander: for all that they
wore quaint costumes and spoke in archaic accents, they were sailors.
Back at the maintenance dock, Cheena
watched, waiting and dreading. She should never have let him go, should
have held him tight, instead of pushing him away. The crowd was larger
than it had been before, and Cheena was pushed up against a man wearing
only a feather cloak over a fur loincloth. “Sorry,” she said, and as
she said it, she realized that it was the bar-boy from the down-spin
dance hall, the one who had first come to the Subtle Tiger and told her
that there had been a wreck. On an impulse, she touched his arm.
“Name’s Cheena,” she told him.
He looked back at her, perhaps startled that
she had spoken. “Tayo,” he said. “You’re the mid-shift girl from Subtle
Tiger. I seen you around.” He was breathing shallowly and his eyes
trembled, perhaps blinking back tears.
“You had somebody on that ship, the one we
talked about?” she asked.
“I dunno.” He trembled. “I—I hope not. A
navigator.”
Suddenly, irrationally, Cheena was certain
that his sailor was Daryn too, that Daryn had had two lovers in the
port. But then he continued, “He shipped out on Singapore,”
and she knew it wasn’t Daryn after all.
A spray of relief washed over Cheena, although
she knew it had been silly for her to have thought Daryn had two lovers
in port. When would he have had time?
“—but you know how sailors are. He said he’d
be back to me on the next ship this direction, and, and if Hes—if that ship was coming inbound….”
She put her arm around Tayo. “He’s okay. He
wouldn’t be on that ship, I’m sure of it.”
Tayo chewed his lip, but he seemed more
cheerful. “Are you sure?”
Cheena nodded sagely, although she knew no
such thing. “Positive.”
When a ship comes to disaster at a wormhole,
the wreckage sprays through both time and space. Cheena didn’t even
know when Hesperia had wrecked,
possibly years or even centuries in the future. She held on to that
thought.
And another ship came in, not through the
Dorado worm- hole, but via Camino Estrella, the smallest of the three
wormholes, one that led toward an old, rich cluster of worlds in the
Orion arm. It would stay at the port for three days, letting its crew
relax, and then depart through Dorado for the other side of the galaxy.
And there was nothing for it but to prepare
for the arrival of the sailors. With a ship coming into port, Patryos
could not spare her, and there was no place at the port for a person
without a job. But when her shift ended, she drifted over to the
maintenance port, wordlessly waiting for them to post names of the
bodies.
Nothing.
Tayo, the boy from the downside bar, dropped
in at the beginning of her next shift and updated her with the latest
gossip from the maintenance investigation. They had finished gathering
the pieces, he told her, and had gathered enough to date the wreck. It
was very nearly contemporal, he told her, and her heart suddenly
chilled.
“Past or future?” she said.
“Two hundred hours pastward of standard,” he
told her. “They said.”
Eight days. She did a quick calculation in her
head. Right now, through the Dorado wormhole mouth, the port stood
fifty-two days pastward of Viadei mouth, and Viadei was forty days in
the future of Standard. So…if the mouths had not drifted farther apart,
and if Hesperia had taken the
straightforward loop, and not some strange path through—the wreckage
came from six days into their future.
Everybody at the port would be doing the same
calculations, she knew. “How about your sailor?” Cheena asked, but from
the radiance of Tayo’s face, she already knew the answer.
“He went out via Dorado.”
And so he was almost certainly safe, she
thought, unless he took a very long passage pastward. Dorado opened
fiftytwo days futureward. Not quite impossible, if he took a
long-enough loop, but unlikely enough that Tayo could consider his
lover safe. Cheena had no such consolation; she knew that Dari had
crewed the doomed ship.
Tayo looked up. “Thought you might want to
know the latest,” he said. “Sorry, but I gotta get to the hall. Sailors
will be arriving in maybe an hour, and the boss wants me on the floor.”
She nodded. “Give ’em hell,” she said.
Tayo looked at her. “You going to be okay?”
“Sure.” She smiled. “I’m fine.”
Cheena went back to cleaning the bar, went
back to hating herself. She had kicked Daryn out, called him a
two-timing bastard, and worse; told him that he didn’t love her. Daryn
had protested, tried to soothe her, but the one thing he didn’t say was
that what she had heard was wrong.
It was another sailor who told her, a sailor
she didn’t know, who had remarked that he wished he was as lucky with
women as Daryn. “Who?” she had asked, although in her heart she knew.
“Daryn Bey,” the sailor had said. “Lucky bastard has a wife in every
port!”
“Excuse me,” she had told him, “I’ll be back
in a moment.” She had put on a modest dress and gone upspin, gone into
a bar near officer’s quarters that she knew he would never frequent.
“I’m looking for Daryn Bey,” she told a man at the bar. “I’ve got a
message sent from his wife in Pskovport. Anybody know him?”
“A message from Karina?” one of the officers
at the bar asked. “She only saw him two days ago, why would she have a
message?”
“That Daryn,” one of the officers said,
shaking his head. “I wonder how he keeps them all straight?”
She had been in no mind to listen. She went
back and threw his clothes out of her apartment, scattered his books
and papers and simulation disks down the corridor with a savage glee.
Then she bolted the door and refused to listen to his pounding or
shouted apologies. Later, she heard, he had shipped out on the Hesperia, and she had felt glad that he
was gone.
She was still cleaning bar when the owner
Patryos came in. “You going to be okay?” he asked.
It was the same thing Tayo had asked. Cheena
nodded, without saying anything.
“I heard that the names are being listed,”
Patryos said, “up in maintenance.”
She turned her head a little toward him,
enough to show she was listening.
“You want to go up? I expect the first hour
after the sailors start coming in will still be pretty calm.” He
shrugged. “I can spare you for a little, if you want to go up.”
She didn’t look up, just shook her head.
“Go!” he told her, and she looked up at him in
surprise. “Anybody can see you haven’t been worth anything, and you
won’t be worth anything until you know for certain. One way or the
other.”
He lowered his voice, and said, more calmly,
“One way or the other, it’s better to know. Take it from me. Go.”
Cheena nodded, dropped her rag on the bar,
and left.
She knew where to go in the maintenance
quarter, although she had never had any reason to go there. Everybody
knew. Behind the door was a desk, and behind the desk a door. Sitting
at the desk was a single maintenance man. She came up to him, and said
quietly, “Daryn Bey.”
His eyes flickered. “Relationship?”
“I’m his downspin wife.” It was a marriage
that was only recognized within the boundaries of the port, but a fully
legal one. The maintenance man looked away for a moment, and then said,
“I’m sorry.” He paused for a moment, and then asked, “Would you like to
see him?”
She nodded, and the maintenance man gestured
toward the door behind him.
The room was cold. Death is cold, she thought.
She was alone, and wondered what to do. A second maintenance man
appeared through another door, and gestured to her to follow. This
close to spin axis, gravity was light, and he moved in an eerie,
slow-motion bounce. She almost floated behind him, her feet nearly
useless. She wasn’t used to low gravity.
He stopped at a pilot’s chair. No, Daryn
wasn’t a pilot, she thought, this is the wrong man, and then she saw
him.
The maintenance man withdrew, and she stared
into Daryn’s face.
Vacuum hematoma had been hard on him, and he
looked like he had been beaten by a band of thugs. His eyes were
closed. The tattoos still glowed, faintly, and that was the worst thing
of all, that his tattoos still were alive, and Daryn wasn’t.
She reached out and put her fingertips against
his cheek with a feather’s touch, stroking along his jawline with a
single finger. Suddenly, irrationally, she was angry at him. She wanted
to tell him how inconsiderate he was, how selfish and idiotic and, and,
and—but he was not listening. He was never going to listen.
The anger helped her to keep from crying.
By the time she returned to the Subtle
Tiger, knots of sailors were walking upspin and downspin the corridors,
talking and sometimes singing, dropping into a bar for a moment to see
if it felt like a place to spend the rest of the shift, and then moving
on, or staying for a drink. She passed a ferret crew going upspin
toward the docks. The ferrets, slender and lithe as snakes with legs,
squirmed in their cages, nearly insane with excitement over the
prospect of being set free on the just-docked ship to hunt for stowaway
rats.
She took over the bar from Patryos, serving
drinks in a daze, unable to think of any quick responses to the double
entendres and light-hearted suggestions offered by the sailors. Most of
them knew that she had a sailor husband, though, and didn’t press her
very hard, and of course they wouldn’t know that he had been in the
wreck.
In fact, none of them would even know about
the wreck yet; unless they had transferred across through an uptime
wormhole, it was still in their future, and the port workers would be
careful not to say anything that would cause a catastrophe. An
incipient contradiction due to a loop in history would close the
wormhole. A little information can leak from the future into the past,
but history must be consistent. If enough information leaks downtime to
threaten an inconsistency, the offending wormhole connection can snap.
The port circled the wormhole cluster,
light-years from any star. If their passage to the rest of civilization
by the wormhole connection failed, it would be a thousand years of
slower-than-light travel to reach the fringes of civilization. So the
port crew did not need to be reminded to avoid incipient contradiction;
it was as natural to them as manufacturing oxygen.
Slowly, the banter and the routine of serving
elevated Cheena’s mood. One of the sailors asked to buy her a drink,
and she accepted it and drank philosophically. It was hard to stay
gloomy when liquor and florins were flowing so freely. She had kicked
him out, after all; he was nothing to her. She could replace him any
night from any of a dozen eager suitors—maybe even this one, if he was
as nice as he seemed.
And the bar was suddenly especially hectic,
with a dozen sailors asking for drinks at once, and half of them asking
for more than that, and two more singing a rather clever duet she
hadn’t heard before, a song about a navigator who kept a pet mouse in
the front of his pants, with the heavyset sailor singing the mouse’s
part in a squeaky falsetto. She was busy smiling and serving and taking
orders, so it wasn’t surprising at all that she didn’t see him come in.
He was quiet, after all, and took a seat at the bar and waited for her
to come to him.
Daryn.
She was so surprised that she started to drop
the beer she was holding, and caught it with a jerk, spilling a great
splash of it across the bar and half across two sailors. The one she’d
caught full-on jumped up, staring down at his splattered uniform. The
one sitting with him started to laugh. “Now you’ve had your baptism in
beer, and the night is still young, say now,” he said. After a moment
the one who had been splashed started to laugh as well. “A good sign,
then, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sorry, there,” she said, bringing them both
fresh drinks, waving her hand when they started to pay. “The last one
was on you, so this one’s on the house,” she told them, and they both
laughed. All the time she carefully avoided looking toward Daryn.
Daryn.
He sat at the end of the bar, drinking the
beer that the other barmaid had brought him, not gesturing for her to
come over, but smugly aware that, sooner or later, she would. He said
something that made the other barmaid giggle, and she wondered what it
might have been. She served a few of the other sailors, and then,
knowing that sooner or later she would, she went to talk to him.
“Alive, alive,” she said. It was barely more
than a whisper.
“Myself, in the flesh,” Daryn said. He smiled
his huge, goonish smile. “Surprised to see me, yes?”
“How can you be here?” she said. “I thought
you were on—on that ship.”
“ Hesperia?
Yeah. But we docked alongside Lictor
at Tarrytown-port, and Lictor was
short a navigator, and Hesperia
could spare me for a bit, and I knew that Lictor
was heading to stop here, and I’d have a chance to see you, and—” he
spread his hands. “I can’t stay.”
“You can’t stay,” she repeated.
“No, I have to sail with Lictor,
so I can catch up with Hesperia at
Dulcinea.” He looked up at her. She was still standing stupidly there
over him. “But I had to see you.”
“You had to see me,” she repeated slowly, as
if trying to understand.
“I had to tell you,” he said. “You have to
know that you’re the only one.”
You are such a sweet liar, she thought, how
can I trust you? But his smile brought back a thousand memories of time
they had spent together, and it was like a sweet ache in her throat.
“The only one,” she repeated, still completely unable to think of any
words of her own to say.
“You aren’t still angry, are you?” he said.
“Please, tell me you’re not still angry. You know that you’ve always
been the only one.”
Morning came to the second-shift, and she
propped her head up on one elbow to look across the bed at him. The
glow of his tattoos cast a mottled pattern of soft light against the
walls and ceiling.
Daryn awoke, rolled over, and looked at her.
He smiled, a radiant smile, with his eyes still smoky with sleep, and
leaned forward to kiss her. “There will be no other,” he said. “This
time I promise.”
She kissed him, her eyes closed, knowing that
it would be the last kiss they would ever have.
“I know,” she said.
Robert Reed (info
site: www.booksnbytes.com/authors/ reed_robert.html) lives in Nebraska,
and has been one of the most prolific short story writers of high
quality in the SF field for the past ten years. His work is notable for
its variety, and for its steady production. The Encyclopedia
of Science Fiction remarks that “the
expertness of the writing and its knowing exploitation of current
scientific speculations are balanced by an underlying quiet sanity
about how to depict and to illumine human beings.” His first story
collection, The Dragons of Springplace (1999),
fine as it is, skims only a bit of the cream from his body of work. And
he writes a novel every year or two, as well. His first novel,
The Leeshore, appeared in 1987, followed by
The Hormone Jungle (1988), Black
Milk (1989), Down the Bright Way (1991), The Remarkables (1992), Beyond the Veil of Stars (1994), An Exaltation of Larks (1995), and Beneath the Gated Sky (1997). His most recent novel is Marrow (2000), a distant-future large-scale story that is
hard SF and seems to be a breakthrough in his career. The
New York Times called it “an exhilarating
ride, in the hands of an author whose aspiration literally knows no
bounds.”
“Coelacanths,” from
F&SF, is a story of the far future in
which post-humans occupy most evolutionary niches—too good a concept to
pass up. He published enough stories to fill a first-rate single-author
collection in 2002, but none better than this one.
THE
SPEAKER
He stalks the
wide stage, a brilliant beam of hot blue light fixed squarely upon him.
“We are great! We are glorious!” the man calls out. His voice is
pleasantly, effortlessly loud. With a face handsome to the brink of
lovely and a collage of smooth, passionate mannerisms, he performs for
an audience that sits in the surrounding darkness. Flinging long arms
overhead, hands reaching for the distant light, his booming voice
proclaims, “We have never been as numerous as we are today. We have
never been this happy. And we have never known the prosperity that is
ours at this golden moment. This golden now!” Athletic legs carry him
across the stage, bare feet slapping against planks of waxed maple.
“Our species is thriving,” he can declare with a seamless ease. “By
every conceivable measure, we are a magnificent, irresistible tide
sweeping across the universe!”
Transfixed by the
blue beam, his naked body is shamelessly young, rippling with hard
muscles over hard bone. A long fat penis dangles and dances, accenting
every sweeping gesture, every bold word. The living image of a small
but potent god, he surely is a creature worthy of admiration, a soul
deserving every esteem and emulation. With a laugh, he promises the
darkness, “We have never been so powerful, we humans.” Yet in the next
breath, with a faintly apologetic smile, he must add, “Yet still, as
surely as tomorrow comes, our glories today will seem small and quaint
in the future, and what looks
golden now will turn to the yellow dust upon which our magnificent
children will tread!”
PROCYON
Study your history. It tells you that travel
always brings its share of hazards; that’s a basic, impatient law of
the universe. Leaving the security and familiarity of home is never
easy. But every person needs to make the occasional journey, embracing
the risks to improve his station, his worth and self-esteem. Procyon
explains why this day is a good day to wander. She refers to
intelligence reports as well as the astrological tables. Then by a
dozen means, she maps out their intricate course, describing what she
hopes to find and everything that she wants to avoid.
She has twin sons. They were born four months
ago, and they are mostly grown now. “Keep alert,” she tells the
man-children, leading them out through a series of reinforced and
powerfully camouflaged doorways. “No naps, no distractions,” she warns
them. Then with a backward glance, she asks again, “What do we want?”
“Whatever we can use,” the boys reply in a
sloppy chorus.
“Quiet,” she warns. Then she nods and shows a
caring smile, reminding them, “A lot of things can be used. But their
trash is sweetest.”
Mother and sons look alike: They are short,
strong people with closely cropped hair and white-gray eyes. They wear
simple clothes and three fashions of camouflage, plus a stew of mental
add-ons and microchine helpers as well as an array of sensors that
never blink, watching what human eyes cannot see. Standing motionless,
they vanish into the convoluted, ever-shifting background. But walking
makes them into three transient blurs—dancing wisps that are noticeably
simpler than the enormous world around them. They can creep ahead only
so far before their camouflage falls apart, and then they have to stop,
waiting patiently or otherwise, allowing the machinery to find new ways
to help make them invisible.
“I’m confused,” one son admits. “That thing up
ahead—”
“Did you update your perception menu?”
“I thought I did.”
Procyon makes no sound. Her diamond-bright
glare is enough. She remains rigidly, effortlessly still, allowing her
lazy son to finish his preparations. Dense, heavily encoded signals
have to be whispered, the local net downloading the most recent
topological cues, teaching a three-dimensional creature how to navigate
through this shifting, highly intricate environment.
The universe is fat with dimensions.
Procyon knows as much theory as anyone. Yet
despite a long life rich with experience, she has to fight to decipher
what her eyes and sensors tell her. She doesn’t even bother learning
the tricks that coax these extra dimensions out of hiding. Let her
add-ons guide her. That’s all a person can do, slipping in close to one
of them. In this place, up is three
things and sideways is five others. Why bother counting? What matters
is that when they walk again, the three of them move through the best
combination of dimensions, passing into a little bubble of
old-fashioned up and down. She knows this place. Rising up beside them
is a trusted landmark—a red granite bowl that cradles what looks like a
forest of tall sticks, the sticks leaking a warm light that Procyon
ignores, stepping again, moving along on her tiptoes.
One son leads the way. He lacks the experience
to be first, but in another few weeks, his flesh and sprint-grown brain
will force him into the world alone. He needs his practice, and more
important, he needs confidence, learning to trust his add-ons and his
careful preparations, and his breeding, and his own good luck.
Procyon’s other son lingers near the granite
bowl. He’s the son who didn’t update his menu. This is her dreamy
child, whom she loves dearly. Of course she adores him. But there’s no
escaping the fact that he is easily distracted, and that his adult life
will be, at its very best, difficult. Study your biology. Since life
began, mothers have made hard decisions about their children, and they
have made the deadliest decisions with the tiniest of gestures.
Procyon lets her lazy son fall behind.
Her other son takes two careful steps and
stops abruptly, standing before what looks like a great black cylinder
set on its side. The shape is a fiction: The cylinder is round in one
fashion but incomprehensible in many others. Her add-ons and sensors
have built this very simple geometry to represent something far more
elaborate. This is a standard disposal unit. Various openings appear as
a single slot near the rim of the cylinder, just enough room showing
for a hand and forearm to reach through, touching whatever garbage
waits inside.
Her son’s thick body has more grace than any
dancer of old, more strength than a platoon of ancient athletes. His IQ
is enormous. His reaction times have been enhanced by every available
means. His father was a great old soul who survived into his tenth
year, which is almost forever. But when the boy drifts sideways, he
betrays his inexperience. His sensors attack the cylinder by every
means, telling him that it’s a low-grade trash receptacle secured by
what looks like a standard locking device, AI-managed and obsolete for
days, if not weeks. And inside the receptacle is a mangled piece of
hardware worth a near-fortune on the open market.
The boy drifts sideways, and he glimmers.
Procyon says, “No,” too loudly.
But he feels excited, invulnerable. Grinning
over his shoulder now, he winks and lifts one hand with a smooth,
blurring motion—
Instincts old as blood come bubbling up.
Procyon leaps, shoving her son off his feet and saving him. And in the
next horrible instant, she feels herself engulfed, a dry cold hand
grabbing her, then stuffing her inside a hole that by any geometry
feels nothing but bottomless.
ABLE
Near the lip of the City, inside the emerald
green ring of Park, waits a secret place where the moss and horsetail
and tree fern forest plunges into a deep crystalline pool of warm
spring water. No public map tells of the pool, and no trail leads the
casual walker near it. But the pool is exactly the sort of place that
young boys always discover, and it is exactly the kind of treasure that
remains unmentioned to parents or any other adult with suspicious or
troublesome natures.
Able Quotient likes to believe that he was
first to stumble across this tiny corner of Creation. And if he isn’t
first, at least no one before him has ever truly seen the water’s
beauty, and nobody after him will appreciate the charms of this
elegant, timeless place.
Sometimes Able brings others to the pool, but
only his best friends and a few boys whom he wants to impress. Not for
a long time does he even consider bringing a girl, and then it takes
forever to find a worthy candidate, then muster the courage to ask her
to join him. Her name is Mish. She’s younger than Able by a little
ways, but like all girls, she acts older and much wiser than he will
ever be. They have been classmates from the beginning. They live three
floors apart in The Tower Of Gracious Good, which makes them close
neighbors. Mish is pretty, and her beauty is the sort that will only
grow as she becomes a woman. Her face is narrow and serious. Her eyes
watch everything. She wears flowing dresses and jeweled sandals, and
she goes everywhere with a clouded leopard named Mr.
Stuff-and-Nonsense. “If my cat can come along,” she says after hearing
Able’s generous offer. “Are there any birds at this pond of yours?”
Able should be horrified by the question. The
life around the pool knows him and has grown to trust him. But he is so
enamored by Mish that he blurts out, “Yes, hundreds of birds. Fat, slow
birds. Mr. Stuff can eat himself sick.”
“But that wouldn’t be right,” Mish replies
with a disapproving smirk. “I’ll lock down his appetite. And if we see
any wounded birds…any animal that’s suffering…we can unlock him right
away…!”
“Oh, sure,” Able replies, almost sick with
nerves. “I guess that’s fine, too.”
People rarely travel any distance. City is
thoroughly modern, every apartment supplied by conduits and meshed with
every web and channel, shareline and gossip run. But even with most of
its citizens happily sitting at home, the streets are jammed with
millions of walking bodies. Every seat on the train is filled all the
way to the last stop. Able momentarily loses track of Mish when the
cabin walls evaporate. But thankfully, he finds her waiting at Park’s
edge. She and her little leopard are standing in the narrow shade of a
horsetail. She teases him, observing, “You look lost.” Then she laughs,
perhaps at him, before abruptly changing the subject. With a nod and
sweeping gesture, she asks, “Have you noticed? Our towers look like
these trees.”
To a point, yes. The towers are tall and thin
and rounded like the horsetails, and the hanging porches make them
appear rough-skinned. But there are obvious and important differences
between trees and towers, and if she were a boy, Able would make fun of
her now. Fighting his nature, Able forces himself to smile. “Oh, my,”
he says as he turns, looking back over a shoulder. “They do look like
horsetails, don’t they?”
Now the three adventurers set off into the
forest. Able takes the lead. Walking with boys is a quick business that
often turns into a race. But girls are different, particularly when
their fat, unhungry cats are dragging along behind them. It takes
forever to reach the rim of the world. Then it takes another two
forevers to follow the rim to where they can almost see the secret
pool. But that’s where Mish announces, “I’m tired!” To the world, she
says, “I want to stop and eat. I want to rest here.”
Able nearly tells her, “No.”
Instead he decides to coax her, promising,
“It’s just a little farther.”
But she doesn’t seem to hear him, leaping up
on the pink polished rim, sitting where the granite is smooth and flat,
legs dangling and her bony knees exposed. She opens the little pack
that has floated on her back from the beginning, pulling out a hot
lunch that she keeps and a cold lunch that she hands to Able. “This is
all I could take,” she explains, “without my parents asking questions.”
She is reminding Able that she never quite got permission to make this
little journey. “If you don’t like the cold lunch,” she promises, “then
we can trade. I mean, if you really don’t.”
He says, “I like it fine,” without opening the
insulated box. Then he looks inside, discovering a single wedge of
spiced sap, and it takes all of his poise not to say, “Ugh!”
Mr. Stuff collapses into a puddle of
towerlight, instantly falling asleep.
The two children eat quietly and slowly. Mish
makes the occasional noise about favorite teachers and mutual friends.
She acts serious and ordinary, and disappointment starts gnawing at
Able. He isn’t old enough to sense that the girl is nervous. He can’t
imagine that Mish wants to delay the moment when they’ll reach the
secret pool, or that she sees possibilities waiting there—wicked
possibilities that only a wicked boy should be able to foresee.
Finished with her meal, Mish runs her hands
along the hem of her dress, and she kicks at the air, and then, hunting
for any distraction, she happens to glance over her shoulder.
Where the granite ends, the world ends.
Normally nothing of substance can be seen out past the pink
stone—nothing but a confused, ever-shifting grayness that extends on
forever. Able hasn’t bothered to look out there. He is much too busy
trying to finish his awful meal, concentrating on his little
frustrations and his depraved little daydreams.
“Oh, goodness,” the young girl exclaims. “Look
at that!”
Able has no expectations. What could possibly
be worth the trouble of turning around? But it’s an excuse to give up
on his lunch, and after setting it aside, he turns slowly, eyes jumping
wide open and a surprised grunt leaking out of him as he tumbles off
the granite, landing squarely on top of poor Mr. Stuff.
ESCHER
She has a clear, persistent memory of flesh,
but the flesh isn’t hers. Like manners and like knowledge, what a
person remembers can be bequeathed by her ancestors. That’s what is
happening now. Limbs and heads; penises and vaginas. In the midst of
some unrelated business, she remembers having feet and the endless need
to protect those feet with sandals or boots or ostrich skin or spiked
shoes that will lend a person even more height. She remembers wearing
clothes that gave color and bulk to what was already bright and
enormous. At this particular instant, what she sees is a distant,
long-dead relative sitting on a white porcelain bowl, bare feet
dangling, his orifices voiding mountains of waste and an ocean of
water.
Her oldest ancestors were giants. They were
built from skin and muscle, wet air and great slabs of fat. Without
question, they were an astonishing excess of matter, vast beyond all
reason, yet fueled by slow, inefficient chemical fires.
Nothing about Escher is inefficient. No flesh
clings to her. Not a drop of water or one glistening pearl of fat. It’s
always smart to be built from structure light and tested, efficient
instructions. It’s best to be tinier than a single cell and as swift as
electricity, slipping unseen through places that won’t even notice your
presence.
Escher is a glimmer, a perfect and enduring
whisper of light. Of life. Lovely in her own fashion, yet fierce beyond
all measure.
She needs her fierceness.
When cooperation fails, as it always does, a
person has to throw her rage at the world and her countless enemies.
But in this place, for this moment,
cooperation holds sway.
Manners rule.
Escher is eating. Even as tiny and efficient
as she is, she needs an occasional sip of raw power. Everyone does. And
it seems as if half of everyone has gathered around what can only be
described as a tiny, delicious wound. She can’t count the citizens
gathered at the feast. Millions and millions, surely. All those weak
glimmers join into a soft glow. Everyone is bathed in a joyous light.
It is a boastful, wasteful show, but Escher won’t waste her energy with
warnings. Better to sip at the wound, absorbing the free current,
building up her reserves for the next breeding cycle. It is best to let
others make the mistakes for you: Escher believes nothing else quite so
fervently.
A pair of sisters float past. The familial
resemblance is obvious, and so are the tiny differences. Mutations as
well as tailored changes have created two loud gossips who speak and
giggle in a rush of words and raw data, exchanging secrets about the
multitude around them.
Escher ignores their prattle, gulping down the
last of what she can possibly hold, and then pausing, considering where
she might hide a few nanojoules of extra juice, keeping them safe for
some desperate occasion.
Escher begins to hunt for that unlikely hiding
place.
And then her sisters abruptly change topics.
Gossip turns to trading memories stolen from The World. Most of it is
picoweight stuff, useless and boring. An astonishing fraction of His
thoughts are banal. Like the giants of old, He can afford to be sloppy.
To be a spendthrift. Here is a pointed example of why Escher is happy
to be herself. She is smart in her own fashion, and imaginative, and
almost everything about her is important, and when a problem confronts
her, she can cut through the muddle, seeing the blessing wrapped up
snug inside the measurable risks.
Quietly, with a puzzled tone, one sister
announces, “The World is alarmed.”
“About?” says the other.
“A situation,” says the first. “Yes, He is
alarmed now. Moral questions are begging for His attention.”
“What questions?”
The first sister tells a brief, strange story.
“You know all this?” asks another. Asks
Escher. “Is this daydream or hard fact?”
“I know, and it is fact.” The sister feels
insulted by the doubting tone, but she puts on a mannerly voice,
explaining the history of this sudden crisis.
Escher listens.
And suddenly the multitude is talking about
nothing else. What is happening has never happened before, not in this
fashion…not in any genuine memory of any of the millions here, it
hasn’t…and some very dim possibilities begin to show themselves.
Benefits wrapped inside some awful dangers. And one or two of these
benefits wink at Escher, and smile….
The multitude panics, and evaporates.
Escher remains behind, deliberating on these
possibilities. The landscape beneath her is far more sophisticated than
flesh, and stronger, but it has an ugly appearance that reminds her of
a flesh-born memory. A lesion; a pimple. A tiny, unsightly ruin
standing in what is normally seamless, and beautiful, and perfect.
She flees, but only so far.
Then she hunkers down and waits, knowing that
eventually, in one fashion or another, He will scratch at this tiny
irritation.
THE
SPEAKER
“You cannot count
human accomplishments,” he boasts to his audience, strutting and
wagging his way to the edge of the stage. Bare toes curl over the sharp
edge, and he grins jauntily, admitting, “And I cannot count them,
either. There are simply too many successes, in too many far flung
places, to nail up a number that you can believe. But allow me, if you
will, this chance to list a few important marvels.”
Long hands grab bony
hips, and he gazes out into the watching darkness. “The conquest of our
cradle continent,” he begins, “which was quickly followed by the
conquest of our cradle world. Then after a gathering pause, we swiftly
and thoroughly occupied most of our neighboring worlds, too. It was
during those millennia when we learned how to split flint and atoms and
DNA and our own restless psyches. With these apish hands, we fashioned
great machines that worked for us as our willing, eager slaves. And
with our slaves’ more delicate hands, we fabricated machines that could
think for us.” A knowing wink, a mischievous shrug. “Like any child, of
course, our thinking machines eventually learned to think for
themselves. Which was a dangerous, foolish
business, said some. Said fools. But my list of our marvels only begins
with that business. This is what I believe, and I challenge anyone to
say otherwise.”
There is a sound—a
stern little murmur—and perhaps it implies dissent. Or perhaps the
speaker made the noise himself, fostering a tension that he is building
with his words and body.
His penis grows
erect, drawing the eye.
Then with a wide and
bright and unabashedly smug grin, he roars out, “Say this with me. Tell
me what great things we have done. Boast to Creation about the wonders
that we have taken part in…!”
PROCYON
Torture is what this is: She feels her body
plunging from a high place, head before feet. A frantic wind roars
past. Outstretched hands refuse to slow her fall. Then Procyon makes
herself spin, putting her feet beneath her body, and gravity instantly
reverses itself. She screams, and screams, and the distant walls
reflect her terror, needles jabbed into her wounded ears. Finally, she
grows quiet, wrapping her arms around her eyes and ears, forcing
herself to do nothing, hanging limp in space while her body falls in
one awful direction.
A voice whimpers.
A son’s worried voice says, “Mother, are you
there? Mother?”
Some of her add-ons have been peeled away, but
not all of them. The brave son uses a whisper-channel, saying, “I’m
sorry,” with a genuine anguish. He sounds sick and sorry, and
exceptionally angry, too. “I was careless,” he admits. He says, “Thank
you for saving me.” Then to someone else, he says, “She can’t hear me.”
“I hear you,” she whispers.
“Listen,” says her other son. The lazy one.
“Did you hear something?”
She starts to say, “Boys,” with a stern voice.
But then the trap vibrates, a piercing white screech nearly deafening
Procyon. Someone physically strikes the trap. Two someones. She feels
the walls turning around her, the trap making perhaps a quarter-turn
toward home.
Again, she calls out, “Boys.”
They stop rolling her. Did they hear her? No,
they found a hidden restraint, the trap secured at one or two or ten
ends.
One last time, she says, “Boys.”
“I hear her,” her dreamy son blurts.
“Don’t give up, Mother,” says her brave son.
“We’ll get you out. I see the locks, I can beat them—”
“You can’t,” she promises.
He pretends not to have heard her. A shaped
explosive detonates, making a cold ringing sound, faraway and useless.
Then the boy growls, “Damn,” and kicks the trap, accomplishing nothing
at all.
“It’s too tough,” says her dreamy son. “We’re
not doing any good—”
“Shut up,” his brother shouts.
Procyon tells them, “Quiet now. Be quiet.”
The trap is probably tied to an alarm. Time is
short, or it has run out already. Either way, there’s a decision to be
made, and the decision has a single, inescapable answer. With a careful
and firm voice, she tells her sons, “Leave me. Now. Go!”
“I won’t,” the brave son declares. “Never!”
“Now,” she says.
“It’s my fault,” says the dreamy son. “I
should have been keeping up—”
“Both of you are to blame,” Procyon calls out.
“And I am, too. And there’s bad luck here, but there’s some good, too.
You’re still free. You can still get away. Now, before you get yourself
seen and caught—”
“You’re going to die,” the brave son
complains.
“One day or the next, I will,” she agrees.
“Absolutely.”
“We’ll find help,” he promises.
“From where?” she asks.
“From who?” says her dreamy son in the same
instant. “We aren’t close to anyone—”
“Shut up,” his brother snaps. “Just shut up!”
“Run away,” their mother repeats.
“I won’t,” the brave son tells her. Or
himself. Then with a serious, tight little voice, he says, “I can
fight. We’ll both fight.”
Her dreamy son says nothing.
Procyon peels her arms away from her face,
opening her eyes, focusing on the blurring cylindrical walls of the
trap. It seems that she was wrong about her sons. The brave one is just
a fool, and the dreamy one has the good sense. She listens to her
dreamy son saying nothing, and then the other boy says, “Of course
you’re going to fight. Together, we can do some real damage—”
“I love you both,” she declares.
That wins a silence.
Then again, one last time, she says, “Run.”
“I’m not a coward,” one son growls.
While her good son says nothing, running now,
and he needs his breath for things more essential than pride and
bluster.
ABLE
The face stares at them for the longest
while. It is a great wide face, heavily bearded with smoke-colored eyes
and a long nose perched above the cavernous mouth that hangs open,
revealing teeth and things more amazing than teeth. Set between the
bone-white enamel are little machines made of fancy stuff. Able can
only guess what the add-on machines are doing. This is a wild man,
powerful and free. People like him are scarce and strange, their bodies
reengineered in countless ways. Like his eyes: Able stares into those
giant gray eyes, noticing fleets of tiny machines floating on the
tears. Those machines are probably delicate sensors. Then with a jolt
of amazement, he realizes that those machines and sparkling eyes are
staring into their world with what seems to be a genuine fascination.
“He’s watching us,” Able mutters.
“No, he isn’t,” Mish argues. “He can’t see
into our realm.”
“We can’t see into his either,” the boy
replies. “But just the same, I can make him out just fine.”
“It must be….” Her voice falls silent while
she accesses City’s library. Then with a dismissive shrug of her
shoulders, she announces, “We’re caught in his topological hardware.
That’s all. He has to simplify his surroundings to navigate, and we
just happen to be close enough and aligned right.”
Able had already assumed all that.
Mish starts to speak again, probably wanting
to add to her explanation. She can sure be a know-everything sort of
girl. But then the great face abruptly turns away, and they watch the
man run away from their world.
“I told you,” Mish sings out. “He couldn’t see
us.”
“I think he could have,” Able replies, his
voice finding a distinct sharpness.
The girl straightens her back. “You’re wrong,”
she says with an obstinate tone. Then she turns away from the edge of
the world, announcing, “I’m ready to go on now.”
“I’m not,” says Able.
She doesn’t look back at him. She seems to be
talking to her leopard, asking, “Why aren’t you ready?”
“I see two of them now,” Able tells her.
“You can’t.”
“I can.” The hardware trickery is keeping the
outside realms sensible. A tunnel of simple space leads to two men
standing beside an iron-black cylinder. The men wear camouflage, but
they are moving too fast to let it work. They look small now. Distant,
or tiny. Once you leave the world, size and distance are impossible to
measure. How many times have teachers told him that? Able watches the
tiny men kicking at the cylinder. They beat on its heavy sides with
their fists and forearms, managing to roll it for almost a quarter
turn. Then one of the men pulls a fist-sized device from what looks
like a cloth sack, fixing it to what looks like a sealed slot, and both
men hurry to the far end of the cylinder.
“What are they doing?” asks Mish with a grumpy
interest.
A feeling warns Able, but too late. He starts
to say, “Look away—”
The explosion is brilliant and swift, the
blast reflected off the cylinder and up along the tunnel of ordinary
space, a clap of thunder making the giant horsetails sway and nearly
knocking the two of them onto the forest floor.
“They’re criminals,” Mish mutters with a
nervous hatred.
“How do you know?” the boy asks.
“People like that just are,” she remarks.
“Living like they do. Alone like that, and wild. You know how they make
their living.”
“They take what they need—”
“They steal!” she interrupts.
Able doesn’t even glance at her. He watches as
the two men work frantically, trying to pry open the still-sealed
doorway. He can’t guess why they would want the doorway opened. Or
rather, he can think of too many reasons. But when he looks at their
anguished, helpless faces, he realizes that whatever is inside, it’s
driving these wild men very close to panic.
“Criminals,” Mish repeats.
“I heard you,” Able mutters.
Then before she can offer another hard
opinion, he turns to her and admits, “I’ve always liked them. They live
by their wits, and mostly alone, and they have all these sweeping
powers—”
“Powers that they’ve stolen,” she whines.
“From garbage, maybe.” There is no point in
mentioning whose garbage. He stares at Mish’s face, pretty but twisted
with fury, and something sad and inevitable occurs to Able. He shakes
his head and sighs, telling her, “I don’t like you very much.”
Mish is taken by surprise. Probably no other
boy has said those awful words to her, and she doesn’t know how to
react, except to sputter ugly little sounds as she turns, looking back
over the edge of the world.
Able does the same.
One of the wild men abruptly turns and runs.
In a super-sonic flash, he races past the children, vanishing into the
swirling grayness, leaving his companion to stand alone beside the
mysterious black cylinder. Obviously weeping, the last man wipes the
tears from his whiskered face with a trembling hand, while his other
hand begins to yank a string of wondrous machines from what seems to be
a bottomless sack of treasures.
ESCHER
She consumes all of her carefully stockpiled
energies, and for the first time in her life, she weaves a body for
herself: A distinct physical shell composed of diamond dust and keratin
and discarded rare earths and a dozen subtle glues meant to bind to
every surface without being felt. To a busy eye, she is dust. She is
insubstantial and useless and forgettable. To a careful eye and an
inquisitive touch, she is the tiniest soul imaginable, frail beyond
words, forever perched on the brink of extermination. Surely she poses
no threat to any creature, least of all the great ones. Lying on the
edge of the little wound, passive and vulnerable, she waits for Chance
to carry her where she needs to be. Probably others are doing the same.
Perhaps thousands of sisters and daughters are hiding nearby, each snug
inside her own spore case. The temptation to whisper, “Hello,” is
easily ignored. The odds are awful as it is; any noise could turn this
into a suicide. What matters is silence and watchfulness, thinking hard
about the great goal while keeping ready for anything that might
happen, as well as everything that will not.
The little wound begins to heal, causing a
trickling pain to flow.
The World feels the irritation, and in reflex,
touches His discomfort by several means, delicate and less so.
Escher misses her first opportunity. A great
swift shape presses its way across her hiding place, but she activates
her glues too late. Dabs of glue cure against air, wasted. So she cuts
the glue loose and watches again. A second touch is unlikely, but it
comes, and she manages to heave a sticky tendril into a likely crevice,
letting the irresistible force yank her into a brilliant, endless sky.
She will probably die now.
For a little while, Escher allows herself to
look back across her life, counting daughters and other successes,
taking warm comfort in her many accomplishments.
Someone hangs in the distance, dangling from a
similar tendril. Escher recognizes the shape and intricate glint of her
neighbor’s spore case; she is one of Escher’s daughters. There is a
strong temptation to signal her, trading information, helping each
other—
But a purge-ball attacks suddenly, and the
daughter evaporates, nothing remaining of her but ions and a flash of
incoherent light.
Escher pulls herself toward the crevice, and
hesitates. Her tendril is anchored on a fleshy surface. A minor
neuron—a thread of warm optical cable—lies buried inside the wet cells.
She launches a second tendril at her new target. By chance, the
purge-ball sweeps the wrong terrain, giving her that little instant.
The tendril makes a sloppy connection with the neuron. Without time to
test its integrity, all she can do is shout, “Don’t kill me! Or my
daughters! Don’t murder us, Great World!”
Nothing changes. The purge-ball works its way
across the deeply folded fleshscape, moving toward Escher again,
distant flashes announcing the deaths of another two daughters or
sisters.
“Great World!” she cries out.
He will not reply. Escher is like the hum of a
single angry electron, and she can only hope that he notices the hum.
“I am vile,” she promises. “I am loathsome and
sneaky, and you should hate me. What I am is an illness lurking inside
you. A disease that steals exactly what I can steal without bringing
your wrath.”
The purge-ball appears, following a tall
reddish ridge of flesh, bearing down on her hiding place.
She says, “Kill me, if you want. Or spare me,
and I will do this for you.” Then she unleashes a series of vivid
images, precise and simple, meant to be compelling to any mind.
The purge-ball slows, its sterilizing lasers
taking careful aim.
She repeats herself, knowing that thought
travels only so quickly and The World is too vast to see her thoughts
and react soon enough to save her. But if she can help…if she saves
just a few hundred daughters…?
Lasers aim, and do nothing. Nothing. And after
an instant of inactivity, the machine changes its shape and nature. It
hovers above Escher, sending out its own tendrils. A careless strength
yanks her free of her hiding place. Her tendrils and glues are ripped
from her aching body. A scaffolding of carbon is built around her, and
she is shoved inside the retooled purge-ball, held in a perfect
darkness, waiting alone until an identical scaffold is stacked beside
her.
A hard, angry voice boasts, “I did this.”
“What did you do?” asks Escher.
“I made the World listen to reason.” It sounds
like Escher’s voice, except for the delusions of power. “I made a
promise, and that’s why He saved us.”
With a sarcastic tone, she says, “Thank you
ever so much. But now where are we going?”
“I won’t tell you,” her fellow prisoner
responds.
“Because you don’t know where,” says Escher.
“I know everything I need to know.”
“Then you’re the first person ever,” she
giggles, winning a brief, delicious silence from her companion.
Other prisoners arrive, each slammed into the
empty spaces between their sisters and daughters. Eventually the
purge-ball is a prison-ball, swollen to vast proportions, and no one
else is being captured. Nothing changes for a long while. There is
nothing to be done now but wait, speaking when the urge hits and
listening to whichever voice sounds less than tedious.
Gossip is the common currency. People are
desperate to hear the smallest glimmer of news. Where the final rumor
comes from, nobody knows if it’s true. But the woman who was captured
moments after Escher claims, “It comes from the world Himself. He’s
going to put us where we can do the most good.”
“Where?” Escher inquires.
“On a tooth,” her companion says. “The right
incisor, as it happens.” Then with that boasting voice, she adds,
“Which is exactly what I told Him to do. This is all because of me.”
“What isn’t?” Escher grumbles.
“Very little,” the tiny prisoner promises.
“Very, very little.”
THE
SPEAKER
“We walk today on
a thousand worlds, and I mean ‘walk’in all manners of speaking.” He
manages a few comical steps before shifting into a graceful turn, arms
held firmly around the wide waist of an invisible and equally graceful
partner. “A hundred alien suns bake us with their perfect light. And
between the suns, in the cold and dark, we survive, and thrive, by
every worthy means.”
Now he pauses, hands
forgetting the unseen partner. A look of calculated confusion sweeps
across his face. Fingers rise to his thick black hair, stabbing it and
yanking backward, leaving furrows in the unruly mass.
“Our numbers,” he
says. “Our population. It made us sick with worry when we were ten
billion standing on the surface of one enormous world. ‘Where will our
children stand?’ we asked ourselves. But then in the next little while,
we became ten trillion people, and we had split into a thousand species
of humanity, and the new complaint was that we were still too scarce
and spread too far apart. ‘How could we matter to the universe?’ we
asked ourselves. ‘How could so few souls endure another day in our
immeasurable, uncaring universe?’ ”
His erect penis
makes a little leap, a fat and vivid white drop of semen striking the
wooden stage with an audible plop.
“Our numbers,” he
repeats. “Our legions.” Then with a wide, garish smile, he confesses,
“I don’t know our numbers today. No authority does. You make estimates.
You extrapolate off data that went stale long ago. You build a hundred
models and fashion every kind of vast number. Ten raised to the twentieth power. The thirtieth power. Or more.”
He giggles and skips backward, and with the giddy, careless energy of a
child, he dances where he stands, singing to lights overhead, “If you
are as common as sand and as unique as snowflakes, how can you be
anything but a wild, wonderful success?”
ABLE
The wild man is enormous and powerful, and
surely brilliant beyond anything that Able can comprehend—as smart as
City as a whole—but despite his gifts, the man is obviously terrified.
That he can even manage to stand his ground astonishes Able. He says as
much to Mish, and then he glances at her, adding, “He must be very
devoted to whoever’s inside.”
“Whoever’s inside what?” she asks.
“That trap.” He looks straight ahead again,
telling himself not to waste time with the girl. She is foolish and
bad-tempered, and he couldn’t be any more tired of her. “I think that’s
what the cylinder is,” he whispers. “A trap of some kind. And someone’s
been caught in it.”
“Well, I don’t care who,” she snarls.
He pretends not to notice her.
“What was that?” she blurts. “Did you hear
that—?”
“No,” Able blurts. But then he notices a
distant rumble, deep and faintly rhythmic, and with every breath,
growing. When he listens carefully, it resembles nothing normal. It
isn’t thunder, and it can’t be a voice. He feels the sound as much as
he hears it, as if some great mass were being displaced. But he knows
better. In school, teachers like to explain what must be happening now,
employing tortuous mathematics and magical sleights of hand. Matter and
energy are being rapidly and brutally manipulated. The universe’s
obscure dimensions are being twisted like bands of warm rubber. Able
knows all this. But still, he understands none of it. Words without
comprehension; froth without substance. All that he knows for certain
is that behind that deep, unknowable throbbing lies something even
farther beyond human description.
The wild man looks up, gray eyes staring at
that something.
He cries out, that tiny sound lost between his
mouth and Able. Then he produces what seems to be a spear—no, an
elaborate missile—that launches itself with a bolt of fire, lifting a
sophisticated warhead up into a vague gray space that swallows the
weapon without sound, or complaint.
Next the man aims a sturdy laser, and fires.
But the weapon simply melts at its tip, collapsing into a smoldering,
useless mass at his feet.
Again, the wild man cries out.
His language could be a million generations
removed from City-speech, but Able hears the desperate, furious sound
of his voice. He doesn’t need words to know that the man is cursing.
Then the swirling grayness slows itself, and parts, and stupidly, in
reflex, Able turns to Mish, wanting to tell her, “Watch. You’re going
to see one of Them.”
But Mish has vanished. Sometime in the last
few moments, she jumped off the world’s rim and ran away, and save for
the fat old leopard sleeping between the horsetails, Able is entirely
alone now.
“Good,” he mutters.
Almost too late, he turns and runs to the very
edge of the granite rim.
The wild man stands motionless now. His bowels
and bladder have emptied themselves. His handsome, godly face is
twisted from every flavor of misery. Eyes as big as windows stare up
into what only they can see, and to that great, unknowable something,
the man says two simple words.
“Fuck you,” Able hears.
And then the wild man opens his mouth, baring
his white apish teeth, and just as Able wonders what’s going to happen,
the man’s body explodes, the dull black burst of a shaped charge
sending chunks of his face skyward.
PROCYON
One last time, she whispers her son’s name.
She whispers it and closes her mouth and
listens to the brief, sharp silence that comes after the awful
explosion. What must have happened, she tells herself, is that her boy
found his good sense and fled. How can a mother think anything else?
And then the ominous deep rumbling begins again, begins and gradually
swells until the walls of the trap are shuddering and twisting again.
But this time the monster is slower. It approaches the trap more
cautiously, summoning new courage. She can nearly taste its courage
now, and with her intuition, she senses emotions that might be
curiosity and might be a kind of reflexive admiration. Or do those
eternal human emotions have any relationship for what It feels…?
What she feels, after everything, is numbness.
A terrible deep weariness hangs on her like a new skin. Procyon seems
to be falling faster now, accelerating down through the bottomless
trap. But she doesn’t care anymore. In place of courage, she wields a
muscular apathy. Death looms, but when hasn’t it been her dearest
companion? And in place of fear, she is astonished to discover an
incurious little pride about what is about to happen: How many
people—wild free people like herself—have ever found themselves so near
one of Them?
Quietly, with a calm, smooth and slow voice,
Procyon says, “I feel you there, you. I can taste you.”
Nothing changes.
Less quietly, she says, “Show yourself.”
A wide parabolic floor appears, gleaming and
black and agonizingly close. But just before she slams into the floor,
a wrenching force peels it away. A brilliant violet light rises to meet
her, turning into a thick sweet syrup. What may or may not be a hand
curls around her body, and squeezes. Procyon fights every urge to
struggle. She wrestles with her body, wrestles with her will, forcing
both to lie still while the hand tightens its grip and grows
comfortable. Then using a voice that betrays nothing tentative or
small, she tells what holds her, “I made you, you know.”
She says, “You can do what you want to me.”
Then with a natural, deep joy, she cries out,
“But you’re an ungrateful glory…and you’ll always belong to me…!”
ESCHER
The prison-ball has been reengineered,
slathered with camouflage and armor and the best immune-suppressors on
the market, and its navigation system has been adapted from add-ons
stolen from the finest trashcans. Now it is a battle-phage riding on
the sharp incisor as far as it dares, then leaping free. A thousand
similar phages leap and lose their way, or they are killed. Only
Escher’s phage reaches the target, impacting on what passes for flesh
and launching its cargo with a microscopic railgun, punching her and a
thousand sisters and daughters through immeasurable distances of
senseless, twisted nothing.
How many survive the attack?
She can’t guess how many. Can’t even care.
What matters is to make herself survive inside this strange new world.
An enormous world, yes. Escher feels a vastness that reaches out across
ten or twelve or maybe a thousand dimensions. How do I know where to
go? she asks herself. And instantly, an assortment of possible routes
appear in her consciousness, drawn in the simplest imaginable fashion,
waiting and eager to help her find her way around.
This is a last gift from Him, she realizes.
Unless there are more gifts waiting, of course.
She thanks nobody.
On the equivalent of tiptoes, Escher creeps
her way into a tiny conduit that moves something stranger than any
blood across five dimensions. She becomes passive, aiming for
invisibility. She drifts and spins, watching her surroundings turn from
a senseless glow into a landscape that occasionally seems a little bit
reasonable. A little bit real. Slowly, she learns how to see in this
new world. Eventually she spies a little peak that may or may not be
ordinary matter. The peak is pink and flexible and sticks out into the
great artery, and flinging her last tendril, Escher grabs hold and
pulls in snug, knowing that the chances are lousy that she will ever
find anything nourishing here, much less delicious.
But her reserves have been filled again, she
notes. If she is careful—and when hasn’t she been—her energies will
keep her alive for centuries.
She thinks of the World, and thanks nobody.
“Watch and learn,” she whispers to herself.
That was the first human thought. She
remembers that odd fact suddenly. People were just a bunch of grubbing
apes moving blindly through their tiny lives until one said to a
companion, “Watch and learn.”
An inherited memory, or another gift from Him?
Silently, she thanks Luck, and she thanks Him,
and once again, she thanks Luck.
“Patience and planning,” she tells herself.
Which is another wise thought of the
conscious, enduring ape.
THE
LAST SON
The locked gates and various doorways know
him—recognize him at a glance—but they have to taste him anyway. They
have to test him. Three people were expected, and he can’t explain in
words what has happened. He just says, “The others will be coming
later,” and leaves that lie hanging in the air. Then as he passes
through the final doorway, he says, “Let no one through. Not without my
permission first.”
“This is your mother’s house,” says the door’s
AI.
“Not anymore,” he remarks.
The machine grows quiet, and sad.
During any other age, his home would be a
mansion. There are endless rooms, rooms beyond counting, and each is
enormous and richly furnished and lovely and jammed full of games and
art and distractions and flourishes that even the least aesthetic soul
would find lovely. He sees none of that now. Alone, he walks to what
has always been his room, and he sits on a leather recliner, and the
house brings him a soothing drink and an intoxicating drink and an
assortment of treats that sit on the platter, untouched.
For a long while, the boy stares off at the
distant ceiling, replaying everything with his near-perfect memory.
Everything. Then he forgets everything, stupidly calling out, “Mother,”
with a voice that sounds ridiculously young. Then again, he calls,
“Mother.” And he starts to rise from his chair, starts to ask the great
empty house, “Where is she?”
And he remembers.
As if his legs have been sawed off, he
collapses. His chair twists itself to catch him, and an army of AIs
brings their talents to bear. They are loyal, limited machines. They
are empathetic, and on occasion, even sweet. They want to help him in
any fashion, just name the way…but their appeals and their smart
suggestions are just so much noise. The boy acts deaf, and he obviously
can’t see anything with his fists jabbed into his eyes like that,
slouched forward in his favorite chair, begging an invisible someone
for forgiveness….
THE
SPEAKER
He squats and uses
the tip of a forefinger to dab at the puddle of semen, and he rubs the
finger against his thumb, saying, “Think of cells. Individual,
self-reliant cells. For most of Earth’s great history, they ruled.
First as bacteria, and then as composites built from cooperative
bacteria. They were everywhere and ruled everything, and then the wild
cells learned how to dance together, in one enormous body, and the
living world was transformed for the next seven hundred million years.”
Thumb and finger
wipe themselves dry against a hairy thigh, and he rises again, grinning
in that relentless and smug, yet somehow charming fashion. “Everything
was changed, and nothing had
changed,” he says. Then he says, “Scaling,” with an important tone, as
if that single word should erase all confusion. “The bacteria and green
algae and the carnivorous amoebae weren’t swept away by any revolution.
Honestly, I doubt if their numbers fell appreciably or for long.” And
again, he says, “Scaling,” and sighs with a rich appreciation. “Life
evolves. Adapts. Spreads and grows, constantly utilizing new energies
and novel genetics. But wherever something large can live, a thousand
small things can thrive just as well, or better. Wherever something
enormous survives, a trillion bacteria hang on for the ride.”
For a moment, the
speaker hesitates.
A slippery
half-instant passes where an audience might believe that he has finally
lost his concentration, that he is about to stumble over his own
tongue. But then he licks at the air, tasting something delicious. And
three times, he clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
Then he says what he
has planned to say from the beginning.
“I never know whom
I’m speaking to,” he admits. “I’ve never actually seen my audience. But
I know you’re great and good. I know that however you appear, and
however you make your living, you deserve to hear this:
“Humans have always
lived in terror. Rainstorms and the eclipsing moon and earthquakes and
the ominous guts of some disemboweled goat—all have preyed upon our
fears and defeated our fragile optimisms. But what we fear today—what
shapes and reshapes the universe around us—is a child of our own
imaginations.
“A whirlwind that
owes its very existence to glorious, endless us!”
ABLE
The boy stops walking once or twice, letting
the fat leopard keep pace. Then he pushes his way through a last wall
of emerald ferns, stepping out into the bright damp air above the
rounded pool. A splashing takes him by surprise. He looks down at his
secret pool, and he squints, watching what seems to be a woman pulling
her way through the clear water with thick, strong arms. She is naked.
Astonishingly, wonderfully naked. A stubby hand grabs an overhanging
limb, and she stands on the rocky shore, moving as if exhausted,
picking her way up the slippery slope until she finds an open patch of
halfway flattened earth where she can collapse, rolling onto her back,
her smooth flesh glistening and her hard breasts shining up at Able,
making him sick with joy.
Then she starts to cry, quietly, with a deep
sadness.
Lust vanishes, replaced by simple
embarrassment. Able flinches and starts to step back, and that’s when
he first looks at her face.
He recognizes its features.
Intrigued, the boy picks his way down to the
shoreline, practically standing beside the crying woman.
She looks at him, and she sniffs.
“I saw two of them,” he reports. “And I saw
you, too. You were inside that cylinder, weren’t you?”
She watches him, saying nothing.
“I saw something pull you out of that trap.
And then I couldn’t see you. It
must have put you here, I guess. Out of its way.” Able nods, and
smiles. He can’t help but stare at her breasts, but at least he keeps
his eyes halfway closed, pretending to look out over the water instead.
“It took pity on you, I guess.”
A good-sized fish breaks on the water.
The woman seems to watch the creature as it
swims past, big blue scales catching the light, heavy fins lazily
shoving their way through the warm water. The fish eyes are huge and
black, and they are stupid eyes. The mind behind them sees nothing but
vague shapes and sudden motions. Able knows from experience: If he
stands quite still, the creature will come close enough to touch.
“They’re called coelacanths,” he explains.
Maybe the woman reacts to his voice. Some
sound other than crying now leaks from her.
So Able continues, explaining, “They were
rare, once. I’ve studied them quite a bit. They’re old and primitive,
and they were almost extinct when we found them. But when they got loose, got free, and took apart
the Earth…and took everything and everyone with them up into the sky…”
The woman gazes up at the towering horsetails.
Able stares at her legs and what lies between
them.
“Anyway,” he mutters, “there’s more
coelacanths now than ever. They live in a million oceans, and they’ve
never been more successful, really.” He hesitates, and then adds, “Kind
of like us, I think. Like people. You know?”
The woman turns, staring at him with
gray-white eyes. And with a quiet hard voice, she says, “No.”
She says, “That’s an idiot’s opinion.”
And then with a grace that belies her strong
frame, she dives back into the water, kicking hard and chasing that
ancient and stupid fish all the way back to the bottom.
Ken Wharton
<www.sff.net/people/kwharton/> is currently an assistant
professor in the San Jose State University Physics Department. In 2002,
his first novel, Divine Intervention (2001),
was runner-up for the Philip K. Dick Award for best SF paperback book.
“Flight Correction”
was published in Analog. It is
about several intertwined themes, including the daily life of
scientists, ingrained prejudice in physics and engineering against
evidence from “softer” sciences, and how the human relations of people
in science can hinder as well as help the solution of problems. It is
set in an interesting future in which the space elevator has been
constructed in the Galápagos Islands, perhaps a technological
triumph and most likely an ecological disaster.
“Albatross, Daddy!” Sally’s freckled
face was pure excitement. “Albatross!”
Hank blinked a few times from his position in
the hammock under the red mangroves. His daughter stood just beyond his
reach. “How do you even know what an albatross looks like?”
“Just come quick, Daddy! C’mon…” She stepped
forward and tugged at the remnants of his favorite shirt, a threadbare
blue oxford from his professor days back in the states.
Hank finally got to his feet and followed his
daughter down to the narrow lagoon. Splashing across after her, he
realized he had forgotten his hat. “Wait a sec, Sally…”
Whether she heard him or not, she didn’t turn
around. Screw it , he thought,
still following her. If he fried his bald spot in the equatorial sun,
it wouldn’t be the first time. Stepping out of the water, they turned
left, following the main path across the white sand beach. “Where’s
your mother?” he asked at last.
“Finches,” was all Sally said, clearly doing
her best to be patient with her slow-paced father.
Of course. Those boring little critters that
he’d never learned to tell apart. If his wife had studied some of these
other birds he might actually be
interested in her research. At that very moment Hank was walking right
past a pair of goofy-looking masked boobies, brilliant white except for
the dark mask around the yellow-orange bill. The two birds were
waddling around their sorry excuse for a nest, which looked for all the
world like a random pile of rocks on the ground. Meanwhile, three
beautiful red-pouched frigate birds sat within reach just overhead in
the mangrove tree, inflating their sacs and ululating madly. All the
birds ignored the humans with their usual Galápagos detachment,
which could have made them easy to study. But instead Julia went
roaming all over the island in search of those damn finches.
Sally led him up the trail toward the two
solar-powered lighthouses that guided those intolerable
mini-cruiseships into the heart of Genovesa. After a minute of
climbing, Hank was embarrassed to find himself panting with exertion.
He glanced down into the blue expanse of Darwin’s Bay and made a
half-hearted resolution to start swimming again.
Finally Hank made it over a crest, and there
it was. Standing on an ancient memorial plaque at the edge of the cliff
was an enormous white bird with a hooked, yellow beak. It was, in fact,
an albatross.
“Wow,” muttered Hank, his interest growing
despite himself. He had been told that these birds were endemic to
Española, at the far south of the Galápagos archipelago.
Hank had even seen them down there once, a huge breeding colony next to
the cliffs. But on this island, a hundred miles to the north, he had
never seen one. Not a single one, for the three years they had lived
here.
“Must have gotten lost, I guess,” Hank said to
his daughter. “Mom’ll be interested.”
But Sally apparently wasn’t finished yet. She
was already halfway to the next crest. Hank sighed and started walking
again. “What’s up there? Another…?”
Hank broke off as he approached the top and
could see the far side of the island. There was
another one! And another…. With every step his jaw dropped a little
further.
Here on Genovesa, a hundred miles off course,
five dozen albatross had gotten lost in the exact same place.
Hank watched from the shade under the
lighthouse while Julia filmed an albatross flopping toward the edge of
the cliff.
“Their feet are funny, Mommy,” Sally was
saying. “They’re way too long.”
“They’re not made for walking,” Julia
explained. “Wait, watch this…”
The bird hesitated at the edge of the cliff,
extending its six-foot wingspan once, twice, and then backing off as if
it was scared to death by the prospect. After a couple more fakes, it
stepped forward and jumped. Jumped, not flew. Hank saw a white form
plummet out of view, then reappear, enormous wings outstretched,
speeding away over the calm water.
“See, Sally,” his wife was saying, “they don’t
really flap. Takes too much energy, so they soar instead. Dynamic
soaring, it’s called.”
“Where’s it going?” Sally asked.
“To fish, probably. Maybe around here, maybe
down off the coast of Peru. Or maybe it’s going back to
Española, where they all live.”
“But then…what are they doing here?”
Julia lifted her gaze from the camera, smiled
at her daughter. “Very good
question. Usually they know right where to go.”
Hank spoke up. “Know any bird people down
south?”
Julia nodded. “Fernando does satellite
migration tracking. Probably has some tagged ones right here,
actually.”
“Hmm. Maybe you’ll get a call from him,” Hank
said.
“Oh, I’m sure the birds will all be gone
before sundown.”
Sally looked a bit sad. “But, but…it was nice
of them to visit, right?”
Julia beamed down at Sally. “And it was nice
of you to spot them for us. Otherwise we might never have known they
were here.”
Ten days later, the albatross population was
pushing a hundred and fifty.
The population of bird people was skyrocketing
as well: Fernando’s arrival this evening made four. Five, counting
Julia. Their little island was getting awfully crowded. Not to mention
their home.
Hank normally would have simply left, gone
outside to read his new download in private, but tonight El
Meaño had sent yet another nasty rainstorm. And with the birders
living in tiny two-man tents, the family’s semipermanent shelter was
the only spot for them all to gather.
Hank couldn’t imagine how Sally managed to
sleep through the noise; he couldn’t even read with all their chatter.
And if he heard the word “migratory” just one more time…. Finally, in
frustration, he picked up the sim-finch he had designed for his wife’s
research and started morphing the beak into implausible shapes.
It was an impressive piece of machinery, Hank
modestly told himself. Back in the early days of finch research, before
nano’geering enabled such devices, academics had resorted to more
gruesome techniques. One ancient study even reported chopping the heads
off of dead birds, swapping them around with the bodies, and then
setting the chimeras in seductive poses to see who would try to mate
with the corpses.
“I don’t think that one is going to see many
suitors, honey.” Julia was speaking to him from across the room,
referring with her eyes to the avian Cyrano. Hank shrugged and set it
back down, nearly spilling his bottle of rum. Julia turned back to the
main conversation.
“I’m telling you,” Julia insisted. “The
albatross are getting confused by the Line.”
Hank rolled his eyes and turned away. His wife
was always complaining about the space elevator; nothing new there. But
still, he couldn’t tune out the conversation.
“I don’t buy it, Julia,” said the only other
female in the group, a penguin expert. “One new star is not going to
mess up these birds. They’ve done studies—”
“One star that doesn’t rotate with all the
others,” Julia countered. “It’s not natural.”
“It’s been fully clouded over the last few
nights,” noted Fernando. “And they keep arriving. So it can’t be the
stars.”
“Well, what does that leave? Landmarks and
dead reckoning?”
Hank looked back over at the group, surprised
at the obvious omission. “Don’t forget magnetic fields.” Even a
washed-up N.E. professor knew that
much about bird migration.
The penguin expert shook her head. “Not here
at the equator. Sure, albatross have traces of magnetite in their
brains like other birds, but the fields are so much weaker here that
they don’t rely on them at all.”
Fernando stroked his white beard. “Still, he
has a point. Flying up from Peru, it’s a pretty small angular shift
between here and Española. You know Tuttle, up in the states?
He’s bred a strain of pigeon that’ll ignore all other cues, steer by
magnetic fields alone. It must be an innate module in pigeons, so maybe
all birds have it to some degree. Not at all inconceivable that new
fields could gently steer the albatross off course.”
“Maybe,” Julia said. “Maybe that’s what the
Line is doing to them. Changing the fields.”
“Enough about the Line, already,” said Hank.
Five pairs of eyes swiveled to glare at him, with varying levels of
intensity. Hank retreated into his book, making an important mental
note: don’t mention the Line around Galápagos ecologists.
Hank supposed that the primary
responsibility lay with generations of science fiction writers. If
Ecuador hadn’t been so certain
about Quito they wouldn’t have campaigned so heavily for a space
elevator in the first place. They wouldn’t have weaned two generations
on the premise that Ecuador would be the gateway to orbit, finally
giving their country the first-world status they deserved. Eventually,
they dreamed, Ecuador would become the richest and most powerful
nation-state on Earth.
So the initial site report had taken them very
much by surprise. High elevations weren’t recommended. Sure, altitude
meant slightly less cable, but compared to the total distance to
geosynch orbit, the percentages involved were so small as to be almost
meaningless. Besides, in the mountains there wasn’t easy access to a
seaport—an essential part of the high-volume operation.
Then there was the disaster scenario. Dropped
equipment, hazardous spills, broken cables snapping down onto the
surface of the earth…A remote location was deemed necessary for safety
concerns alone. Ecuador was hit hard on both fronts: everything was too
mountainous or too crowded. Or both. Suddenly Brazil and Indonesia were
being discussed as possible elevator locations.
For Ecuador, faced with the loss of its
dreams, the sacrifice of its most famous national treasure hadn’t come
hard. The largest of the Galápagos islands, Isabela, was the
only one to actually span the equator. If Quito wasn’t possible,
Ecuador had told the world, Isabela would be just perfect.
Predictably, the ecologists went daytrader on
the whole idea. The Galápagos was not only a pristine ecological
laboratory, but the very birthplace of evolutionary theory. They hadn’t
spent millions of dollars ridding Isabela of the wild goats, fighting
the unending battles with the local fishermen, only to have the island
turned into the biggest port on the planet. Years of intense protest
followed, but the initial public opposition faded as Ecuador spared no
expense on the propaganda wars. Hardly any of the islands would be
affected, the government promised. The giant land tortoise population
of Isabela would be protected. A portion of the future tax revenue was
even allotted to environmental research to help sow dissension in the
ecologists’ midst.
And, as always, the money had won. The space
elevator had been completed five years ago, and all of the rosy
predictions were now proven rubbish. Isabela was almost completely
developed, and many of the other islands were heading in the same
direction. The smaller outlying islands were still relatively
unaffected, but no one knew how long that would last.
To Hank, the Line had once dangled the promise
of tropical employment. Three years back, when he had sacrificed his
job for his family, he had held out hope of finding work on the space
elevator. The entire structure was nanoengineered, after all. His
specialty. And with that fantasy in mind, giving up his tenure-track
position hadn’t seemed quite so final.
But the reality down here had been different.
The completed elevator had no need for academic types. The only jobs
available were loading cargo—and Hank’s back certainly couldn’t handle
that.
So now he was just living for his family, and
the occasional bottle of rum. No more Paula, no more cheating around,
no more rat race…no more anything. But I’m
doing the right thing, Hank told himself, reciting his
mantra. I’m doing the right thing.
From across the room Julia glanced in his
direction, with a smile that said she still loved him despite his
terribly insensitive comment about the Line. He tried to return the
smile, tried to return a bit of love to his wife, but came up empty on
both counts. Hank raised his book to cover his face, and buried himself
in the meaningless words.
They didn’t speak again until halfway
through breakfast.
“Hank…”
He knew that voice, that look. Hank took a
shallow breath and steeled himself for another painful argument.
“Why wouldn’t
you expect a magnetic field from the space elevator? Shouldn’t there be
currents every now and then?”
His pulse skipped a beat as he realized it
wasn’t going to be that sort of
argument. He managed a smile.
“Yeah, that was a big worry. The cable goes
right up through the Van Allen belts, after all. Wouldn’t do to have an
induced current yanking on the Line. So they spun it to be
nonconducting.”
“But buckytubes are…”
Hank broke into a full grin. Finches might be
boring, but this stuff was cool. He
arrayed his napkin in front of him, smoothed it out. “Not always. OK,
say this is a single sheet of carbon atoms, arrayed like hexagonal
chicken wire. You make it into a buckytube simply by rolling it up.” He
did so. “But there are lots of different classes of buckytubes,
depending on how you line up the hexagons.”
He demonstrated this by first making a
cylindrical tube—with the corners of the napkins touching—and then
sliding one edge of the napkin with respect to the other. Now the axis
of the tube was no longer perpendicular to the bottom edge of the
napkin.
“There are lots of buckytube topologies, and
each one has a different conductivity. So the tubes in your computer
conduct, but the tubes in the Line don’t.”
Julia looked skeptical. “Thousands of miles of
buckytube cable and they’re sure it’s all
the non-conducting kind?”
“The fibers are all continuous. If there was a
transition between two buckytube geometries, there has to be a
discontinuity, a weak link. The tube hasn’t snapped, so I think that’s
a good sign.”
Hank was exaggerating; a single-point failure
wouldn’t snap the Line. It had been given the same design as the
successful multifiber space tethers, which contained many redundant
strands that weren’t even in use. If one strand failed, two others
would instantly snap into place to take up the load.
Julia just shook her head. “I don’t know,
Hank…. But I do know that’s got to be the answer. These birds think
they’re on Española. Something
has messed them up, and we’ve dismissed pretty much every other
explanation. Think about it, will you?”
“Sure, honey.” Hank’s gaze skipped over to the
rum supply, then back to Julia. “Sure.”
By afternoon, he wasn’t thinking about much
of anything. The bottle had been out of reach for a while, but it
wasn’t worth the effort to get off his hammock.
How many hours had he spent in this thing? he
wondered. More likely the time should be measured in months. The
hammock was the fabric of spacetime, Hank decided, and he was a
gravitational sink, warping the geodesics around his body. By now he
knew every fiber of the netting; at that very moment he could tell that
there was a single crease running under his left buttock. He tried to
mentally picture the folded topology down there—the strands in the
middle doing no work at all, forcing its neighbors to pull twice their
weight.
Just like the Line, he realized. Only the Line
was different because…
Hank bolted up straight, nearly spinning the
hammock and dumping him onto the sand. The topology shift didn’t have
to be in the primary fibers, he realized. The slack fibers could carry
a current as well. And if they were
starting to shift…
Five minutes later he was at his wife’s
computer, commencing his first literature search in nearly two years.
“So there you have it,” Hank told his wife
two nights later. “That’s my best guess.”
Julia squinted at the pencil sketches that
Hank had just drawn for her, shaking her head. “I might understand the
concept, but certainly not the details. What am I supposed to do with
this?”
Hank shrugged, got up from the table and
padded into the bathroom to get ready for bed. “I don’t know what you
do with it,” he called over his shoulder. “That’s for you to decide.”
He was in the middle of brushing his teeth
when he saw in the mirror that Julia was standing beside him, glaring
with a fury he hadn’t seen in years.
“For me to
decide?! Me? What about you?!”
Hank spun to face her, his mouth full of foam.
“Whmmh?”
“Do you know how glad I’ve been these last two
days, seeing you actually do some work you enjoy? I know you’re not
happy here. I know these islands are sapping the life out of you. But
now that you’ve figured out this problem you’re just going to drop it?
You’re just going to flop right back into your hammock, back to the way
things were?”
Hank spat into the sink, wiped his face with
the back of his hand, and looked up to stare at his own reflection.
“This was just a one-time coincidence. As soon as you report it, like
it or not, things will be right
back where they were. I’m not needed here.”
“Sally needs you, you know that. Hell, if
you’re right about this, the whole goddamn solar system needs you.”
He turned again to face her. “And you?”
“I…” Julia drew a breath through pursed lips.
“I need my husband. But what I don’t need is—”
Julia broke off as Sally appeared in the
doorway, half-asleep and obviously frightened. Hank dropped to a squat
and she ran into his arms.
“Were we too loud for you?” Hank asked,
stroking her hair. “We’re sorry, we’ll be quiet.”
He stood up, lifting his daughter into the
air. Julia stepped over to plant a kiss on her cheek, then glanced up
apologetically at Hank. He smiled at his wife, nodded, and carried
Sally off to bed.
Hank ran a final check of his computer model
while the dozen bird people nestled in for the presentation. He had
first considered making a physical model, but the only string he could
find on the island was his hammock, and he wasn’t ready to sacrifice it
just yet. Instead, he had had to dredge up his old programming skills
for the proper 3-D rendering.
“Everyone ready?” he asked the crowd. Julia
nodded in reply, then winked at him. Sally sat next to her mother,
peeking inside a Tupperware container at her pet lava lizard, Darwin.
“OK,” Hank began. “This is a molecular view of
one section of the Line. The original
design.” The lattice appeared on the screen behind him, blue and red
lines arrayed in a webbed cylinder.
“Each one of these lines is a single-wall
buckytube, and together they form this larger cylinder called a fiber.
The blue strands are the primaries, where all the strain is carried.
But you’ll notice that there are more secondary red tubes than blue
ones. That’s because if there’s a point failure…”
Now a virtual pair of scissors appeared and
snipped one of the blue strands. The fiber stretched only slightly as
two red lines snapped into place to take up the slack. “Redundancy. And
I’m only showing you the tubes and the fibers. These fibers are woven
into what’s known as a bundle, and in turn the bundles form the
backbone of the Line itself. Each level of complexity has both primary
and secondary strands, and the redundancy gives the Line an expected
700- year lifetime.”
“Only 695 to go,” muttered the penguin expert.
“Or maybe not,” Hank retorted. “Which is the
whole point. The redundancy assumes that the secondary fibers maintain
their structure, even when they’re not in use.”
Now the 3-D graphics zoomed in on a
spherical-fullerene intersection where two red lines crossed a blue. At
this resolution the lines were no longer 1-dimensional; now each
buckytube appeared as an actual cylinder, composed of a geometrical
spiral of dots.
“Each one of these dots is a carbon atom,”
Hank explained. “And as I said, this is the original
design. A full quantum analysis was performed on this design, to make
sure that the secondary fibers wouldn’t degrade, even without full
tension. The entire simulation series took 19 months to run on ASCI
Platinum. And then they changed the
design.”
Hank hit a button on the computer and now the
spherical intersections shifted ever so slightly. “This was what they
actually built, shaving ten months off construction. Very subtle
change—only two carbon atoms have moved per intersection. But the
orbital pattern is different enough to require an entirely new
calculation.
“Now, there are public documents which refer to a new calculation, but nothing
about it was ever published. And it only took 6 months from the design
change to the final ratification. It all points to someone doing a
half-assed perturbative analysis using the old design as a starting
point, and passing it off as the real thing.”
“I don’t understand,” said Fernando from the
front row. “This has something to do with magnetic fields?”
Hank sighed. Apparently the nanotech details
were lost on this crowd. Still, it was good practice for later.
“It’s possible,” Hank said, “although I can’t
say for sure. The concern is that the new design might be susceptible
to topology shifts like this.” He hit his last animation cue, and one
of the secondary tubes slipped. The
structure didn’t break, but one row of carbon atoms slipped relative to
another, leaving the red tube with a different spiral pattern than the
others.
“This weakens the fiber, and if it happened
throughout the line, might shorten its lifetime considerably. A side
effect would be that these shifted tubes can become electrically
conducting, and perhaps generate their own magnetic fields. And once
currents start flowing through them, all the calculations are going to
be way off. It might even accelerate the slipping process.”
Julia spoke up. “I’m sure Hank’s on to
something. We’ve seen what’s happening to the migration patterns.”
Hank flipped off the projector as the bird
people started chattering among themselves. Only Fernando got to his
feet and approached him, a worried look on his face.
“Tell me, son. If you’re right…. They’re going
to have to shut down the Line for a while?”
“At the very least.”
Fernando’s old eyes sparkled mischievously.
“Well, I can tell you, you’ll have a lot of support from the people in
this room. But you’re going to have a hell of a time getting anyone on
Isabela to listen to you.”
“That’s the nice thing about the scientific
process,” Hank said with a grin. “After I make the claim, the evidence
will prove me right or wrong.”
Fernando shook his head sadly. “I’ve played
this game for many years, son. This isn’t about evidence, or even
science. Be careful.”
“Don’t worry, Fernando. I think I can handle
this.”
“I hope so,” the old man replied, turning back
to converse with the rest of the crowd. “I hope so.”
A week later, Hank finally managed to
contact an actual Tethercorp employee over the net. It was still before
dawn on the Galápagos, but by now he had resorted to calling the
London office.
The man on his computer screen didn’t look
like a scientist; probably a mid-level bureaucrat. No matter. Hank
would start with this guy and work his way up the chain.
The bureaucrat held a printout of Hank’s
report up to the camera. “Is this yours?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m a nanotech engineer from—”
“I’m having trouble filing this one,” the man
interrupted. “The bulk of it looks like it should go into Harmless
Crackpot, but this first paragraph reads more like a Bomb Threat. Could
you clarify your position for me?”
Hank was livid, but forced himself to speak
slowly and deliberately. “Could you please tell me, then, what is the
proper channel for scientists to present—”
“Harmless Crackpot, then. Thank you.” The
picture flickered off.
“Jesus!” Hank stomped outside and stared out
into Darwin’s Bay. A cruise ship was heading out to sea, stirring up a
brilliant wake of bioluminescence. He waited for the anger to subside,
raising his gaze from the lights below to the stars above. Topside
Station, gateway to the solar system, was visible directly overhead. It
was brighter even than Venus. Hank’s neck began to ache, but staring
upward was better than being hunched over the computer.
“You can do this,” said Julia from behind him.
Hank turned around, startled. “What?” he
snapped.
“You can do this. Don’t give up so easily.”
“I’m not giving up.”
“But you’re not doing what you need to do,
either.”
Hank clenched his fists. “I’m perfectly able
to do this by myself.”
“I don’t get it.” Julia raised her hands in
confusion. “What’s so terrible about contacting your old colleagues?
What do you still think you’re running from?”
“I didn’t run. I gave up my job to be with you
and Sally.”
“Dammit, Hank, you’re not
going to make me feel guilty about your decision! You were the one who
proved we couldn’t live apart.”
Hank shut up for a moment, biting off the
snappy reply which came to mind. Yes, he had had an affair, but weren’t
they supposed to be beyond that?
“What do you want from me?” he said at last.
“I’m doing science again, OK? I’m working.
So now you’re asking me to go dump the problem on Vargas’ lap, let the real scientists solve the problem?”
Julia shook her head. “That’s not the issue
and you know it. You haven’t contacted these people in three years. Are
you afraid of them? What do you imagine they think of you?” She stepped
forward to wrap her arms around him, and he didn’t fight her off.
“Just that…”he began. “Just that I washed out,
couldn’t handle the job. I think Vargas is the only one who really knew
why I left.”
“Then show them what you’re capable of. Show
them what you’ve found. If they really think you’re a shabby scientist,
then prove them wrong.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Isn’t it?”
They held each other, silently, as dawn crept
into the sky.
In the end, Hank had resorted to an
old-fashioned email.
An actual conversation would have been too
awkward, he decided, but writing a letter hadn’t been as painful as
he’d thought. He’d picked the two colleagues who had been closest to
him—not counting Vargas, of course—and sent them each a three-page
summary of his findings. And now, only 24 hours later, he was startled
to have already received a reply.
Hank; good to hear from you. How are Sally
and Julia? Finally became a mother myself last year—twin girls; see the
pics.
Interesting problem you’ve run across. I don’t
know any Tethercorp techs personally, but I think Vargas does. Mind if
I ask him? I know you two didn’t part on the best of terms, so let me
know.
Still, no one will authorize a serious theory
effort unless you come up with some decent evidence. Bird migration?
Don’t think that will fly around here, so to speak. Can’t they measure
the Line conductivity from the base station?
Let me know if you come up with some real
proof. I’ll see what I can do in the meanwhile.
—Abby
Moments later Hank was banging out a quick
response, warning Abby not to bring Vargas into this. But he paused
before sending it, thought for a few minutes, and finally erased the
request.
Perhaps it was time. After what had happened,
he knew that Luis Vargas would prefer never to hear from his traitorous
friend ever again. But Julia was right; it was time to stop running.
Yes, it would probably be better to contact Luis directly. But it would
be hard. And it would be so easy to just let events take their course,
to let Abby make contact for him.
Julia had been able to put the affair behind
her. Hopefully Luis and Paula had done the same, had been able to move
on with their lives.
There was even the outside chance that Luis
didn’t hate him quite so much as he deserved to.
“You seem frustrated,” said Julia.
Hank sat up straight, startled by the
interruption. “That’s an understatement.” He glanced back down at the
computer screen. “I can’t figure out how to measure it. Not for less
than ten million, anyway. If only we could afford a fleet of custom
microcopters.”
“How to measure the magnetic field, you mean?
Too bad it’s not a biology problem, or we could use my extra grant
money. Still, it can’t be that hard
to pull off. After all, the albatross figured it out.”
Hank snickered. “The goddamn albatross. If
only that were enough evidence…. I’m realizing that we hard scien tists
don’t give animals a lot of credit.”
“Maybe if they came down to Genovesa, saw the
birds for themselves—”
“No,” said Hank. “It doesn’t mean anything to
them. They want to see hard data, not birds.”
Julia frowned. “But birds are
hard data.”
“Not to an engineer, darling.”
“Hmmpf.”
Hank returned his attention to the screen,
which was currently displaying an image of Base Station, where the Line
lifted its cargo off the Earth’s surface. It was situated at the saddle
point on an east-west ridge connecting Mt. Wolf and Mt. Ecuador,
overlooking the ocean to the north and the south. The area surrounding
the Station was covered with metal warehouses, transformers, and power
cables, which meant that a ground-based measurement of the B-field
would be worse than useless. He had to get up off the ground, away from
all other possible currents. Against that requirement he had to contend
with a strictly enforced no-fly zone within a 50 km radius of the Line,
not to mention his shoestring budget.
“Julia, just how am I going to get my hands on
safe, cheap, airborne magnetic field detectors? I need dozens, more
likely thousands, if we want to take a temporal snapshot.”
After a moment of silence, Julia burst into
laughter. “These islands are filled with exactly what you need! Too bad
you engineers don’t trust them…” She laughed some more.
Hank turned to look at her again. “What?
Birds?”
“You said it. Safe, cheap, airborne, magnetic
field detectors.”
Hank started to laugh himself, but quickly
grew serious again. What was it that Fernando had said the other night?
Something about…
He shot to his feet, grabbed his surprised
wife by the shoulders and planted a kiss directly onto her lips.
“Julia, my dear. You are a genius.”
“If you think I’m going to kiss you back
before you tell me what you’re thinking…”
Hank smiled. “I think this idea’s worth more
than a kiss.”
“Well, then…” She gazed at him mischievously
for a moment, and then grabbed his hands and led Hank toward the
bedroom. “It had better be good,” she said.
It was.
The high-rises of Puerto Villamil shimmered
beyond the scorched tarmac. Hank felt Julia clasp his hand tightly as
the passenger jet slowed to a halt and they waited for the passengers
to disembark.
Hank recognized Abby first, followed by
Jackson and Nigel. The three of them had agreed to come down to Isabela
to see the demonstration for themselves.
They had already cleared customs in Guayaquil,
and the once-enforced agricultural inspection had been abandoned years
ago, so there was almost no delay. Hank and Julia met them on the
tarmac.
The greetings had just begun when another
familiar face appeared in the crowd of arrivals. Hank forced himself to
keep smiling when the recognition flooded through him. It was Luis
Vargas.
Luis wasn’t smiling himself. He nodded briskly
to Hank and Julia, then turned to introduce the two men who flanked
him.
“Robert, Ali,” said Luis. “Please meet Hank
Sadler. And this is his wife, Julia.” Luis nodded to them again. “Nice
to see you both together. Robert and Ali here work for Tethercorp.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Hank, shaking hands.
He turned to Luis, trying not to show his nervousness. “It’s good to
see you again. I’m glad you came.”
Luis nodded a third time, then walked past him
to join the others. Julia and Hank raised eyebrows at each other before
turning to follow.
Puerto Villamil sat on the southern edge of
Isabela, sixty-some miles below the equator. Sporting the only airport
on the island, it hosted the largest population in the
Galápagos, even beating out Base City up at the northern port.
The chartered van was waiting in its assigned
spot, and the eight of them piled in with minimal conversation. Hank
found himself sitting in the front row, directly in front of Luis,
which he found somewhat disconcerting.
“How’s traffic today?” Julia asked the driver.
He responded in Spanish, and the two of them commenced to hold an
unintelligible conversation. The interaction didn’t seem to slow his
driving, though; within minutes they were on the tollway, zooming up
the eastern side of the island.
After an uneventful half-hour, the tollway cut
west across the Perry Isthmus, just south of Mt. Darwin. Hank wondered
what the mountain’s namesake would think of the island if he could see
it now. Only five weeks of the Beagle’s five-year journey had been
spent in the Galápagos, but Isabela had been one of the islands
visited. Today, few endemic species remained. Mt. Darwin was covered
with invasive California sage scrub, and the foothills beyond the
tollway fence were littered with the detritus of civilization: bars,
fuel cell stations, minimalls, strip clubs, and miles upon miles of
warehouses and storage space.
Hank removed his gaze from the window as he
became aware of an uncomfortable lull in the small talk. Up until now,
Julia had carried the conversation with the other passengers,
restricting her questions to general pleasantries and gently touching
on the outlines of everyone’s life for the last three years. But she
hadn’t really spoken with Luis Vargas. Now she swiveled around in her
seat to face him, and Hank held his breath, hoping she would keep
things civil.
“And how have you
been, Luis? How’s Paula?”
Hank’s eyes bulged, but he didn’t move a
muscle, didn’t turn to look at either of them. Why would she say
something like that? Was she just trying to prove that she had moved
beyond the affair? Or was she trying to evoke an outburst from Luis?
Either way, she should have known better than to bring up Paula.
“We’re divorced, actually,” came Luis’ reply.
An ominous silence passed before Julia spoke.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Ah,” said Luis, “it was probably all for the
best.”
Hank’s mind spun, but his body remained
planted. The affair had triggered a divorce? He suddenly needed to know
more. How soon had it ended? Where had Paula gone? What feelings must
Luis have for him after Hank had so thoroughly ruined his life?
Finally Hank turned and locked eyes with his
old friend. Luis looked almost relaxed. Almost.
“I’m really sorry to hear that, too,” Hank
heard himself say.
Luis didn’t break eye contact. “It was all for
the best,” he said again.
Hank turned back to the front and gratefully
heard Julia bring up a new topic: the now-extirpated giant tortoise
population of Isabela.
All for the best? Luis had been devastated by
the news, by the betrayal. Was this just a show of bravado in front of
everyone else? Or had Luis really managed to convince himself that he
didn’t love Paula after all?
Lost in his thoughts, Hank didn’t speak for
the remainder of the journey.
The Line scarred the sky like a rent in the
space-time fabric. Hank stared upward through the glass ceiling of the
observation deck, but no cars were visible. The Line just hung above
them, motionless.
The two Tethercorp employees were busy
introducing themselves to the Base Station staff. Hank got the distinct
impression that these two—what were their names again?—were not exactly
upper-level managers at Tethercorp. It appeared that neither of them
had ever been Up.
“Um…I don’t know,” said the Tethercorp
employee who might have been named Ali. He then turned to Hank. “Dr.
Sadler? What exactly are we doing
here?”
Hank checked his watch. Just
one more minute. Julia had already made the call on her
handheld; everything was set.
“I’m sure that Luis,” Hank said, nodding at
his old colleague, “has already given you the outline. If the Line were
generating a magnetic field—”
“I assure you, that is quite impossible,”
interrupted Ali.
Hank forged onward. “Impossible or not, if it were generating a field, that would imply
currents. Which would in turn imply—”
“That you boys could be in trouble,” finished
Julia.
The second Tethercorp employee turned to Luis,
looking bored. “You assured us,
Luis—”
Vargas held up his hand. “Yes, I was told that
this would not be a purely theoretical argument, that some sort of
experimental demonstration would make this worth your time. And I
imagine…”He cocked an eyebrow at Hank. “I imagine that now would be a
good time to show us what you’ve got.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Hank, “it is exactly time.” He took a deep breath.
“About five seconds ago—”
He was cut off by several loud beeps
throughout the room. It took him a moment to realize they were sounding
from the belts of the Base Station staff. The shortest man grabbed his
handheld, jabbed at it, and a voice came out of the speaker.
“We have some activity out at warehouse 194.
Sounded like some sort of explosion, and now we’re getting reports of
all these…” The voice broke into digital static.
“How far is that from the Line?” Ali snapped.
The staff ignored him.
The short man spoke to his handheld. “Repeat
that. Do we need fire containment?”
“Negative, no fire reported. Just a whole
shitload of birds.”
At that moment, through the glass of the
observation deck, Hank saw the fluttering of the homing pigeons.
Hundreds, no, thousands of birds. They glittered in the Sun; each
pigeon carried a Mylar streamer for visibility.
Julia’s grant money had paid for the older
generations of Tuttle’s pigeon-breeding experiment to be sent down to
Isabela. These birds apparently didn’t follow field lines quite as well
as the newest generation, but they would hopefully be sufficient.
Hopefully. But Hank could already tell the
plan was failing. Instead of moving as a group, the pigeons were
spreading out, some flying toward the Line but some away from it. He
felt his heart drop. Pigeons trained to follow magnetic fields? What
had he been thinking?
“I’m worried,” said Julia beside him. But she
wasn’t even looking out the glass. “Are we sure they’re all sterilized?
I know it’s a little late to be worried about introducing species,
but…”
“Sadler?” barked Ali’s voice from behind. “Is
this your doing? What are all those
things?”
Julia beat him to an answer, and Hank wandered
away to the opposite side of the observation deck as his wife started
to explain about the pigeon’s specialized navigation behavior. Hank
didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to stand there and be stood up by a
bunch of damn birds. Right now he just wanted to be alone.
“Interesting stunt,” said a voice behind him,
and Hank looked up to see that Luis had followed him across the deck.
“Can’t imagine you thought it would work, but…interesting. You should
have called me. We could have set up some microgliders, maybe, taken
some real measurements—”
“Why are you trying to help me?” Hank broke
in. “Why come down here with these two? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I
appreciate it. I just don’t understand why…”
Hank trailed off and Luis watched him for a
moment before he spoke. “It’s been three years, Hank. Two and a half
without Paula. And I’m happy. Happier than ever. You were just a
symptom, not the cause.”
“But if I hadn’t—”
“Then it would have been somebody else, down
the line. Maybe when we had kids of our own, god forbid. I can’t say
that all the anger’s gone. I can’t even say I forgive you. But you
didn’t ruin my life.”
“I’m glad, but still…” Hank turned away,
looked out the window at the clear Pacific ocean. “I think I ruined
mine.”
Luis sighed. “You ever imagine coming back?”
“That’s not an option.”
“What about an adjunct position…?” Luis
started, but broke off when the murmurs reached them from the other
side of the deck.
Hank glanced over and saw that most of the
pigeons had landed or dispersed. Only a few hundred were still
circling. He started to turn away again before he did a double-take.
Circling?
With ten long strides he rejoined his wife and
the others, wrapped his arm around Julia as he watched the beautiful
fluttering Mylar.
“It only worked for the highest birds,” Julia
whispered to him, as if a louder voice would break the spell.
About 50 meters off the ground, a group of
pigeons was orbiting the Line in a formation shaped like a diamond
ring. They had found a closed-loop magnetic field. There was no other
explanation; the current had to be running right through the center.
“I’m telling you, that’s impossible,” Ali was
saying.
The second Tethercorp employee stepped between
Hank and the glass, a serious expression on his face. “This is bad,” he
said simply.
“Yes, it is…” Hank searched the man’s badge
for the name. “Robert.”
“You think it’s in the secondaries?” Robert
asked.
“Where else? It’ll be an extraordinary effort
to fix the thing, but I’ve been sketching out some ideas.”
Robert looked him up and down. “How long have
you been working on this?”
“Two months.”
Suddenly Ali was forcing himself between the
two of them. “Bob. Maybe they trained the pigeons to fly in circles?”
Robert ignored him, gently pushed Ali aside.
He looked Hank in the eye. “Would you be interested in a position with
Tethercorp? I can arrange to waive the usual interview…”
Julia gazed up at Hank, keeping her face
impassive but letting her eyes do the smiling. He returned the look for
a long moment before responding.
“No, thanks,” he said, still watching his
wife.
Now Julia’s eyes squinted. “Hank, dear—” she
began.
“But I do consulting work.” He looked up at
Robert. “Based right here in the Galápagos.”
“Excellent,” said Robert, whipping out his
handheld. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to make quite a few calls…”
Hank took Julia’s hand in his own and looked
out to see the pigeons again. Only about ten birds were remaining—this
time orbiting in the opposite direction for some reason. He filed the
fact away to think about later, pulled his wife toward him, and leaned
down to whisper in her ear. “I’ll have to spend a lot of time here on
Isabela.”
“It’s not so far,” she said, squeezing him
back. “I’m happy for you.”
“Hmm. I’m still nervous as hell.”
“What for? You did it!”
“We did it.
But…I really don’t know if I’m ready for this life.”
Julia commanded his full attention. “You’ll
never know until you try. And the alternative is—”
“Don’t worry, love,” Hank said, gazing out
over the ocean. Three magnificent frigate birds were soaring far above
the pigeons, far beyond the Line. “I don’t really know where I was all
these years,” he said. “But I do know I’m not going back.”
Robert Sheckley
<www.sheckley.com> lives in Portland, Oregon. He is one of the
finest short story writers ever in SF, who first flourished in the
1950s in Galaxy, and has made a
strong showing in the last decade. His characteristic mode is
satirical, and he often focuses on the ambiguous and ironic
relationship of ordinary people to the technology they use or misuse,
but do not or cannot understand. His is a fiction of tiny monsters and
of nightmares with limited ability to do damage. His central characters
are often working men, or men of limited means, slackers or con men,
but almost always people who gain a bit of useful insight when
technology malfunctions. His stories usually have happy endings, often
with a punch line. But the finest pleasure of reading Sheckley is his
graceful, witty style and amusing sentences.
He had an especially
good year in 2002, publishing several stories that might have been
included in this volume. “Shoes,” from F&SF, is Sheckleyan satire in his classic mode. A
down-at-the-heels writer buys a pair of hi-tech shoes in a second-hand
clothing store, which turn out to be inhabited by an advanced AI who
only wants to help him.
My shoes were worn out and I was passing
a Goodwill store so I went in to see if they had anything that would
fit me.
The assortment you find in places like this is
not to the most exacting taste. And the sizes they get don’t fit a
normal foot like mine. But this time I lucked out. A pair of lovely
heavy cordovans. Built to last. Looking brand new, except for the deep
gouge on top of one toe, a mark that had undoubtedly resulted in the
shoes’ disposal. The outer leather had been scraped away—maybe by some
indigent like myself, outraged at so expensive a pair of shoes. You
never know, it’s the sort of thing I might have done myself in one of
my darker moods.
But today I was feeling good. You don’t find a
pair of shoes like this every day, and the price tag read a ridiculous
four dollars. I removed my ragged Kmart sneakers and slipped into the
cordovans, to see if they fit.
Immediately I heard a voice in my mind, clear
as a bell, saying, “You’re not Carlton Johnson. Who are you?”
“I’m Ed Phillips,” I said aloud.
“Well, you have no right to be wearing Carlton
Johnson’s shoes.”
“Hey, look,” I said, “I’m in a Goodwill, these
shoes are priced at four bucks, they’re here for anyone to buy.”
“Are you sure?” the voice said. “Carlton
Johnson wouldn’t have just given me away. He was so pleased when he
purchased me, so happy when I was enabled to give him the maximum in
shoe comfort.”
“Who are you?” I said.
“Isn’t it obvious? I am a prototype smart
shoe, talking to you through micro-connections in my sole. I pick up
your subvocalizations via your throat muscles, translate them, and
broadcast my words back to you.”
“You can do all that?”
“Yes, and more. Like I said, I’m a smart
shoe.”
By this time I noticed that a couple of ladies
were looking at me funny and I realized they could hear only one side
of the conversation, since the other side seemed to be taking place in
my head. I paid for the shoes, which offered no further comment, and I
got out of there.
Back to my own place, an efficiency one-room
apartment in the Jack London Hotel on 4th near Pike. No comment from
the shoes until I reached the top linoleum-covered step of the
two-flight walk to my apartment, the elevator being a nonstarter this
evening.
The shoes said, “What a dump.”
“How can you see my place?”
“My eyelets, where the laces go, are
light-absorbing diodes.”
“I realize you were used to better things with
Carlton Johnson,” I said.
“Everything was carpeted,” the shoes said
wistfully, “except for expanses of polished floor left bare on
purpose.” It paused and sighed. “The wear on me was minimal.”
“And here you are in a flophouse,” I said.
“How have the mighty fallen!”
I must have raised my voice, because a door in
the corridor opened and an old woman peered out. When she saw me
apparently talking to myself, she shook her head sadly and closed the
door.
“You do not have to shout,” the shoes said.
“Just directing your thoughts toward me is sufficient. I have no
trouble picking up your subvocalizations.”
“I guess I’m embarrassing you,” I said aloud.
“I am so terribly sorry.”
The shoes did not answer until I had unlocked
my door, stepped inside, turned on the light and closed the door again.
Then it said, “I am not embarrassed for
myself, but for you, my new owner. I tried to watch out for Carlton
Johnson, too.”
“How?”
“For one thing, by stabilizing him. He had an
unfortunate habit of taking a drink too many from time to time.”
“So the guy was a lush?” I said. “Did he ever
throw up on you?”
“Now you’re being disgusting,” the shoes said.
“Carlton Johnson was a gentleman.”
“It seems to me I’ve heard entirely enough
about Carlton Johnson. Don’t you have anything else to talk about?”
“He was my first,” the shoes said. “But I’ll
stop talking about him if it distresses you.”
“I couldn’t care less,” I said. “I’m now going
to have a beer. If your majesty doesn’t object.”
“Why should I object? Just please try not to
spill any on me.”
“Whatsamatter, you got something against
beer?”
“Neither for nor against. It’s just that
alcohol could fog my diodes.”
I got a bottle of beer out of the little
fridge, uncapped it and settled back in the small sagging couch. I
reached for the TV clicker. But a thought crossed my mind.
“How come you talk that way?” I asked.
“What way?”
“Sort of formal, but always getting into
things I wouldn’t expect of a shoe.”
“I’m a shoe computer, not just a shoe.”
“You know what I mean. How come? You talk
pretty smart for a gadget that adjusts shoes to feet.”
“I’m not really a standard model,” the shoe
told me. “I’m a prototype. For better or worse, my makers gave me
excess capacity.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m too smart to just fit shoes to people. I
also have empathy circuitry.”
“I haven’t noticed much empathy toward me.”
“That’s because I’m still programmed to
Carlton Johnson.”
“Am I ever going to hear the last of that
guy?”
“Don’t worry, my deconditioning circuitry has
kicked in. But it takes time for the aura effect to wear off.”
I watched a little television and went to
bed. Buying a pair of smart shoes had taken it out of me. I woke up
some time in the small hours of the night. The shoes were up to
something, I could tell even without wearing them.
“What are you up to?” I asked, then realized
the shoes couldn’t hear me and groped around on the floor for them.
“Don’t bother,” the shoes said. “I can pick up
your subvocalizations on remote, without a hard hookup.”
“So what are you doing?”
“Just extracting square roots in my head. I
can’t sleep.”
“Since when does a computer have to sleep?”
“A fault in my standby mode…. I need something
to do. I miss my peripherals.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Carlton Johnson had eyeglasses. I was able to
tweak them up to give him better vision. You wouldn’t happen to have a
pair, would you?”
“I’ve got a pair, but I don’t use them much.”
“May I see them? It’ll give me something to
do.”
I got out of bed, found my reading glasses on
top of the TV, and set them down beside the shoes. “Thank you,” the
shoe computer said.
“Mrggh,” I said, and went back to sleep.
“So tell me something about yourself,” the
shoes said in the morning.
“What’s to tell? I’m a free-lance writer.
Things have been going so well that I can afford to live in the Jack
London. End of story.”
“Can I see some of your work?”
“Are you a critic, too?”
“Not at all! But I am a creative thinking
machine, and I may have some ideas that could be of use to you.”
“Forget about it,” I told him. “I don’t want
to show you any of my stuff.”
The shoes said, “I happened to glance over
your story ‘Killer Goddess of the Dark Moon Belt.’ ”
“How did you just happen to glance at it?” I
asked. “I don’t remember showing it to you.”
“It was lying open on your table.”
“So all you could see was the title page.”
“As a matter of fact, I read the whole thing.”
“How were you able to do that?”
“I made a few adjustments to your glasses,”
the shoe said. “X-ray vision isn’t so difficult to set up. I was able
to read each page through the one above it.”
“That’s quite an accomplishment,” I said. “But
I don’t appreciate you poking into my private matters.”
“Private? You were going to send it to a
magazine.”
“But I haven’t yet…. What did you think of
it?”
“Old-fashioned. That sort of thing doesn’t
sell anymore.”
“It was a parody, dummy…. So now you’re not
only a shoe adjuster but an analyst of the literary marketplace also?”
“I did glance over the writing books in your
bookcase.”
By the sound of the thoughts in my head, I
could tell he didn’t approve of my books, either.
“You know,” the shoe said later, “You really
don’t have to be a bum, Ed. You’re bright. You could make something of
yourself.”
“What are you, a psychologist as well as a
shoe computer?”
“Nothing of the sort. I have no illusions
about myself. But I’ve gotten to know you a bit in the last few hours
since my empathy circuitry kicked in. I can’t help but notice—to
know—that you’re an intelligent man with a good general education. All
you need is a little ambition. You know, Ed, that could be supplied by
a good woman.”
“The last good woman left me shuddering,” I
said. “I’m really not ready just yet for the next one.”
“I know you feel that way. But I’ve been
thinking about Marsha—”
“How in hell do you know about Marsha?”
“Her name is in your little red phone book,
which I happened to glance through with my X-ray vision in my efforts
to better serve you.”
“Listen, even my writing down Marsha’s name
was a mistake. She’s a professional do-gooder. I hate that type.”
“But she could be good for you. I noticed you
put a star after her name.”
“Did you also notice I crossed out the star?”
“That was a second thought. Now, on third
thought, she might start looking good again. I suspect you two could go
well together.”
“You may be good at shoes,” I said, “but you
know nothing about the sort of women I like. Have you seen her legs?”
“The photo in your wallet showed only her
face.”
“What? You looked in my wallet, too?”
“With the help of your glasses…. And not out
of any prurient interest, Ed, I assure you. I just want to help.”
“You’re already helping too much.”
“I hope you won’t mind the one little step I
took.”
“Step? What step?”
My doorbell rang. I glared at my shoes.
“I took the liberty of calling Marsha and
asking her over.”
“YOU DID WHAT?”
“Ed, Ed, calm down! I know it was taking a
liberty. It’s not as if I called your former boss, Mr. Edgarson, at
Super-Gloss Publications.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
“I would, but I didn’t. But you could do a lot
worse than go back to work for Edgarson. The salary was very nice.”
“Have you read any of Gloss’s publications? I
don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you aren’t going to do it
to me!”
“Ed, Ed, I haven’t done anything yet! And if
you insist, I won’t. Not without your permission!”
There was a knock at the door.
“Ed, I’m only trying to look out for you.
What’s a machine with empathy circuits and excess computing ability to
do?”
“I’ll tell you in a moment,” I said.
I opened the door. Marsha stood there,
beaming.
“Oh, Ed, I’m so glad you called!”
So the son of a bitch had imitated my voice,
too! I glanced down at my shoes, at the gash in the cap of the left
one. A light went off in my head. Realization! Epiphany!
“Come in, Marsha,” I said. “I’m glad to see
you. I have something for you.”
She entered. I sat down in the only decent
chair and stripped off the shoes, ignoring the shoe computer’s agonized
cry in my head of “Ed! Don’t do this to me….”
Standing up again, I handed them to Marsha.
“What’s this?” she said.
“Shoes for one of your charity cases,” I said.
“Sorry I don’t have a paper bag for you to carry them in.”
“But what am I going to do with—”
“Marsha, these are special shoes, computerized
shoes. Give them to one of your down-and-outers, get him to put them
on. They’ll make a new man of him. Pick one of the weak-willed ones you
specialize in. It’ll give him backbone!”
She looked at the shoes. “This gash in one of
them—”
“A minor flaw. I’m pretty sure the former
owner did that himself,” I told her. “A guy named Carlton Johnson. He
couldn’t stand the computer’s messing around with his head, so he
disfigured them and gave them away. Marsha, believe me, these shoes are
perfect for the right man. Carlton Johnson wasn’t the right man, and
I’m not either. But someone you know will bless the ground you walk on
for these, believe me.”
And with that, I began herding her toward the
door.
“When will I hear from you?” she said.
“Don’t worry, I’ll call,” I told her, reveling
in the swinish lie that went along with my despicable life.
Charles Sheffield
(1935–2002) <www.sff.net/people/ sheffield/>, physicist and
writer, was born in the UK, but lived in the U.S. after the mid-1960s.
In 1998, he married writer Nancy Kress. Sheffield began publishing SF
in the 1970s, and quickly gained a reputation as a new star of hard SF
in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke. He in fact wrote SF of all
descriptions but always with a positive view of scientific knowledge as
a tool for solving problems. Sheffield was a prolific novelist,
averaging more than a book a year. His novel Spheres of
Heaven (2001) is a sequel to The
Mind Pool (1993). He had two books out in 2002:
Dark as Day, a sequel to Cold as Ice
(1992), and The Amazing Dr. Darwin. His short fiction is collected in
Vectors (1979), Hidden Variables (1981), Erasmus Magister (1982), The McAndrew Chronicles (1983), and Georgia On My Mind, and Other
Places (1996). He also wrote
Borderlands of Science: How to Think Like a Scientist and Write Science
Fiction (1999).
“The Diamond Drill”
is from Analog, and is one of the
last pieces from this clever, energetic writer, who died near the end
of 2002. The central character is a smart man and proud of it, and uses
his wit and knowledge to gain advantage. Charles Sheffield’s amused,
intelligent narrative voice is here personified in the central
character. Not a word is wasted. Sheffield cared about science and
science fiction, and we will miss him and his engaging stories.
I doubt if there is a human being alive
who said, as a small child, “What I want to be when I grow up is a tax
inspector.”
That includes the Customs official (Customs
are just another form of taxation) who had just pulled me out of line
with a discreet, “If you wouldn’t mind, sir.”
“What’s the problem?” I had been headed for
the NOTHING TO DECLARE exit.
“Your luggage. You are Dr. Purcell, arriving
from Pavonis Six?”
“I am.” I read his badge. “What can I do for
you, Mr. Warren?”
“Are you aware, sir, that the import to Earth
of diamonds, alien artifacts, and life-forms from Pavonis Six is
strictly forbidden?”
“I did know that, yes.”
“Then what about these, sir?”
We had entered an official chamber off the
main entrance corridor. There, open on a table, lay my suitcase. Beside
it sat a large leather pouch, also opened to reveal a bright glitter
from within.
I laughed. “Oh, I see why you are worried.” I
put my hand into the pouch and pulled out a handful of faceted stones
that seemed to catch and refract every ray of light in the room. “These
are stage jewelry, Mr. Warren. They look much like diamonds, but
they’re not. I picked them up very cheaply, practically for nothing. If
you like, I can show you the receipt.”
“I think, Dr. Purcell, that we would rather
obtain our own assurances as to their nature.” He stared at me, but my
easy confidence must have somewhat persuaded him of my innocence,
because his voice was more friendly when he said, “I presume you would
not object to our conducting our own tests—nondestructive ones, of
course.”
“Not at all.” I quickly poured the handful of
stones that I was holding back into the pouch and held it out. “I hope
this won’t take too long—I do have appointments.”
“It will be very quick, sir, just a few
minutes. We now have a fully automated procedure.” He said that with a
slight air of pride.
“A machine?”
“That is correct. This machine.” He walked
across to a compact unit maybe half a meter on a side. “It is designed
specifically to establish if a stone is a diamond, or some other
material.”
He emptied the pouch into a hopper on the top,
and the stones vanished into the interior.
“Fascinating.” I leaned against the table. “If
it’s not some sort of trade secret, I wonder if you would mind telling
me how it works.”
“Not at all.” From his tone I could tell that
he was delighted to talk about his department’s latest toy. “How much
do you know about diamonds, sir?”
“Enough to know you can’t buy them for the
price I paid for those stones. Oh, and if it will scratch glass, it’s a
diamond. Right?”
“Actually, sir, that’s wrong. Diamonds are the
hardest things found in nature, but many other gemstones, such as
rubies and sapphires and topazes, plus many manmade materials, will
scratch glass. You would be safer to state it the other way around: If
it won’t scratch glass, it’s not a
real diamond.”
“So I know even less about diamonds than I
thought. This machine tests hardness?”
“It does. It also tests for density. Diamonds have a density of about
3.5 times that of water. Zircons—a very common ‘fake diamond’—are much
denser, at 4.6 and 4.7. So are rubies and sapphires at about 4.1.
Glasses are much less dense.”
“I suppose the machine tests everything for
densities?”
“Indeed it does. But that’s not all—colorless
topazes have almost exactly the same density as diamonds, so we have to
consider still another test: of refractive index.”
“How much the stone bends light?”
“Exactly. Diamonds have a very high refractive
index, at 2:43, which accounts for its brilliance. ‘Fake diamond’
candidates run over a wide range of refractive indices, from clear
quartz at about 1.5 to zircons at 1.97.”
“And I suppose this marvelous machine tests
that, too?”
“Indeed it does. Only if a stone passes all
three tests—hardness, density, and refractive index—can it be a
diamond.” The machine at his side beeped gently and disgorged a heap of
glittering stones into the pan at its bottom. “And yours didn’t pass
all the tests. Whatever these are, they’re not diamonds. I hope you
didn’t pay too much for them, sir.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” I picked up the pan
and emptied its contents back into my lead-lined carrying pouch. “Is
there anything else, Mr. Warren, or am I free to go?”
“That’s all, sir. Welcome to Earth, and I hope
that you enjoy your stay here.”
“I’m sure I will. And I guess I won’t be going
near the diamond merchants.”
We both laughed. I placed the pouch containing
dozens of pure diamonds back in my case, nodded to him, and headed for
the exit. The Customs staff were of course free to question me about
other matters, but human psychology being what it is, there was no
chance of that. Their infallible machine had assured them that despite
the anonymous tip (provided, of course by me) Dr. Purcell was not a
diamond smuggler, so it was remotely unlikely that he would be
smuggling anything else.
The trouble with machines, of course, is that
they do what they are built to do. They lack the human talent for
suspicion or the power to notice that, although a stone failed to pass
all their tests and could therefore not be a diamond, there was still
something highly odd about the results of these particular tests.
My diamonds had satisfied the hardness test
and the refractive index test, but they had all failed the density
test. Their density, rather than being 3.5, would have measured 4.1.
All diamonds are pure crystallized carbon, and these were no exception.
But nothing like these diamonds had ever been found—or made—by humans.
Ordinary diamonds consist of the commonest form of carbon, carbon-12.
These were pure carbon-14, a more massive and slightly unstable isotope
with a half-life of 5,700 years. If the Customs’ Department machine had
possessed a suitable test, it would have discovered that the stones
were radioactive enough to glow feebly in the dark.
I was telling the exact truth when I said that
I would not be visiting the diamond merchants. My target is the big
industrialists. The chance to experiment with and explore an alien
artifact is worth thousands of times as much to them as any gemstone in
existence.
Ursula K. Le Guin
<www.ursulakleguin.com> lives in Portland, Oregon. She has been
such an important force in fantasy and science fiction for the last
decade, after decades of major work, that it is conceivable that
literary historians will look back on the years before and after the
turn of the 21st century as Le Guin’s mature period. She has also
written poetry, mainstream fiction, a children’s book, and literary
essays, has published a good book on how to write narrative fiction and
nonfiction, and co-edited The Norton Book of Science Fiction, an influential anthology. Le Guin’s work is widely
read outside the SF field, and she is taken seriously as a contemporary
writer. In 2000, she published The Telling, her first SF novel in more than ten years. Her
short story collection, The Birthday of the World, came out in 2002, and is the best SF collection of
the year, in a year when a dozen or more excellent SF collections
appeared. Her 2001 novel, The Other Wind,
is one of the finest fantasy novels in years, and her fantasy
collection, Tales from Earthsea ,
was the best fantasy collection of 2001. That’s what she’s done lately.
“Seasons of the
Ansarac” was first published online by Infinite Matrix, and reprinted inF&SF. It is a subtle, clever anthropological portrait of
a species of aliens that behaves rather like osprey.
To the Ospreys
of McKenzie Bridge,
whose lifestyle inspired this story
—Ursula K. Le Guin
I talked for a long time once with an
old Ansar. I met him at his Interplanary Hostel, which is on a large
island far out in the Great Western Ocean, well away from the migratory
routes of the Ansarac. It is the only place visitors from other planes
are allowed, these days.
Kergemmeg lived there as a native host and
guide, to give visitors a little whiff of local color, for otherwise
the place is like a tropical island on any of a hundred planes—sunny,
breezy, lazy, beautiful, with feathery trees and golden sands and
great, blue-green, white-maned waves breaking on the reef out past the
lagoon. Most visitors came to sail, fish, beachcomb, and drink
fermented ü, and had no interest otherwise in the plane or in the
sole native of it they met. They looked at him, at first, and took
photos, of course, for he was a striking figure: about seven feet tall,
thin, strong, angular, a little stooped by age, with a narrow head,
large, round, black-and-gold eyes, and a beak. There is an
all-or-nothing quality about a beak that keeps the beaked face from
being as expressive as those on which the nose and mouth are separated,
but Kergemmeg’s eyes and eyebrows revealed his feelings very clearly.
Old he might be, but he was a passionate man.
He was a little bored and lonely among the
uninterested tourists, and when he found me a willing listener (surely
not the first or last, but currently the only one) he took pleasure in
telling me about his people, as we sat with a tall glass of iced ü
in the long, soft evenings, in a purple darkness all aglow with the
light of the stars, the shining of the sea-waves full of luminous
creatures, and the pulsing glimmer of clouds of fireflies up in the
fronds of the feather-trees.
From time immemorial, he said, the Ansarac had
followed a Way. Madan, he called
it. The way of my people, the way things are done, the way things are,
the way to go, the way that is hidden in the word always:
like ours, his word held all those meanings. “Then we strayed from our
Way,” he said. “For a little while. Now again we do as we have always
done.”
People are always telling you that “we have
always done thus,” and then you find that their “always” means a
generation or two, or a century or two, at most a millennium or two.
Cultural ways and habits are blips, compared to the ways and habits of
the body, of the race. There really is very little that human beings on
our plane have “always” done, except find food and drink, sleep, sing,
talk, procreate, nurture the children, and probably band together to
some extent. Indeed it can be seen as our human essence, how few
behavioral imperatives we follow. How flexible we are in finding new
things to do, new ways to go. How ingeniously, inventively, desperately
we seek the right way, the true way, the Way we believe we lost long
ago among the thickets of novelty and opportunity and choice…
The Ansarac had a somewhat different choice to
make than we did, perhaps a more limited one. But it has its interest.
Their world is farther from a larger sun than
ours, so, though its spin and tilt are much the same as Earth’s, its
year lasts about twenty-four of our years. And the seasons are
correspondingly large and leisurely, each of them six of our years
long.
On every plane and in every climate that has a
spring, spring is the breeding time, when new life is born; and for
creatures whose life is only a few seasons or a few years, early spring
is mating time, too, when new life begins. So it is for the Ansarac,
whose life span is, in their terms, three years.
They inhabit two continents, one on the
equator and a little north of it, one that stretches up toward the
north pole; the two are joined, as the Americas are, by a narrower
mountainous bridge of land, though it is all on a smaller scale. The
rest of the world is ocean, with a few archipelagoes and scattered
large islands, none with any human population except the one used by
the Interplanary Agency.
The year begins, Kergemmeg said, when, in the
cities of the plains and deserts of the South, the Year Priests give
the word and great crowds gather to see the sun pause at the peak of a
Tower or stab through a Target with an arrow of light at dawn: the
moment of solstice. Now increasing heat will parch the southern
grasslands and prairies of wild grain, and in the long dry season the
rivers will run low and the wells of the city will go dry. Spring
follows the sun northward, melting snow from those far hills,
brightening valleys with green… And the Ansarac will follow the sun.
“Well, I’m off,” old friend says to old friend
in the city street. “See you around!” And the young people, the
almost-one-year-olds—to us they’d be people of twenty-one or
twenty-two—drift away from their households and groups of pals, their
colleges and sports clubs, and seek out, among the labyrinthine
apartment-complexes and communal dwellings and hostelries of the city,
one or the other of the parents from whom they parted, back in the
summer. Sauntering casually in, they remark, “Hullo, Dad,” or “Hullo,
Mother. Seems like everybody’s going back north.” And the parent,
careful not to insult by offering guidance over the long route they
came half the young one’s life ago, says, “Yes, I’ve been thinking
about it myself. It certainly would be nice to have you with us. Your
sister’s in the other room, packing.”
And so by ones, twos, and threes, the people
abandon the city. The exodus is a long process, without any order to
it. Some people leave quite soon after the solstice, and others say
about them, “What a hurry they’re in,” or “Shennenne just has to get
there first so she can grab the old homesite.” But some people linger
in the city till it is almost empty, and still can’t make up their mind
to leave the hot and silent streets, the sad, shadeless, deserted
squares, that were so full of crowds and music all through the long
halfyear. But first and last they all set out on the roads that lead
north. And once they go, they go with speed.
Most carry with them only what they can carry
in a backpack or load on a ruba (from Kergemmeg’s description, rubac
are something like small, feathered donkeys). Some of the traders who
have become wealthy during the Desert Season start out with whole
trains of rubac loaded with goods and treasures. Though most people
travel alone or in a small family group, on the more popular roads they
follow pretty close after one another. Larger groups form temporarily
in places where the going is hard and the older and weaker people need
help gathering and carrying food.
There are no children on the road north.
Kergemmeg did not know how many Ansarac there
are but guessed some hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million. All of
them join the migration.
As they go up into the mountainous Middle
Lands, they do not bunch together, but spread out onto hundreds of
different tracks, some followed by many, others by only a few, some
clearly marked, others so cryptic that only people who have been on
them before could ever trace the turnings. “That’s when it’s good to
have a three-year-old along,” Kergemmeg said. “Somebody who’s been up
the way twice.” They travel very light and very fast. They live off the
land except in the arid heights of the mountains, where, as he said,
“They lighten their packs.” And up in those passes and high canyons,
the hard-driven rubac of the traders’ caravans begin to stumble and
tremble, perishing of exhaustion and cold. If the trader still tries to
drive them on, people on the road unload them and loose them and let
their own pack-beast go with them. The little animals limp and scramble
back down southward, back to the desert. The goods they carried end up
strewn along the wayside for anyone to take; but nobody takes anything,
except a little food at need. They don’t want stuff to carry, to slow
them down. Spring is coming, cool spring, sweet spring, to the valleys
of grass and the forests, the lakes, the bright rivers of the North,
and they want to be there when it comes.
Listening to Kergemmeg, I imagined that if one
could see the migration from above, see those people all threading
along a thousand paths and trails, it would be like seeing our
Northwest Coast in spring a century or two ago when every stream, from
the mile-wide Columbia to the tiniest creek, turned red with the salmon
run.
The salmon spawn and die when they reach their
goal, and some of the Ansarac are going home to die, too: those on
their third migration north, the three-year-olds, whom we would see as
people of seventy and over. Some of them don’t make it all the way.
Worn out by privation and hard going, they drop behind. If people pass
an old man or woman sitting by the road, they may speak a word or two,
help to put up a little shelter, leave a gift of food, but they do not
urge the elder to come with them. If the elder is very weak or ill they
may wait a night or two, until perhaps another migrant takes their
place. If they find an old person dead by the roadside, they bury the
body. On its back, with the feet to the north: going home.
There are many, many graves along the roads
north, Kergemmeg said. Nobody has ever made a fourth migration.
The younger people, those on their first and
second migrations, hurry on, crowded together in the high passes of the
mountains, then spreading out ever wider on myriad narrow paths through
the prairies as the Middle Land widens out north of the mountains. By
the time they reach the Northland proper, the great rivers of people
have tasseled out into thousands of rivulets, veering west and east,
across the north.
Coming to a pleasant hill country where the
grass is already green and the trees are leafing out, one of the little
groups comes to a halt. “Well, here we are,” says Mother. “Here it is.”
There are tears in her eyes and she laughs, the soft, clacking laugh of
the Ansarac. “Shuku, do you remember this place?”
And the daughter who was less than a halfyear
old when she left this place—eleven or so, in our years—stares around
with amazement and incredulity, and laughs, and cries, “But it was bigger than this!”
Then perhaps Shuku looks across those
half-familiar meadows of her birthplace to the just-visible roof of the
nearest neighbor and wonders if Kimimmid and his father, who caught up
to them and camped with them for a few nights and then went on ahead,
were there already, living there, and if so, would Kimimmid come over
to say hello?
For, though the people who lived so
close-packed, in such sociable and ceaseless promiscuity in the Cities
Under the Sun, sharing rooms, sharing beds, sharing work and play,
doing everything together in groups and crowds, now have all gone
apart, family from family, friend from friend, each to a small and
separate house here in the meadowlands, or farther north in the rolling
hills, or still farther north in the lakelands—even though they have
all scattered out like sand from a broken hourglass, the bonds that
unite them have not broken; only changed. Now they come together, not
in groups and crowds, not in tens and hundreds and thousands, but by
two and two.
“Well, here you are!” says Shuku’s mother, as
Shuku’s father opens the door of the little house at the meadow’s edge.
“You must have been just a few days ahead of us.”
“Welcome home,” he says gravely. His eyes
shine. The two adults take each other by the hand and slightly raise
their narrow, beaked heads in a particular salute, an intimate yet
formal greeting. Shuku suddenly remembers seeing them do that when she
was a little girl, when they lived here, long ago. Here at the
birthplace.
“Kimimmid was asking about you just
yesterday,” Father says to Shuku, and he softly clacks a laugh.
Spring is coming, spring is upon them. Now
they will perform the ceremonies of the spring.
Kimimmid comes across the meadow to visit, and
he and Shuku talk together, and walk together in the meadows and down
by the stream. Presently, after a day or a week or two, he asks her if
she would like to dance. “Oh, I don’t know,” she says, but seeing him
stand tall and straight, his head thrown back a little, in the posture
that begins the dance, she too stands up; at first her head is lowered,
though she stands straight, arms at her sides; but then she wants to
throw her head back, back, to reach her arms out wide, wide…to dance,
to dance with him…
And what are Shuku’s parents and Kimimmid’s
parents doing, in the kitchen garden or out in the old orchard, but the
same thing? They face each other, they raise their proud and narrow
heads, and then he leaps, arms raised above his head, a great leap and
a bow, a low bow…and she bows too…And so it goes, the courtship dance.
All over the northern continent, now, the people are dancing.
Nobody interferes with the older couples,
recourting, refashioning their marriage. But Kimimmid had better look
out. A young man comes across the meadow one evening, a young man Shuku
never met before; his birthplace is some miles away. He has heard of
Shuku’s beauty. He sits and talks with her. He tells her that he is
building a new house, in a grove of trees, a pretty spot, nearer her
home than his. He would like her advice on how to build the house. He
would like very much to dance with her some time. Maybe this evening,
just for a little, just a step or two, before he goes away?
He is a wonderful dancer. Dancing with him on
the grass in the late evening of early spring, Shuku feels that she is
flying on a great wind, and she closes her eyes, her hands float out
from her sides as if on that wind, and meet his hands…
Her parents will live together in the house by
the meadow; they will have no more children, for that time is over for
them, but they will make love as often as ever they did when they first
were married. Shuku will choose one of her suitors, the new one, in
fact. She goes to live with him and make love with him in the house
they finish building together. Their building, their dancing,
gardening, eating, sleeping, everything they do, turns into making
love. And in due course Shuku is pregnant; and in due course she bears
two babies. Each is born in a tough, white membrane or shell. Both
parents tear this protective covering open with hands and beaks,
freeing the tiny curled-up newborn, who lifts its infinitesimal beaklet
and peeps blindly, already gaping, greedy for food, for life.
The second baby is smaller, is not greedy,
does not thrive. Though Shuku and her husband both feed her with tender
care, and Shuku’s mother comes to stay and feeds the little one from
her own beak and rocks her endlessly when she cries, still she pines
and weakens. One morning lying in her grandmother’s arms the infant
twists and gasps for breath, and then is still. The grandmother weeps
bitterly, remembering Shuku’s baby brother, who did not live even this
long, and tries to comfort Shuku. The baby’s father digs a small grave
out back of the new house, among the budding trees of the long
springtime, and the tears fall and fall from his eyes as he digs. But
the other baby, the big girl, Kikirri, chirps and clacks and eats and
thrives.
About the time Kikirri is hauling herself
upright and shouting “Da!” at her father and “Ma!” at her mother and
grandmother and “No!” when told to stop what she is doing, Shuku has
another baby. Like many second conceptions, it is a singleton. A fine
boy, small, but greedy. He grows fast.
PART
2
And he will be the last of Shuku’s children.
She and her husband will make love still, whenever they please, in all
the delight and ease of the time of flowering and the time of fruit, in
the warm days and the mild nights, in the cool under the trees and out
in the buzzing heat of the meadow in summer noontime, but it will be,
as they say, luxury love; nothing will come of it but love itself.
Children are born to the Ansarac only in the
early Northern spring, soon after they have returned to their
birthplace. Some couples bring up four children, and many three; but
often, if the first two thrive, there is no second conception.
“You are spared our curse of overbreeding,” I
said to Kergemmeg when he had told me all this. And he agreed, when I
told him a little about my plane.
But he did not want me to think that an Ansar
has no real sexual or reproductive choice at all. Pairbonding is the
rule, but human will and contrariness change and bend and break it, and
he talked about those exceptions. Many pairbonds are between two men or
two women. Such couples and others who are childless are often given a
baby by a couple who have three or four, or take on an orphaned child
and bring it up. There are people who take no mate and people who take
several mates at one time or in sequence. There is of course adultery.
And there is rape. It is bad to be a girl among the last migrants
coming up from the South, for the sexual drive is already strong in
such stragglers, and young women are all too often gang-raped and
arrive at their birthplace brutalized, mateless, and pregnant. A man
who finds no mate or is dissatisfied with his wife may leave home and
go off as a peddler of needles and thread or a tool-sharpener and
tinker; such wanderers are welcomed for their goods but mistrusted as
to their motives.
When we had talked together through several of
those glimmering purple evenings on the verandah in the soft sea
breeze, I asked Kergemmeg about his own life. He had followed Madan,
the rule, the way, in all respects but one, he said. He mated after his
first migration north. His wife bore two children, both from the first
conception, a girl and a boy, who of course went south with them in due
time. The whole family rejoined for his second migration north, and
both children had married close by, so that he knew his five
grandchildren well. He and his wife had spent most of their third
season in the South in different cities; she, a teacher of astronomy,
had gone farther south to the Observatory, while he stayed in Terke
Keter to study with a group of philosophers. She had died very suddenly
of a heart attack. He had attended her funeral. Soon after that he made
the trek back north with his son and grandchildren. “I didn’t miss her
till I came back home,” he said, factually. “But to come there to our
house, to live there without her—that wasn’t something I could do. I
happened to hear that someone was needed to greet the strangers on this
island. I had been thinking about the best way to die, and this seemed
a sort of halfway point. An island in the middle of the ocean, with not
another soul of my own people on it…not quite life, not quite death.
The idea amused me. So I am here.” He was well over three Ansar years
old; getting on for eighty in our years, though only the slight stoop
of his shoulders and the pure silver of his crest showed his age.
The next night he told me about the southern
migration, describing how a man of the Ansarac feels as the warm days
of the northern summer begin to wane and shorten. All the work of
harvest is done, the grain stored in airtight bins for next year, the
slow-growing edible roots planted to winter through and be ready in the
spring; the children are shooting up tall, active, increasingly
restless and bored by life on the homeplace, more and more inclined to
wander off and make friends with the neighbors’ children. Life is sweet
here, but the same, always the same, and luxury love has lost its
urgency. One night, a cloudy night with a chill in the air, your wife
in bed next to you sighs and murmurs, “You know? I miss the city.” And
it comes back to you in a great wave of light and warmth—the crowds,
the deep streets and high houses packed with people, the Year Tower
high above it all—the sports arenas blazing with sunlight, the squares
at night full of lantern-lights and music where you sit at the
café tables and drink ü and talk and talk till halfway to
morning—the old friends, friends you haven’t thought of all this
time—and strangers—how long has it been since you saw a new face? How
long since you heard a new idea, had a new thought? Time for the city,
time to follow the sun!
“Dear,” the mother says, “we can’t take all your rock collection south, just pick
out the most special ones,” and the child protests, “But I’ll carry them! I promise!” Forced at last to
yield, she finds a special, secret place for her rocks till she comes
back, never imagining that by next year, when she comes back home, she
won’t care about her childish rock collection, and scarcely aware that
she has begun to think constantly of the great journey and the unknown
lands ahead. The city! What do you do in the city? Are there rock
collections?
“Yes,” Father says. “In the museum. Very fine
collections. They’ll take you to see all the museums when you’re in
school.”
School?
“You’ll love it,” Mother says with absolute
certainty.
“School is the best good time in the world,”
says Aunt Kekki. “I loved school so much I think I’m going to teach
school, this year.”
The migration south is quite a different
matter from the migration north. It is not a scattering but a grouping,
a gathering. It is not haphazard but orderly, planned by all the
families of a region for many days beforehand. They all set off
together, five or ten or fifteen families, and camp together at night.
They bring plenty of food with them in handcarts and barrows, cooking
utensils, fuel for fires in the treeless plains, warm clothing for the
mountain passes, and medicines for illness along the way.
There are no old people on the southward
migration—no-body over seventy or so in our years. Those who have made
three migrations stay behind. They group together in farm-steads or the
small towns that have grown around the farmsteads, or they live out the
end of their life with their mate, or alone, in the house where they
lived the springs and summers of their lives. (I think what Kergemmeg
meant, when he said he had followed his people’s Way in all ways but
one, was that he had not stayed home, but had come to the island.) The
“winter parting,” as it is called, between the young going south and
the old staying home is painful. It is stoical. It is as it must be.
Only those who stay behind will ever see the
glory of autumn in the Northern lands, the blue length of dusk, the
first faint patterns of ice on the lake. Some have made paintings or
left letters describing these things for the children and grandchildren
they will not see again. Most die before the long, long darkness and
cold of winter. None survive it.
Each migrating group, as they come down toward
the Middle Land, is joined by others coming from east and west, till at
night the twinkle of campfires covers all the great prairie from
horizon to horizon. They sing at the campfires, and the quiet singing
hovers in the darkness between the little fires and the stars.
They don’t hurry on the southward journey.
They drift along easily, not far each day, though they keep moving. As
they reach the foothills of the mountains the great masses split apart
again onto many different paths, thinning out, for it’s pleasanter to
be few on a trail than to come after great numbers of people and trudge
in the dust and litter they leave. Up in the heights and passes where
there are only a few ways to go they have to come together again. They
make the best of it, with cheerful greetings and offers to share food,
fire, shelter. Everyone is kind to the children, the half-year-olds,
who find the steep mountain paths hard going and often frightening;
they slow their pace for the children.
And one evening when it seems they have been
struggling in the mountains forever, they come through a high, stony
pass to the outlook—South Face, or the Godsbeak Rocks, or the Tor.
There they stand and look out and out and down and down to the golden,
sunlit levels of the South, the endless fields of wild grain, and some
far, faint, purple smudges—the walls and towers of the Cities Under the
Sun.
On the downhill road they go faster, and eat
lighter, and the dust of their going is a great cloud behind them.
They come to the cities—there are nine of
them; Terke Keter is the largest—standing full of sand and silence and
sunlight. They pour in through the gates and doors, they fill the
streets, they light the lanterns, they draw water from the brimming
wells, they throw their bedding down in empty rooms, they shout from
window to window and from roof to roof.
Life in the cities is so different from life
in the homesteads that the children can’t believe it; they are
disturbed and dubious; they disapprove. It is so noisy, they complain.
It’s hot. There isn’t anywhere to be alone, they say. They weep, the
first nights, from homesickness. But they go off to school as soon as
the schools are organized, and there they meet everybody else their
age, all of them disturbed and dubious and disapproving and shy and
eager and wild with excitement. Back home, they all learned to read and
write and do arithmetic, just as they learned carpentry and farming,
taught by their parents; but here are advanced classes, libraries,
museums, galleries of art, concerts of music, teachers of art, of
literature, of mathematics, of astronomy, of architecture, of
philosophy—here are sports of all kinds, games, gymnastics, and
somewhere in the city every night there is a round dance—above all,
here is everybody else in the world, all crowded into these yellow
walls, all meeting and talking and working and thinking together in an
endless ferment of mind and occupation.
The parents seldom stay together in the
cities. Life there is not lived by twos, but in groups. They drift
apart, following friends, pursuits, professions, and see each other now
and then. The children stay at first with one parent or the other, but
after a while they too want to be on their own and go off to live in
one of the warrens of young people, the communal houses, the
dormitories of the colleges. Young men and women live together, as do
grown men and women. Gender is not of much import where there is no
sexuality.
For they do everything under the sun in the
Cities Under the Sun, except make love.
They love, they hate, they learn, they make,
they think hard, work hard, play; they enjoy passionately and suffer
desperately, they live a full and human life, and they never give a
thought to sex—unless, as Kergemmeg said with a perfect poker face,
they are philosophers.
Their achievements, their monuments as a
people, are all in the Cities under the Sun, whose towers and public
buildings, as I saw in a book of drawings Kergemmeg showed me, vary
from stern purity to fervent magnificence. Their books are written
there, their thought and religion took form there over the centuries.
Their history, their continuity as a culture, is all there.
Their continuity as living beings is what they
see to in the North.
Kergemmeg said that while they are in the
South they do not miss their sexuality at all. I had to take him at his
word, which was given, hard as it might be for us to imagine, simply as
a statement of fact.
And as I try to tell here what he told me, it
seems wrong to describe their life in the cities as celibate or chaste:
for those words imply a forced or willed resistance to desire. Where
there is no desire there is no resistance, no abstinence, but rather
what one might call, in a radical sense of the word, innocence. They
don’t think about sex, they don’t miss it, it is a non-problem. Their
marital life is an empty memory to them, meaningless. If a couple stays
together or meets often in the South it is because they are uncommonly
good friends—because they love each other. But they love their other
friends too. They never live separately from other people. There is
little privacy in the great apartment houses of the cities—nobody cares
about it. Life there is communal, active, sociable, gregarious, and
full of pleasures.
But slowly the days grow warmer; the air
dryer; there is a restlessness in the air. The shadows begin to fall
differently. And the crowds gather in the streets to hear the Year
Priests announce the solstice and watch the sun stop, and pause, and
turn south.
People leave the cities, one here, a couple
there, a family there…It has begun to stir again, that soft hormonal
buzz in the blood, that first vague yearning intimation or memory, the
body’s knowledge of its kingdom coming.
The young people follow that knowledge
blindly, without knowing they know it. The married couples are drawn
back together by all their wakened memories, intensely sweet. To go
home, to go home and be there together!
All they learned and did all those thousands
of days and nights in the cities is left behind them, packed up, put
away. Till they come back South again…
“That is why it was easy to turn us aside,”
Kergemmeg said. “Because our lives in the North and the South are so
different that they seem, to you others, incoherent, incomplete. And we
cannot connect them rationally. We cannot explain or justify our Madan
to those who live only one kind of life. When the Bayderac came to our
plane, they told us our Way was mere instinct and that we lived like
animals. We were ashamed.”
(I later checked Kergemmeg’s “Bayderac” in the
Encyclopedia Planaria, where I found
an entry for the Beidr., of the Unon Plane, an aggressive and
enterprising people with highly advanced material technologies, who
have been in trouble more than once with the Interplanary Agency for
interfering on other planes. The tourist guidebook gives them the
symbols that mean “of special interest to engineers, computer
programmers, and systems analysts.”)
Kergemmeg spoke of them with a kind of pain.
It changed his voice, tightened it. He had been a child when they
arrived—the first visitors, as it happened, from another plane. He had
thought about them the rest of his life.
“They told us we should take control over our
lives. We should not live two separate half-lives, but live fully all
the time, all the year, as all intelligent beings did. They were a
great people, full of knowledge, with high sciences and great ease and
luxury of life. To them we truly were little more than animals. They
told us and showed us how other people lived on other planes. We saw we
were foolish to do without the pleasure of sex for half our life. We
saw we were foolish to spend so much time and energy going between
South and North on foot, when we could make ships, or roads and cars,
or airplanes, and go back and forth a hundred times a year if we liked.
We saw we could build cities in the North and make homesteads in the
South. Why not? Our Madan was wasteful and irrational, a mere animal
impulse controlling us. All we had to do to be free of it was take the
medicines the Bayderac gave us. And our children need not take
medicines, but could have their being altered by the genetic science of
Bayder. Then we could be without rest from sexual desire until we got
very old, like the Bayderac. And then a woman would be able to get
pregnant at any time before her menopause—in the South, even. And the
number of her children would not be limited…They were eager to give us
these medicines. We knew their doctors were wise. As soon as they came
to us they had given us treatments for some of our illnesses, that
cured people as if by a miracle. They knew so much. We saw them fly
about in their airplanes, and envied them, and were ashamed.
“They brought machines for us. We tried to
drive the cars they gave us on our narrow, rocky roads. They sent
engineers to direct us, and we began to build a huge Highway straight
through the Middle Land. We blew up mountains with the explosives the
Bayderac gave us so the Highway could run wide and level, south to
north and north to south. My father was a workman on the Highway. There
were thousands of men working on that road, for a while. Men from the
southern homesteads…Only men. Women were not asked to go and do that
work. Bayder women did not do such work. It was not women’s work, they
told us. Women were to stay home with the children while men did the
work.”
Kergemmeg sipped his ü thoughtfully and
gazed off at the glimmering sea and the star-dusted sky.
“Women went down from the homesteads and
talked to the men,” he said. “They said to listen to them, not only to
the Bayderac…Perhaps women don’t feel shame the way men do. Perhaps
their shame is different, more a matter of the body than the mind. It
seemed they didn’t care much for the cars and airplanes and bulldozers,
but cared a great deal about the medicines that would change us and the
rules about who did which kind of work. After all, with us, the woman
bears the child, but both parents feed it, both nurture it. Why should
a child be left to the mother only? They asked that. How could a woman
alone bring up four children? Or more than four children? It was
inhuman. And then, in the cities, why should families stay together?
The child doesn’t want its parents then, the parents don’t want the
child, they all have other things to do…The women talked about this to
us men, and with them we tried to talk about it to the Bayderac.
“They said, ‘All that will change. You will
see. You cannot reason correctly. It is merely an effect of your
hormones, your genetic programming, which we will correct. Then you
will be free of your irrational and useless behavior patterns.’
“But we answered, ‘But will we be free of your
irrational and useless behavior patterns?’
“Men working on the Highway began throwing
down their tools and abandoning the big machines the Bayderac had
provided. They said, ‘What do we need this Highway for when we have a
thousand ways of our own?’ And they set off southward on those old
paths and trails.
“You see, all this happened—fortunately, I
think—near the end of a Northern Season. In the North, where we all
live apart, and so much of life is spent in courting and making love
and bringing up the children, we were—how shall I put it—more
short-sighted, more impressionable, more vulnerable. We had just begun
the drawing together, then. When we came to the South, when we were all
in the Cities Under the Sun, we could gather, take counsel together,
argue and listen to arguments, and consider what was best for us as a
people.
“After we had done that, and had talked
further with the Bayderac and let them talk to us, we called for a
Great Consensus, such as is spoken of in the legends and the ancient
records of the Year Towers where history is kept. Every Ansar came to
the Year Tower of their city and voted on this choice: Shall we follow
the Bayder Way or the Manad? If we followed their Way, they were to
stay among us; if we chose our own, they were to go. We chose our way.”
His beak clattered very softly as he laughed. “I was a halfyearling,
that season. I cast my vote.”
I did not have to ask how he had voted, but I
asked if the Bayderac had been willing to go.
“Some of them argued, some of them
threatened,” he said. “They talked about their wars and their weapons.
I am sure they could have destroyed us utterly. But they did not. Maybe
they despised us so much they didn’t want to bother. Or their wars
called them away. By then we had been visited by people from the
Interplanary Agency, and most likely it was their doing that the
Bayderac left us in peace. Enough of us had been alarmed that we agreed
then, in another voting, that we wanted no more visitors. So now the
Agency sees to it that they come only to this island. I am not sure we
made the right choice, there. Sometimes I think we did, sometimes I
wonder. Why are we afraid of other peoples, other Ways? They can’t all
be like the Bayderac.”
“I think you made the right choice,” I said.
“But I say it against my will. I’d like so much to meet an Ansar woman,
to meet your children, to see the Cities Under the Sun! I’d like so
much to see your dancing!”
“Oh, well, that you can see,” he said, and
stood up. Maybe we had had a little more ü than usual, that night.
He stood very tall there in the glimmering
darkness on the verandah over the beach. He straightened his shoulders,
and his head went back. The crest on his head slowly rose into a stiff
plume, silver in the starlight. He lifted his arms above his head. It
was the pose of the antique Spanish dancer, fiercely elegant, tense,
and masculine. He did not leap, he was after all a man of eighty, but
he gave somehow the impression of a leap, then a deep graceful bow. His
beak clicked out a quick double rhythm, he stamped twice, and his feet
seemed to flicker in a complex set of steps while his upper body
remained taut and straight. Then his arms came out in a great embracing
gesture, toward me, as I sat almost terrified by the beauty and
intensity of his dance.
And then he stopped, and laughed. He was out
of breath. He sat down and passed his hand over his forehead and his
crest, panting a little. “After all,” he said, “it isn’t courting
season.”
Richard Chwedyk
lives in Chicago, Illinois. Last year we featured his story “The
Measure of All Things” in Years Best SF 7.
This year he published a fine long sequel, “Bronte’s Egg.” He often
reads in the Chicago area, most recently at the Twilight
Tales reading series at the Red Lion Pub. His
poetry has recently been published in Tales of the
Unanticipated and Tales from the
Red Lion, but has also appeared in
Another Chicago Magazine, Oyez Review, Paul Hoover’s legendary Oink! (now called New American Writing), and The Best of Hair Trigger anthology, among even older publications. He teaches
creative writing classes at Oakton Community College, but his day job
is doing layout and copyediting for a chain of newspapers in the
Chicago suburbs.
“A Few Kind Words
for A. E. Van Vogt,” from Tales of the Unanticipated, is a lyric poem about one of the titanic figures
of SF, who was given the Grand Master Award by the SFWA only after he
had succumbed to Alzheimer’s. This poem is about the night he stood up
in front of the audience at the annual Nebula Awards banquet to accept
the award. I was there; the description is accurate. It is also about
his powerful contributions to genre SF and to literature in the 20th
century (note the allusion to Mishima).
An irony in physics rendered him mute
as he stood to receive his award
in the darkened arena.
He looked at the assembled audience with
gratitude, but also with undisguised
bewilderment, a little apprehension.
His eyes were liquid, opened wide,
forehead furrowed, confounded with
his inarticulation.
His speech was read for him by an old, good
friend.
His wife stood just a step behind him.
His hair was combed straight back.
He dressed like an accountant and it was not inappropriate,
for it was this disguise that was his work.
It was not, in a word, original:
Plato, De Quincey, Borges, Christian mystics, Eastern monks,
all hinted at the notion that each object in this world
is a secret symbol for an object in another,
and nothing is in itself merely itself.
Of course, then, he wore the uniform of a
“plain” man.
Of course, he wondered at the crowd
and what this all was really about.
He was looking, perhaps, for Cayle Clark,
or Jommy, or Gosseyn,
out there in the dark, the audience up,
out of their seats. He seemed to look past them all.
He’d torn open the bag that held his dreams
and let them all pour out
at a penny or two a word. And what a surprise
it must have been, when the contents fell
to the page, how many people recognized those objects
as their own.
It wasn’t eloquent. It wasn’t pristine.
At times his vessel seemed hardly seaworthy.
But to have made it so would have betrayed the secret:
There is a secret world one train stop
further on,
across the highway, past the chain-link fence,
on the other side of the woods. A secret neighborhood.
A secret room. The fate of the universe, of time itself,
is weighed against this discovery.
There is something important at the other
end of this gaze,
and we better find out what it is.
But for now, don’t say a word.
And he didn’t.
And when my dour, self-absorbed, ascetic,
“literary”
friend asks me (and pronounces the name
like a gummy cough) “About this van Vogt,”
that he read of in a biography of Mishima,
I tell him nothing, betray nothing.
An accident of semantics, an irony of
physics,
a brief attack of poetry, renders me mute.
The skeleton of the world I saw
when I left that dark arena
was a cast-off from the bag of dreams.
And Cayle, and Jommy and Gilbert Gosseyn
were standing by the newspaper boxes, in their dark suits,
each holding a finger up to his lips.
Charles Stross
(http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi) lives in Edinburgh,
Scotland. A dyed-in-the-wool science fiction writer in the tradition of
Bruce Sterling, he is so full of ideas and energy that at times he
seems to be a fizzing, popping conduit, a high-powered cable full of
lightning bolts and showering sparks. He is of the same social circle
as Iain M. Banks and Ken McLeod, and the three of them are being called
(not entirely unjustly) the Scots SF Renaissance. Stross has been
publishing for the past four years in Spectrum SF and Interzone,
and recently in Asimov’s, but had
a hit in 2001 in writing circles with his story “Lobsters.” By the time
of the world SF convention in San Jose in 2001, SF people were eager to
meet Stross. His collection Toast (2002)
appeared in a print-on-demand edition last year. His first SF novel
will appear in 2003.
“Halo” is part of a
series of energetic showpieces in the first person present tense that
have appeared in Asimov’s over the
last two years—the Manfred Maxx series, set in a near future that is
undergoing continuing revolution in the biological sciences, after a
computer revolution, after a techno-economic revolution. And there’s
more to come. This one has a sympathetic teenage protagonist, Amber,
Manfred’s cyborg super-competent daughter, who is desperate to get out
from under the authority of her control-freak mother, and away from her
cat. And what better place than outer space to be free?
Vast whorls of cloud ripple beneath the
ship’s drive stinger: orange and brown and muddy gray streaks slowly
ripple across the bloated horizon of Jupiter. Sanger
is nearing perijove, deep within the gas giant’s lethal magnetic field;
static discharges flicker along the tube, arcing over near the deep
violet exhaust cloud emerging from the magnetic mirrors of the ship’s
VASIMR motor. The plasma rocket is cranked up to maximum mass flow, its
specific impulse almost as low as a fission rocket but thrusting at
maximum as the assembly creaks and groans through the gravitational
assist maneuver. In another hour, the drive will flicker off, and the
orphanage will fall up and out toward Ganymede, before dropping back in
toward orbit around Amalthea, Jupiter’s fourth moon (and source of much
of the material in the Gossamer ring). They’re not the first canned
primates to make it to Jupiter subsystem, but they’re one of the first
wholly private ventures. The bandwidth out here sucks dead slugs
through a straw, with millions of kilometers of vacuum separating them
from scant hundreds of mouse-brained microprobes and a few mechanical
dinosaurs left behind by NASA or ESA. They’re so far from the inner
system that a good chunk of the ship’s communications array is given
over to caching: the news is whole kiloseconds old by the time it gets
out here.
Amber, along with about half the waking
passengers, watches in fascination from the common room. The commons
are a long axial cylinder, a double-hulled inflatable at the center of
the ship with a large part of their liquid water supply stored in its
wall-tubes. The far end is video-enabled, showing them a realtime 3D
view of the planet as it rolls beneath them: in reality, there’s as
much mass as possible between them and the trapped particles in the
Jovian magnetic envelope. “I could go swimming in that,” sighs Lilly.
“Just imagine, diving into that sea…. ”Her avatar appears in the
window, riding a silver surfboard down the kilometers of vacuum.
“Nice case of wind-burn you’ve got there,”
someone jeers: Kas. Suddenly, Lilly’s avatar, heretofore clad in a
shimmering metallic swimsuit, turns to the texture of baked meat, and
waggles sausage-fingers up at them in warning.
“Same to you and the window you climbed in
through!” Abruptly the virtual vacuum outside the window is full of
bodies, most of them human, contorting and writhing and morphing in
mock-combat as half the kids pitch into the virtual deathmatch: it’s a
gesture in the face of the sharp fear that outside the thin walls of
the orphanage lies an environment that really is
as hostile as Lilly’s toasted avatar would indicate.
Amber turns back to her slate: she’s working
through a complex mess of forms, necessary before the expedition can
start work. Facts and figures that are never far away crowd around her,
intimidating. Jupiter weighs 1.9 × 10 27
kilograms. There are twenty-nine Jovian moons and an estimated two
hundred thousand minor bodies, lumps of rock, and bits of debris
crowded around them—debris above the size of ring fragments, for
Jupiter (like Saturn) has rings, albeit not as prominent. A total of
six major national orbiter platforms have made it out here—and another
two hundred and seventeen microprobes, all but six of them private
entertainment platforms. The first human expedition was put together by
ESA Studios six years ago, followed by a couple of wildcat mining
prospectors and a u-commerce bus that scattered half a million
picoprobes throughout Jupiter subsystem. Now the Sanger
has arrived, along with another three monkey cans—one from Mars, two
more from LEO—and it looks as if colonization would explode except that
there are at least four mutually exclusive Grand Plans for what to do
with old Jove’s mass.
Someone prods her. “Hey, Amber, what are you
up to?”
She opens her eyes. “Doing my homework.” It’s
Su Ang. “Look, we’re going to Amalthea, aren’t we? But we file our
accounts in Reno, so we have to do all this paperwork. Monica asked me
to help. It’s insane.”
Ang leans over and reads, upside down.
“Environmental Protection Agency?”
“Yeah. Estimated Environmental Impact Forward
Analysis 204.6b, Page Two. They want me to ‘list any bodies of standing
water within five kilometers of the designated mining area. If
excavating below the water table, list any well-springs, reservoirs,
and streams within depth of excavation in meters multiplied by five
hundred meters up to a maximum distance of ten kilometers downstream of
direction of bedding plane flow. For each body of water, itemize any
endangered or listed species of bird, fish, mammal, reptile,
invertebrate, or plant living within ten kilometers—’”
“—Of a mine on Amalthea? Which orbits one
hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above Jupiter, has no
atmosphere, and where you can pick up a whole body radiation dose of
ten Grays in half an hour on the surface?” Ang shakes her head, then
spoils it by giggling. Amber glances up.
On the wall in front of her someone—Nicky or
Boris, probably—has pasted a caricature of her own avatar into the
virch fight. She’s being hugged from behind by a giant cartoon dog with
floppy ears and an erection, who’s singing anatomically improbable
suggestions while fondling himself suggestively. “Fuck that!” Shocked
out of her distraction—and angry—Amber drops her stack of paperwork and
throws a new avatar at the screen, one an agent of hers dreamed up
overnight: it’s called Spike, and it’s not friendly. Spike rips off the
dog’s head and pisses down its trachea, which is anatomically correct
for a human being: meanwhile she looks around, trying to work out which
of the laughing idiot children and lost geeks around her could have
sent such an unpleasant message.
“Children! Chill out.” She glances round: one
of the Franklins (this is the twenty-something dark-skinned female one)
is frowning at them. “Can’t we leave you alone for half a K without a
fight?”
Amber pouts. “It’s not a fight: it’s a
forceful exchange of opinions.”
“Hah.” The Franklin leans back in mid-air,
arms crossed, an expression of supercilious smugness pasted across
her-their face. “Heard that one before. Anyway—” she-they gesture and
the screen goes blank “—I’ve got news for you pesky kids. We got a
claim verified! Factory starts work as soon as we shut down the stinger
and finish filing all the paperwork via our lawyers. Now’s our chance
to earn our upkeep….”
Amber is flashing on ancient history, three
years back along her timeline. In her replay, she’s in some kind of
split-level ranch house out west. It’s a temporary posting while her
mother SciFiction fab line enterprise that grinds out dead chips of
VLSI silicon for Pentagon projects that have slipped behind the cutting
edge. Her mom leans over her, menacingly adult in her dark suit and
chaperonage earrings: “You’re going to school, and that’s that!”
Her mother is a blond ice-maiden madonna, one
of the IRS’s most productive bounty hunters—she can make grown CEOs
panic just by blinking at them. Amber, a tow-headed eight-year-old
tearaway with a confusing mix of identities, inexperience blurring the
boundary between self and grid, is not yet able to fight back
effectively. After a couple of seconds, she verbalizes a rather feeble
protest: “Don’t want to!” One of her stance demons whispers that this
is the wrong approach to take, so she modifies it: “They’ll beat up on
me, Mom. I’m too different. ’Sides, I know you want me socialized up
with my grade metrics, but isn’t that what sideband’s for? I can
socialize real good at home.”
Mom does something unexpected: she kneels
down, putting herself on eye level with Amber. They’re on the living
room carpet, all seventies-retro brown corduroy and acid-orange paisley
wallpaper: the domestics are in hiding while the humans hold court.
“Listen to me, sweetie.” Mom’s voice is breathy, laden with an
emotional undertow as strong and stifling as the eau de cologne she
wears to the office to cover up the scent of her client’s fear. “I know
that’s what your father’s writing to you, but it isn’t true. You need
the company—physical company—of
children your own age. You’re natural,
not some kind of engineered freak, even with your skullset. Natural
children like you need company, or they grow up all weird. Don’t you
know how much you mean to me? I want you to grow up happy, and that
won’t happen if you don’t learn to get along with children your own
age. You’re not going to be some kind of cyborg otaku freak, Amber. But
to get healthy, you’ve got to go to
school, build up a mental immune system. That which does not destroy us
makes us stronger, right?”
It’s crude moral blackmail, transparent as
glass and manipulative as hell, but Amber’s corpus
logica flags it with a heavy emotional sprite miming the
likelihood of physical discipline if she rises to the bait: Mom is
agitated, nostrils slightly flared, ventilation rate up, some
vasodilatation visible in her cheeks. Amber—in combination with her
skullset and the metacortex of distributed agents it supports—is mature
enough at eight years to model, anticipate, and avoid corporal
punishment: but her stature and lack of physical maturity conspire to
put her at a disadvantage when negotiating with adults who matured in a
simpler age. She sighs, then puts on a pout to let Mom know she’s still
reluctant, but obedient. “O-kay. If you say so.”
Mom stands up, eyes distant—probably telling
Saturn to warm his engine and open the garage doors. “I say so, punkin.
Go get your shoes on, now. I’ll pick you up on my way back from work,
and I’ve got a treat for you: we’re going to check out a new Church
together this evening.” Mom smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “You
be a good little girl, now, all right?”
The Imam is at prayer in a gyrostabilized
mosque.
His mosque is not very big, and it has a
congregation of one: he performs salat on his own every seventeen
thousand two hundred and eighty seconds. He also webcasts the call to
prayer, but there are no other believers in trans-Jovian space to
answer the summons. Between prayers, he splits his attention between
the exigencies of life-support and scholarship. A student of the Hadith
and of knowledge-based systems, Sadeq collaborates in a project with
other mujtahid scholars who are building a revised concordance of all
the known isnads, to provide a basis for exploring the body of Islamic
jurisprudence from a new perspective—one they’ll need sorely if the
looked-for breakthroughs in communication with aliens emerge. Their
goal is to answer the vexatious questions that bedevil Islam in the age
of accelerated consciousness: and as their representative in orbit
around Jupiter, these questions fall most heavily on Sadeq’s shoulders.
Sadeq is a slightly built man, with
close-cropped black hair and a perpetually tired expression: unlike the
orphanage crew, he has a ship to himself. The ship started out as an
Iranian knock-off of a Shenzhou-B capsule, with a Chinese-type 921
space-station module tacked onto its tail: but the clunky,
nineteen-sixties lookalike—a glittering aluminum dragonfly mating with
a Coke can—has a weirdly contoured M2P2 pod strapped to its nose. The
M2P2 pod is a plasma sail: built in orbit by one of Daewoo’s wake
shield-facilities, it dragged Sadeq and his cramped space station out
to Jupiter in just four months, surfing on the solar breeze. His
presence may be a triumph for the Ummah, but he feels acutely alone out
here: when he turns his compact observatory’s mirrors in the direction
of the Sanger, he is struck by its
size and purposeful appearance. Sanger’s
superior size speaks of the efficiency of the western financial
instruments, semi-autonomous investment trusts with variable
business-cycle accounting protocols that make possible the development
of commercial space exploration. The Prophet, peace be unto him, may
have condemned usury: but surely it would have given him pause to see
these engines of capital formation demonstrate their power above the
Great Red Spot.
After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a
couple of extra precious minutes on his mat. He finds that meditation
comes hard in this environment: kneel in silence and you become aware
of the hum of ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and sweat, the
metallic taste of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is hard
to approach God in this third-hand spaceship, a hand-me-down from
arrogant Russia to ambitious China, and finally to the religious
trustees of Qom, who have better uses for it than any of the heathen
states imagine. They’ve pushed it far, this little toy space station:
but who’s to say if it is God’s intention for humans to live here, in
orbit around this swollen alien giant of a planet?
Sadeq shakes his head: he rolls his mat up and
stows it beside the solitary porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of
homesickness wrenches at him, for his childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and
his many years as a student in Qom: he steadies himself by looking
round, searching the station that is by now as familiar to him as the
fourth-floor concrete apartment that his parents—a car factory worker
and his wife—raised him in. The interior of the station is the size of
a school bus, every surface cluttered with storage areas, instrument
consoles, and layers of exposed pipes: a couple of globules of
antifreeze jiggle like stranded jellyfish near a heat exchanger that
has been giving him grief. Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze
bottle he keeps for this purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and
instructs one of his agents to find him the relevant sura of the
maintenance log: it’s time to fix this leaky joint for good.
An hour or so of serious plumbing, and then he
will eat (freeze-dried lamb stew, with a paste of lentils and boiled
rice, and a bulb of strong tea to wash it down), then sit down to
review his next flyby maneuvering sequence. Perhaps, God willing, there
will be no further system alerts and he’ll be able to spend an hour or
two on his research between evening and final prayers. Maybe the day
after tomorrow, there’ll even be time to relax for a couple of hours,
to watch one of the old movies that he finds so fascinating for their
insights into alien cultures: Apollo 13,
maybe. It isn’t easy, being the only crew aboard a long-duration space
mission: and it’s even harder for Sadeq, up here with nobody to talk
to, for the communications lag to earth is more than half an hour each
way—and so far as he knows he’s the only believer within half a billion
kilometers.
Amber dials a number in Paris and waits
until someone answers the phone. She knows the strange woman on the
phone’s tiny screen: Mom calls her “your father’s fancy bitch,” with a
peculiar tight smile. (The one time Amber asked what a fancy bitch was,
Mom hit her—not hard, just a warning.) “Is Daddy there?” she asks.
The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her
hair is blond, like Mom’s, but the color clearly came out of a bleach
bottle, and it’s cut really short, mannish.) “Oui.
Ah, yes.” She smiles tentatively. “I am sorry, it is a disposable phone
you are using? You want to talk to ’im?”
It comes out in a rush: “I want to see him.” Amber clutches the phone like a
lifesaver: it’s a cheap disposable cereal-packet item, and the
cardboard is already softening in her sweaty grip. “Momma won’t let me,
auntie ’Nette—”
“Hush.” Annette, who has lived with Amber’s
father for more than twice as long as her mother did, smiles. “You are
sure that telephone, your mother does not know of it?”
Amber looks around. She’s the only child in
the rest room because it isn’t break time and she told teacher she had
to go right now: “I’m sure, P 20 confidence factor greater than
0.9.” Her Bayesian head tells her that she can’t reason accurately
about this because Momma has never caught her with an illicit phone
before, but what the hell. It can’t get Dad
into trouble if he doesn’t know, can it?
“Very good.” Annette glances aside. “Manny, I
have a surprise call for you.”
Daddy appears on screen. She can see all of
his face, and he looks younger than last time: he must have stopped
using those clunky old glasses. “Hi—Amber! Where are you? Does your
mother know you’re calling me?” He looks slightly worried.
“No,” she says confidently, “the phone came in
a box of Grahams.”
“Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember to
never, ever call me where your mom may find out. Otherwise, she’ll get
her lawyers to come after me with thumb screws and hot pincers, because
she’ll say I made you call me.
Understand?”
“Yes, Daddy.” She sighs. “Don’t you want to
know why I called?”
“Um.” For a moment he looks taken aback. Then
he nods, seriously. Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously
most times when she talks to him. It’s a phreaking nuisance having to
borrow her classmates’ phones or tunnel past Mom’s pit-bull firewall,
but Dad doesn’t assume that she can’t know anything because she’s only
a kid. “Go ahead. There’s something you need to get off your chest?
How’ve things been, anyway?”
She’s going to have to be brief: the
disposaphone comes pre-paid, the international tariff it’s using is
lousy, and the break bell is going to ring any minute. “I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom’s getting
loopier every week: she’s dragging me around to all these churches now,
and yesterday she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She wants
me to see the school shrink, I mean, what for?
I can’t do what she wants; I’m not
her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she tries to put a
content-bot on me, and it’s making my head hurt—I can’t even think
straight anymore!” To her surprise, Amber feels tears starting. “Get me
out of here!”
The view of her father shakes, pans around to
show her tante Annette looking worried. “You know, your father, he
cannot do anything? The divorce lawyers, they will tie him up.”
Amber sniffs. “Can you
help?” she asks.
“I’ll see what I can do,” her father’s fancy
bitch promises as the break bell rings.
An instrument package peels away from the Sanger’s claimjumper drone and drops
toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty kilometers below. Jupiter hangs
huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist wallpaper for a mad
cosmologist: Pierre bites his lower lip as he concentrates on steering
it.
Amber, wearing a black sleeping-sack, hovers
over his head like a giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She
looks down on Pierre’s bowl-cut hair, his wiry arms gripping either
side of the viewing table, and wonders what to have him do next. A
slave for a day is an interesting experience, restful: life aboard the Sanger is busy enough that nobody gets
much slack-time (at least, not until the big habitats have been
assembled and the high bandwidth dish is pointing at Earth). They’re
unrolling everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by the
backers’ critical path team, and there isn’t much room for idling: the
expedition relies on shamelessly exploitative child labor—they’re
lighter on the life-support consumables than adults—working the kids
twelve-hour days to assemble a toe-hold on the shore of the future.
(When they’re older and their options vest fully, they’ll all be
rich—but that hasn’t stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda back
home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else work for her is
novel, and she’s trying to make every minute count.
“Hey, slave,” she calls idly: “how you doing?”
Pierre sniffs. “It’s going okay.” He refuses
to glance up at her, Amber notices. He’s thirteen: isn’t he supposed to
be obsessed with girls by that age? She notices his quiet, intense
focus, runs a stealthy probe along his outer boundary: he shows no sign
of noticing it but it bounces off, unable to chink his mental armor.
“Got cruise speed,” he says, taciturn, as two tons of metal, ceramics,
and diamond-phase weirdness hurtles toward the surface of Barney at
three hundred kilometers per hour. “Stop shoving me: there’s a
three-second lag and I don’t want to get into a feedback control-loop
with it.”
“I’ll shove if I want, slave.”
She sticks her tongue out at him.
“And if you make me drop it?” he asks. Looking
up at her, his face serious—“Are we supposed to be doing this?”
“You cover your ass and I’ll cover mine,” she says, then turns bright red.
“You know what I mean.”
“I do, do I?” Pierre grins widely, then turns
back to the console: “Aww, that’s no fun. And you want to tune
what-ever bit-bucket you’ve given control of your speech centers to:
they’re putting out way too much double-entendre
, somebody might mistake you for a grown-up.”
“You stick to your
business and I’ll stick to mine,” she says, emphatically. “And you
can start by telling me what’s happening.”
“Nothing.” He leans back and crosses his arms,
grimacing at the screen. “It’s going to drift for five hundred seconds,
now, then there’s the midcourse correction and a deceleration burn
before touch-down. And then it’s
going to be an hour while it unwraps itself and starts unwinding the
cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles with that?”
“Uh-huh.” Amber spreads her bat-wings and lies
back in mid-air, staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre
works his way through her day-shift. “Wake me when there’s something
interesting to see.” Maybe she should have had him feed her peeled
grapes or give her a foot massage, something more traditionally
hedonistic: but right now just knowing
he’s her own little piece of alienated labor is doing good things for
her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms, the curve of his neck,
she thinks maybe there’s something to this whispering-and-giggling he really likes you stuff the older girls go
in for—
The window rings like a gong and Pierre
coughs. “You’ve got mail,” he says dryly. “You want me to read it for
you?”
“What the—” A message is flooding across the
screen, right-to-left snaky script like the stuff on her corporate
instrument (now lodged safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her
a while to page-in the grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and
another minute for her to take in the meaning of the message. When she
does, she starts swearing, loudly and continuously.
“You bitch,
Mom! Why’d you have to go and do a thing like
that?”
The corporate instrument arrived in a huge
FedEx box addressed to Amber: it happened on her birthday while Mom was
at work, and she remembers it as if it was only an hour ago.
She remembers reaching up and scraping her
thumb over the delivery man’s clipboard, the rough feel of the
microsequencers sampling her DNA; afterward, she drags the package
inside. When she pulls the tab on the box it unpacks itself
automatically, regurgitating a compact 3D printer, half a ream of paper
printed in old-fashioned dumb ink, and a small calico cat with a large
@-symbol on its flank. The cat hops out of the box, stretches, shakes
its head, and glares at her. “You’re Amber?” it mrowls.
“Yeah,” she says, shyly. “Are you from
Tanté ’Nette?”
“No, I’m from the fucking tooth fairy.” It
leans over and head-butts her knee, strops the scent glands between its
ears all over her skirt. “Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?”
“Mom doesn’t believe in seafood,” says Amber:
“it’s all foreign junk, she says. It’s my birthday today, did I tell
you?”
“Happy fucking birthday, then.” The cat yawns,
convincingly realistic. “Here’s your dad’s present. Bastard put me in
hibernation and blogged me along to show you how to work it. You take
my advice, you’ll trash the fucker. No good will come of it.”
Amber interrupts the cat’s grumbling by
clapping her hands gleefully. “So what is
it?” she demands. “A new invention? Some kind of weird sex toy from
Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?”
“Naaah.” The cat yawns, yet again, and curls
up on the floor next to the 3D printer. “It’s some kinda dodgy business
model to get you out of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though—he
says its legality is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise.”
“Wow. Like, how totally cool!” In truth, Amber
is delighted because it is her
birthday, but Mom’s at work and Amber’s home alone, with just the TV in
moral-majority mode for company. Things have gone so far downhill since
Mom discovered religion that absolutely the best thing in the world
tante Annette could have sent her is some scam programmed by Daddy to
take her away. If he doesn’t, Mom will take her to Church tonight (and
maybe to an IRS compliance-certified restaurant afterward, if Amber’s
good and does whatever Pastor Wallace tells her to).
The cat sniffs in the direction of the
printer: “Why dontcha fire it up?” Amber opens the lid on the printer,
removes the packing popcorn, and plugs it in. There’s a whirr and a
rush of waste heat from its rear as it cools the imaging heads down to
working temperature and registers her ownership.
“What do I do now?” she asks.
“Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow
the instructions,” the cat recites in a bored sing-song voice. It winks
at her, then fakes an exaggerated French accent: “Le READ ME contains
directions pour l’execution instrument corporate dans le boîte.
In event of perplexity, consult the accompanying aineko for
clarification.” The cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it’s about to
bite an invisible insect. “Warning: don’t rely on your father’s cat’s
opinions, it is a perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother
helped seed its meme base, back when they were married. Ends.” It mumbles on for a while:
“fucking snotty Parisian bitch, I’ll piss in her knicker drawer, I’ll
molt in her bidet….”
“Don’t be vile.” Amber scans the README
quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy,
and this one is exotic by any standards: a limited company established
in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari’a and the global
legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn’t easy, even with a personal net
full of sub-sapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of
international trade law—the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds
the documents highly puzzling. It’s not the fact that half of them are
written in Arabic that bothers her—that’s what her grammar engine is
for—or even that they’re full of S-expressions and semi-digestible
chunks of LISP: but that the company seems to assert that it exists for
the sole purpose of owning slaves.
“What’s going on?” she asks the cat. “What’s
this all about?”
The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. “This
wasn’t my idea, big shot. Your
father is a very weird guy and your mother hates him lots because she’s
still in love with him. She’s got kinks, y’know? Or maybe she’s
sublimating them, if she’s serious about this church shit she’s putting
you through. He thinks that she’s a control freak. Anyway, after your
dad ran off in search of another dome, she took out an injunction
against him. But she forgot to cover his partner, and she bought this parcel of worms and sent
them to you, okay? Annie is a real bitch, but he’s got her wrapped
right around his finger, or something. Anyway, he built these companies
and this printer—which isn’t hardwired to a filtering proxy, like your
mom’s—specifically to let you get away from her legally. If that’s what you want to do.”
Amber fast-forward through the dynamic chunks
of the README—boring static UML diagrams, mostly—soaking up the gist of
the plan. Yemen is one of the few countries to implement traditional
Sunni shari’a law and a limited-liability company scam at the same
time. Owning slaves is legal—the fiction is that the owner has an
option hedged on the indentured laborer’s future output, with interest
payments that grow faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them
off—and companies are legal entities. If Amber sells herself into
slavery to this company, she will become a slave, and the company will
be legally liable for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal
instrument—about 90 percent of it, in fact—is a set of self-modifying
corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit
Turing-complete company constitutions, and which act as an ownership
shell for the slavery contract: at the far end of the corporate
firewall is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary and
shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she’ll acquire total
control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve her
slave contract; until then, the trust funds (which she essentially
owns) oversee the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from hostile
takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an
extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust’s
assets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is enclosed.
“You think I should take this?” she asks
uncertainly. It’s hard to tell how smart the cat really is—there’s
probably a yawning vacuum behind those semantic networks if you dig
deep enough—but it tells a pretty convincing tale.
The cat squats and curls its tail protectively
around its paws: “I’m saying nothing, you know what I mean? You take
this, you can go live with your dad. But it won’t stop your ma coming
after him with a horse whip and after you
with a bunch of lawyers and a set of handcuffs. You want my advice, you’ll phone the Franklins and
get aboard their off-planet mining scam. In space, no one can serve a
writ on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI
market, cracking alien network packets. You want my honest opinion, you
wouldn’t like it in Paris after a bit. Your dad and the frog bitch,
they’re swingers, y’know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat
like me, now I think of it. They’re out all hours of the night doing
drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera, that kind of adult shit. Your dad
dresses in frocks more than your mom, and your tante ’Nettie leads him
around the apartment on a chain when they’re not having noisy sex on
the balcony. They’d cramp your style, kid: you shouldn’t have to put up
with parents who have more of a life than you do.”
“Huh.” Amber wrinkles her nose, half-disgusted
by the cat’s transparent scheming, and half-acknowledging its message: I’d better think hard about this, she
decides. Then she flies off in so many directions at once that she
nearly browns out the household net feed. Part of her is examining the
intricate card pyramid of company structures; somewhere else, she’s
thinking about what can go wrong, while another bit (probably some of
her wet, messy glandular biological self) is thinking about how nice it
would be to see Daddy again, albeit with some trepidation. Parents
aren’t supposed to have sex: isn’t there a law, or something? “Tell me
about the Franklins? Are they married? Singular?”
The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses
slightly, dissipating heat from the hard-vacuum chamber in its
supercooled workspace. Deep in its guts it creates coherent atom beams,
from a bunch of Bose-Einstein condensates hovering on the edge of
absolute zero: by superimposing interference patterns on them, it
generates an atomic hologram, building a perfect replica of some
original artifact, right down to the atomic level—there are no clunky
moving nanotechnology parts to break or overheat or mutate. Something
is going to come out of the printer in half an hour, something cloned
off its original right down to the individual quantum states of its
component atomic nuclei. The cat, seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer
to its exhaust ducts.
“Bob Franklin, he died about two, three years
before you were born: your dad did business with him. So did your mom.
Anyway, he had chunks of his noumen preserved, and the estate trustees
are trying to re-create his consciousness by cross-loading him in their
implants. They’re sort of a borganism, but with money and style.
Anyway, Bob got into the space biz back then, with some financial
wizardry a friend of your father whipped up for him, and now they-he
are building a spacehab that they’re going to take all the way out to
Jupiter, where they can dismantle a couple of small moons and begin
building helium-three refineries. It’s that CETI scam I told you about
earlier, but they’ve got a whole load of other angles on it for the
long term.”
This is mostly going right over Amber’s
head—she’ll have to learn what helium-three refineries are later—but
the idea of running away to space has a certain appeal. Adventure,
that’s what. Amber looks around the living room and sees it for a
moment as a capsule, a small wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a
middle-America that never was—the one her mom wants to retreat into.
“Is Jupiter fun?” she asks. “I know it’s big and not very dense, but is
it, like, a happening place?”
“You could say that,” says the cat, as the
printer clanks and disgorges a fake passport (convincingly aged), an
intricate metal seal engraved with Arabic script, and a tailored
wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on Amber’s immature immune system.
“Stick that on your wrist, sign the three top copies, put them in the
envelope, and let’s get going: we’ve got a flight to catch.”
Sadeq is eating his dinner when the lawsuit
rolls in.
Alone in the cramped humming void of his
station, he contemplates the plea. The language is awkward, showing all
the hallmarks of a crude machine translation: the suppli-
cant is American, a woman, and—oddly—claims to
be a Christian. This is surprising enough, but the nature of her claim
is, at face value, preposterous. He forces himself to finish his bread,
then bag the waste and clean the platter, before he gives it his full
consideration. Is it a tasteless joke? Evidently not: as the only quadi
outside the orbit of Mars he is uniquely qualified to hear it, and it is a case that cries out for justice.
A woman who leads a God-fearing life—not a
correct one, no, but she shows some signs of humility and progress
toward a deeper understanding—is deprived of her child by the
machinations of a feckless husband who deserted her years before. That
the woman was raising the child alone strikes Sadeq as disturbingly
western, but pardonable when he reads her account of the feckless one’s
behavior, which is degenerate: an ill fate indeed would await any child
that this man raises to adulthood. This man deprives her of her child,
but not by legitimate means: he doesn’t take the child into his own
household or make any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with
his own customs or the precepts of shari’a. Instead, he enslaves her
wickedly in the mire of the western legal tradition, then casts her
into outer darkness to be used as a laborer by the dubious forces of
self-proclaimed “progress.” The same forces that Sadeq has been sent to
confront, as representative of the Ummah in orbit around Jupiter.
Sadeq scratches his short beard thoughtfully.
A nasty tale, but what can he do about it? “Computer,” he says, “a
reply to this supplicant: my sympathies lie with you in the manner of
your suffering, but I fail to see in what way I can be of assistance.
Your heart cries out for help before God (blessed be his name), but
surely this is a matter for the temporal authorities of the dar
al-Harb.” He pauses: or is it? he
wonders. Legal wheels begin to turn in his mind. “If you can but find
your way to extending to me a path by which I can assert the primacy of
shari’ah over your daughter, I shall apply myself to constructing a
case for her emancipation, to the greater glory of God (blessed be his
name) in the name of the Prophet (peace be unto him). Ends, sigblock,
send.”
Releasing the Velcro straps that hold him at
the table, Sadeq floats up and then kicks gently toward the forward end
of the cramped habitat. The controls of the telescope are positioned
between the ultrasonic clothing cleaner and the lithium hydroxide
scrubbers: they’re already freed up, because he was conducting a
wide-field survey of the inner ring, looking for the signature of water
ice. It is the work of a few moments to pipe the navigation and
tracking system into the telescope’s controller and direct it to hunt
for the big foreign ship of fools. Something nudges at Sadeq’s mind
urgently, an irritating realization that he may have missed something
in the woman’s email: there were a number of huge attachments. With
half his mind, he surfs the news digest his scholarly peers send him
daily: meanwhile, he waits patiently for the telescope to find the
speck of light that the poor woman’s daughter is enslaved within.
This might be a way in, he realizes, a way to
enter dialogue with them. Let the hard questions answer themselves,
elegantly. There will be no need for the war of the sword if they can
be convinced that their plans are faulty: no need to defend the godly
from the latter-day Tower of Babel these people propose to build. If
this woman Pamela means what she says, Sadeq need not end his days out
here in the cold between the worlds, away from his elderly parents and
brother and his colleagues and friends. And he will be profoundly
grateful: because, in his heart of hearts, he knows that he is less a
warrior than a scholar.
“I’m sorry, but the Borg is attempting to
assimilate a lawsuit,” says the receptionist. “Will you hold?”
“Crud.” Amber blinks the Binary Betty
answerphone sprite out of her eye and glances around at the cabin.
“That is so last century,” she
grumbles. “Who do they think they are?”
“Doctor Robert H. Franklin,” volunteers the
cat. “It’s a losing proposition if you ask me. Bob was so fond of his
dope that there’s this whole hippie groupmind that’s grown up using his
state vector as a bong—”
“Shut the fuck up!” Amber shouts at him.
Instantly contrite (for yelling in an inflatable spacecraft is a major
faux pas): “Sorry.” She spawns an autonomic thread with full
parasympathetic nervous control, tells it to calm her down: then she
spawns a couple more to go forth and become fuqaha, expert on shari’a
law. She realizes she’s buying up way too much of the orphanage’s
scarce bandwidth—time that will have to be paid for in chores,
later—but it’s necessary. “She’s gone too
far. This time, it’s war.”
She slams out of her cabin and spins right
around in the central axis of the hab, a rogue missile pinging for a
target to vent her rage on. A tantrum would be good—
But her body is telling her to chill out, take
ten, and there’s a drone of scriptural lore dribbling away in the back
of her head, and she’s feeling frustrated and angry and not in control,
but not really mad now. It was like this three years ago when Mom
noticed her getting on too well with Jenny Morgan and moved her to a
new school district—she said it was a work assignment, but Amber knows
better, Mom asked for it—just to keep her dependent and helpless. Mom
is a psycho bitch control-freak and ever since she had to face up to
losing Dad she’s been working her claws into Amber—which is tough,
because Amber is not good victim material, and is smart and
well-networked to boot. But now Mom’s found a way of fucking Amber over
completely, even in Jupiter orbit,
and Amber would be totally out of control if not for her skullware
keeping a lid on things.
Instead of shouting at her cat or trying to
message the Borg, Amber goes to hunt them down in their meatspace den.
There are sixteen Borg aboard the Sanger—adults, members of the Franklin
Collective, squatters in the ruins of Bob Franklin’s posthumous vision.
They lend bits of their brains to the task of running what science has
been able to resurrect of the dead dot-com billionaire’s mind, making
him the first boddhisatva of the uploading age—apart from the lobster
colony, of course. Their den mother is a woman called Monica: a willowy
brown-eyed hive queen with raster-burned corneal implants and a dry,
sardonic delivery that can corrode egos like a desert wind. She’s
better than the others at running Bob, and she’s no slouch when she’s
being herself: which is why they elected her Maximum Leader of the
expedition.
Amber finds Monica in the number four kitchen
garden, performing surgery on a filter that’s been blocked by
toad-spawn. She’s almost buried beneath a large pipe, her Velcro-taped
toolkit waving in the breeze like strange blue air-kelp. “Monica? You
got a minute?”
“Sure, I have lots of minutes. Make yourself
helpful? Pass me the antitorque wrench and a number-six hex head.”
“Um.” Amber captures the blue flag and fiddles
around with its contents. Something that has batteries, motors, a
fly-wheel counterweight, and laser gyros assembles itself—Amber passes
it under the pipe. “Here. Listen, your phone is busy.”
“I know. You’ve come to see me about your
conversion, haven’t you?”
“Yes!”
There’s a clanking noise from under the
pressure sump. “Take this.” A plastic bag floats out, bulging with
stray fasteners. “I got a bit of vacuuming to do. Get yourself a mask
if you don’t already have one.”
A minute later, Amber is back beside Monica’s
legs, her face veiled by a filter mask. “I don’t want this to go
through,” she says. “I don’t care what Mom says, I’m not Moslem! This
judge, he can’t touch me. He can’t,”
she repeats, vehemence warring with uncertainty.
“Maybe he doesn’t want to?” Another bag.
“Here, catch.”
Amber grabs the bag: too late, she discovers
that it’s full of water and toadspawn. Stringy mucous ropes full of
squiggling comma-shaped baby tadpoles explode all over the compartment
and bounce off the walls in a shower of amphibian confetti. “Eew!”
Monica squirms out from behind the pipe. “Oh,
you didn’t.” She kicks off the
consensus-defined floor and grabs a wad of absorbent paper from the
spinner, whacks it across the ventilator shroud above the sump.
Together they go after the toadspawn with garbage bags and paper—by the
time they’ve got the stringy mess mopped up, the spinner has begun to
click and whirr, processing cellulose from the algae tanks into fresh
wipes. “That was really clever,” Monica says emphatically, as the
disposal bin sucks down her final bag. “You wouldn’t happen to know how
the toad got in here?”
“No, but I ran into one that was loose in the
commons, one shift before last cycle-end. Gave it a ride back to
Oscar.”
“I’ll have a word with him, then.” Monica
glares blackly at the pipe. “I’m going to have to go back and re-fit
the filter in a minute. Do you want me to be Bob?”
“Uh.” Amber thinks. “Not sure. Your call.”
“All right, Bob coming online.” Monica’s face
relaxes slightly, then her expression hardens. “Way I see it, you’ve
got a choice. Your mother’s kinda boxed you in, hasn’t she?”
“Yes.” Amber frowns.
“So. Pretend I’m an idiot. Talk me through it,
huh?”
Amber drags herself alongside the hydro pipe
and gets her head down, alongside Monica/Bob, who is floating with her
feet near the floor. “I ran away from home. Mom owned me—that is, she
had parental rights and Dad had none. So Dad, via a proxy, helped me
sell myself into slavery to a company. The company was owned by a trust
fund, and I’m the main beneficiary when I reach the age of majority. As
a chattel, the company tells me what to do—legally—but the shell
company is set to take my orders. So I’m autonomous. Right?”
“That sounds like the sort of thing your
father would do,” Monica says neutrally. Overtaken by a sardonic
middle-aged Silicon Valley drawl, her north-of-England accent sounds
peculiarly mid-Atlantic.
“Trouble is, most countries don’t acknowledge
slavery; those that do mostly don’t have any equivalent of a
limited-liability company, much less one that can be directed by
another company from abroad. Dad picked Yemen on the grounds that
they’ve got this stupid brand of shari’a law—and a crap human-rights
record—but they’re just about conformant to the open legal standards
protocol, able to interface to EU norms via a Turkish legislative
firewall.”
“So.”
“Well, I guess I was technically a Jannissary.
Mom was doing her Christian phase, so that made me a Christian
unbeliever slave of an Islamic company. But now the stupid bitch has
gone and converted to shi’ism. Now, normally, Islamic descent runs
through the father, but she picked her sect carefully, and chose one
that’s got a progressive view of women’s rights: they’re sort of
Islamic fundamentalist liberal constructionists! ‘What would the
Prophet do if he were alive today and had to worry about
self-replicating chewing gum factories.’ They generally take a
progressive, almost westernized, view of things like legal equality of
the sexes, because for his time and place, the Prophet was way ahead of
the ball and they figure they ought to follow his example. Anyway, that
means Mom can assert that I am
Moslem, and under Yemeni law I get to be treated as a Moslem chattel of
a company. And their legal code is very dubious about permitting
slavery of Moslems. It’s not that I have rights
as such, but my pastoral well-being becomes the responsibility of the
local imam, and—” She shrugs helplessly.
“Has he tried to make you run under any new
rules, yet?” asks Monica/Bob. “Has he put blocks on your freedom of
agency, tried to mess with your mind? Insisted on libido dampers?”
“Not yet.” Amber’s expression is grim. “But
he’s no dummy. I figure he may be using Mom—and me—as a way of getting
his fingers into this whole expedition. Staking a claim for
jurisdiction, claim arbitration, that sort of thing. It could be worse;
he might order me to comply fully with his specific implementation of
shari’a. They permit implants, but require mandatory conceptual
filtering: if I run that stuff, I’ll end up believing
it!”
“Okay.” Monica does a slow backward somersault
in midair. “Now tell me why you can’t simply repudiate it.”
“Because.” Deep breath. “I can do that in two
ways. I can deny Islam, which makes me an apostate, and automatically
terminates my indenture to the shell, so Mom owns me. Or I can say that
the instrument has no legal standing because I was in the USA when I
signed it, and slavery is illegal there, in which case Mom owns me,
because I’m a minor. Or I can take the veil, live like a modest Moslem
woman, do whatever the imam wants, and Mom doesn’t own me—but she gets
to appoint my chaperone. Oh Bob, she has planned this so well.”
“Uh-huh.” Monica rotates back to the floor and
looks at Amber, suddenly very Bob. “Now you’ve told me your troubles,
start thinking like your dad. Your dad had a dozen creative ideas
before breakfast every day—it’s how he made his name. Your mom has got
you in a box. Think your way outside
it: what can you do?”
“Well.” Amber rolls over and hugs the fat
hydroponic duct to her chest like a life raft. “It’s a legal paradox.
I’m trapped because of the jurisdiction she’s cornered me in. I could
talk to the judge, I suppose, but she’ll have picked him carefully.”
Her eyes narrow. “The jurisdiction. Hey, Bob.” She lets go of the duct
and floats free, hair streaming out behind her like a cometary halo.
“How do I go about creating myself a new jurisdiction?”
Monica grins. “I seem to recall the
traditional way was to grab yourself some land and set yourself up as
king: but there are other ways. I’ve got some friends I think you
should meet. They’re not good conversationalists and there’s a two-hour
lightspeed delay…but I think you’ll find they’ve answered that question
already. But why don’t you talk to the imam first and find out what
he’s like? He may surprise you. After all, he was already out here
before your mom decided to use him against you.”
The Sanger
hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of
potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes of Mons Lyctos,
ten kilometers above the mean surface level: they kick up clouds of
reddish sulfate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the
surface. This close to Jupiter—a mere hundred and eighty thousand
kilometers above the swirling madness of the cloudscape—the gas giant
fills half the sky with a perpetually changing clockface: for Amalthea
orbits the master in under twelve hours. The Sanger’s
radiation shields are running at full power, shrouding the ship in a
corona of rippling plasma: radio is useless, and the human miners run
their drones via an intricate network of laser circuits. Other, larger
drones are unwinding spools of heavy electrical cable north and south
from the landing site: once the circuits are connected, these will form
a coil cutting through Jupiter’s magnetic field, generating electrical
current (and imperceptibly slowing the moon’s orbital momentum).
Amber sighs and looks, for the sixth time this
hour, at the webcam plastered on the side of her cabin. She’s taken
down the posters and told the toys to tidy themselves away. In another
two thousand seconds, the tiny Iranian spaceship will rise above the
limb of Moshtari, and then it will be time to talk to the teacher. She
isn’t looking forward to the experience. If he’s a grizzled old
blockhead of the most obdurate fundamentalist streak, she’ll be in
trouble: disrespect for age has been part and parcel of the western
teenage experience for generations, and a cross-cultural thread that
she’s sent to clue-up on Islam reminds her that not all cultures share
this outlook. But if he turns out to be young, intelligent, and
flexible, things could be even worse. When she was eight, Amber audited
The Taming of the Shrew: now she has
no appetite for a starring role in her own cross-cultural production.
She sighs again. “Pierre?”
“Yeah?” His voice comes from the foot of the
emergency locker in her room. He’s curled up down there, limbs
twitching languidly as he drives a mining drone around the surface of
Object Barney, as the rock has named itself. The drone is a long-legged
crane-fly lookalike, bouncing very slowly from toe-tip to toe-tip in
the microgravity—the rock is only half a kilometer along its longest
axis, coated brown with weird hydrocarbon goop and sulfur compounds
sprayed off the surface of Io by the Jovian winds. “I’m coming.”
“You better.” She glances at the screen. “One
twenty seconds to next burn.” The payload canister on the screen is,
technically speaking, stolen: it’ll be okay as long as she gives it
back, Bob said, although she won’t be able to do that until it’s
reached Barney and they’ve found enough water ice to refuel it. “Found
anything yet?”
“Just the usual. Got a seam of ice near the
semimajor pole—it’s dirty, but there’s at least a thousand tons there.
And the surface is crunchy with tar. Amber, you know what? The orange
shit, it’s solid with fullerenes.”
Amber grins at her reflection in the screen.
That’s good news. Once the payload she’s steering touches down, Pierre
can help her lay superconducting wires along Barney’s long axis. It’s
only a kilometer and a half, and that’ll only give them a few tens of
kilowatts of juice, but the condensation fabricator that’s also in the
payload will be able to use it to convert Barney’s crust into processed
goods at about two grams per second. Using designs copylefted by the
free hardware foundation, inside two hundred thousand seconds they’ll
have a grid of sixty-four 3D printers barfing up structured matter at a
rate limited only by available power. Starting with a honking great
dome tent and some free nitrogen/oxygen for her to breathe, then adding
a big web-cache and direct high-bandwidth uplink to Earth, Amber could
have her very own one-girl colony up and running within a million
seconds.
The screen blinks at her. “Oh shit. Make
yourself scarce, Pierre!” The incoming call nags at her attention.
“Yeah? Who are you?”
The screen fills with a view of a cramped,
very twen-cen-looking space capsule. The guy inside it is in his
twenties, with a heavily tanned face, close-cropped hair and beard,
wearing an olive-drab spacesuit liner. He’s floating between a TORU
manual-docking controller and a gilt-framed photograph of the Ka’bah at
Mecca. “Good evening to you,” he says solemnly. “Do I have the honor to
be addressing Amber Macx?”
“Uh, yeah. That’s me.” She stares at him: he
looks nothing like her conception of an ayatollah—whatever an ayatollah
is—elderly, black-robed, vindictively fundamentalist. “Who are you?”
“I am Doctor Sadeq Khurasani. I hope that I am
not interrupting you? Is it convenient for you that we talk now?”
He looks so anxious that Amber nods
automatically. “Sure. Did my mom put you up to this?” They’re still
speaking English, and she notices that his diction is good, but
slightly stilted: he isn’t using a grammar engine, he’s actually
learned it the hard way. “If so, you want to be careful. She doesn’t
lie, exactly, but she gets people to do what she wants.”
“Yes, she did. Ah.” A pause. They’re still
almost a light-second apart, time for painful collisions and accidental
silences. “I have not noticed that. Are you sure you should be speaking
of your mother that way?”
Amber breathes deeply. “Adults
can get divorced. If I could get
divorced from her, I would. She’s—” she flails around for the right
word helplessly. “Look. She’s the sort of person who can’t lose a
fight. If she’s going to lose, she’ll try to figure how to set the law
on you. Like she’s done to me. Don’t you see?”
Doctor Khurasani looks extremely dubious. “I
am not sure I understand,” he says. “Perhaps, mm, I should tell you why
I am talking to you?”
“Sure. Go ahead.” Amber is startled by his
attitude: he’s actually taking her seriously, she realizes. Treating
her like an adult. The sensation is so novel—coming from someone more
than twenty years old and not a member of the Borg—that she almost lets
herself forget that he’s only talking to her because Mom set her up.
“Well, I am an engineer. In addition, I am a
student of fiqh, jurisprudence. In
fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very junior judge, but
even so, it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway. Your mother, peace be
unto her, lodged a petition with me. Are you aware of it?”
“Yes.” Amber tenses up. “It’s a lie.
Distortion of the facts.”
“Hmmm.” Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully.
“Well, I have to find out, yes? Your mother has submitted herself to
the will of God. This makes you the child of a Moslem, and she claims—”
“She’s trying to use you as a weapon!” Amber
interrupts. “I sold myself into slavery
to get away from her, do you understand? I enslaved myself to a company
that is held in trust for my ownership. She’s trying to change the
rules to get me back. You know what? I don’t believe she gives a shit
about your religion, all she wants is me!”
“A mother’s love—”
“Fuck love!” Amber snarls, “she wants power.”
Sadeq’s expression hardens. “You have a foul
mouth in your head, child. All I am trying to do is to find out the
facts of this situation: you should ask yourself if such disrespect
furthers your interests?” He pauses for a moment, then continues, less
abruptly, “Did you really have such a bad childhood with her? Do you
think she did everything merely for power, or could she love you?”
Pause. “You must understand, I need an answer to these things. Before I
can know what is the right thing to do.”
“My mother—” Amber stops. Spawns a vaporous
cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the space around her
mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network
parsers and class filters, she turns the memories into reified images
and blats them at the webcam’s tiny brain so that he can see them. Some
of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in
full office war-paint, leaning over Amber, promising to take her to
church so that Reverend Beeching can pray the devil out of her. Mom
telling Amber that they’re moving again, abruptly, dragging her away
from school and the friends she’d tentatively started to like. Mom
catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and
hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat—“My
mother likes control.”
“Ah.” Sadeq’s expression turns glassy. “And
this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of—no,
please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do
your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?”
“My grandparents?” Amber stifles a snort.
“Mom’s parents are dead. Dad’s are still alive, but they won’t talk to
him—they like Mom. They think I’m creepy. I know little things, their
tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I
was four. I’m not built like little girls were in their day, and they
don’t understand. You know that the old ones don’t like us at all? Some
of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who
think their kids are possessed.”
“Well.” Sadeq is fingering his beard again,
distractedly. “I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know that
your mother has accepted Islam, don’t you? This means that you are
Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for
you. And she says that this makes you my problem. Hmm.”
“I’m not Moslem.” Amber stares at the screen.
“I’m not a child, either.” Her threads are coming together, whispering
scarily behind her eyes: her head is suddenly dense and turgid with
ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. “I am nobody’s
chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with
implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I
don’t believe in any god, mister
judge. I don’t believe in any limits. Mom can’t, physically, make me do
anything, and she sure can’t speak
for me.”
“Well, if that is what you have to say, I must
think on the matter.” He catches her eye: his expression is thoughtful,
like a doctor considering a diagnosis. “I will call you again in due
course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I
am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your
pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those
you care for.”
“Same to you too,” she mutters darkly as the
connection goes dead. “Now what?”
she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for
attention.
“I think it’s the lander,” Pierre says
helpfully. “Is it down yet?”
She rounds on him. “Hey, I thought I told you
to get lost!”
“What, and miss all the fun?” He grins at her
impishly. “Amber’s got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody….”
Sleep cycles pass: the borrowed 3D printer
on Object Barney’s surface spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep
at its rendering platform, building up the control circuitry and
skeletons of new printers. (There are no clunky nano-assemblers here,
no robots the size of viruses busily sorting molecules into piles—just
the bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated
Bose-Einstein condensates collapsing into strange, lacy, supercold
machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they slice
through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock’s momentum
into power: small robots grovel in the orange dirt, scooping up raw
material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber’s garden of machinery
flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according to a schema designed by
pre-teens at an industrial school in Poland, with barely any need for
human guidance.
High in orbit around Amalthea, complex
financial instruments breed and conjugate. Developed for the express
purpose of facilitating trade with the alien intelligences believed to
have been detected eight years earlier by SETI, they function equally
well as fiscal firewalls for space colonies. The Sanger’s
bank accounts in California and Cuba are looking acceptable—since
entering Jupiter space, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a
hundred gigatons of random rocks and a moon that’s just small enough to
creep in under the International Astronomical Union’s definition of a
sovereign planetary body. The Borg are working hard, leading their
eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the
industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium three from
Jupiter: they’re so focused that they spend much of their time being
themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared identity that gives
them their messianic drive.
Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and
slumbers in time to its ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college
in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: if replicators are
used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular
level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be
treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing
machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the
computer now a Moslem? If not, why
not? If so, what are its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline
the urgency of theotechnological inquiry.
More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham,
and Marseilles also underline a rising problem: social chaos caused by
cheap anti-aging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of
disaffected youth against the formerly graying gerontocracy of Europe,
insist that people who predate the supergrid and can’t handle implants
aren’t really conscious: their
ferocity is equaled only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of
the baby boom, their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties
youth but their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent century. The
faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool but
unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new
millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by
deflationary time.
The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of
the age. With growth rates running at over 20 percent, cheap
out-of-control bioindustrialization has swept the nation: former rice
farmers harvest plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children
study mariculture and design sea walls. With cell-phone ownership
nearing 80 percent and literacy at 90, the once-poor country is finally
breaking out of its historical infrastructure trap and beginning to
develop: another generation, and they’ll be richer than Japan in 2001.
Radical new economic theories are focusing
around bandwidth, speed-of-light transmission time, and the
implications of CETI, communication with extra-terrestrial
intelligence: cosmologists and quants collaborate on bizarre
relativistically telescoped financial instruments. Space (which lets
you store information) and structure (which lets you process it)
acquire value while dumb mass—like gold—loses it: the degenerate cores
of the traditional stock markets are in free fall, the old smokestack
microprocessor and biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the
onslaught of matter replicators and self-modifying ideas and the
barbarian communicators, who mortgage their future for a millennium
against the chance of a gift from a visiting alien intelligence.
Microsoft, once the US Steel of the silicon age, quietly fades into
liquidation.
An outbreak of green goo—a crude biomechanical
replicator that eats everything in its path—is dealt with in the
Australian outback by carpet-bombing with fuel-air explosives: the USAF
subsequently reactivates two wings of refurbished B-52s and places them
at the disposal of the UN standing committee on self-replicating
weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest pilots, re-enlisting
with the body of a twenty-year-old and an empty pension account, first
flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The news overshadows the World
Health Organization’s announcement of the end of the HIV pandemic,
after more than fifty years of bigotry, panic, and megadeath.
“Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator
drill? If you spot your heart rate going up or your mouth going dry,
take five.”
“Shut the fuck up, ’Neko, I’m trying to
concentrate.” Amber fumbles with the titanium D-ring, trying to snake
the strap through it. The gauntlets are getting in her way: high orbit
spacesuits—little more than a body stocking designed to hold your skin
under compression and help you breathe—are easy, but this deep in
Jupiter’s radiation belt, she has to wear an old moon suit that comes
in about thirteen layers, and the gloves are stiff. It’s Chernobyl
weather, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming through
the void. “Got it.” She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring,
then goes to work on the next strap. Never looking down: because the
wall she’s tying herself to has no floor, just a cut-off two meters
below, then empty space for a hundred kilometers before the nearest
solid ground.
The ground sings to her moronically: “I fall
to you, you fall to me, it’s the law of gravity—”
She shoves her feet down onto the platform
that juts from the side of the capsule like a suicide’s ledge:
metalized Velcro grabs hold, and she pulls on the straps to turn her
body around until she can see past the capsule, side-ways. The capsule
masses about five tons, barely bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It’s
packed to overflowing with environment-sensitive stuff she’ll need, and
a honking great high-gain antenna. “I hope you know what you’re doing?”
someone says over the intercom.
“Of course I—” she stops. Alone in this
TsUP-surplus iron maiden with its low bandwidth comms and bizarre
plumbing, she feels claustrophobic and helpless: parts of her mind
don’t work. When she was four, Mom took her down a famous cave system
somewhere out west: when the guide turned out the lights half a
kilometer underground, she’d screamed with surprise as the darkness had
reached out and touched her. Now it’s not the darkness that frightens
her, it’s the lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her,
there are no minds, and even on the
surface there’s not much but a moronic warbling of bots. Everything
that makes the universe primate-friendly seems to be locked in the huge
spaceship that looms somewhere just behind her, and she has to fight
down an urge to shed her straps and swarm back up the umbilical that
anchors this capsule to the Sanger.
“I’ll be fine,” she forces herself to say. And even though she’s unsure
that it’s true, she tries to make herself believe it. “It’s just
leaving-home nerves. I’ve read about it, okay?”
There’s a funny, high-pitched whistle in her
ears. For a moment, the sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold,
then the noise stops. She strains for a moment, and when it returns,
she recognizes the sound: the heretofore-talkative cat, curled in the
warmth of her pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore.
“Let’s go,” she says, “time to roll the
wagon.” A speech macro deep in the Sanger’s
docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets go of the
pod. A couple of cold gas thrusters pop, deep banging vibrations
running through the capsule, and she’s on her way.
“Amber. How’s it hanging?” A familiar voice in
her ears: she blinks. Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour
gone.
“Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?”
“Heh!” A pause. “I can see your head from here.”
“How’s it looking?” she asks. There’s a lump
in her throat, she isn’t sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one
of the smaller proximity cameras dotted around the outer hull of the
big mothership. Watching over her as she falls.
“Pretty much like always,” he says
laconically. Another pause, this time longer. “This is wild, you know?
Su Ang says hi, by the way.”
“Su Ang, hi,” she replies, resisting the urge
to lean back and look up—up relative to her feet, not her vector—and
see if the ship’s still visible.
“Hi,” Ang says shyly. “You’re very brave!”
“Still can’t beat you at chess.” Amber frowns.
Su Ang and her over-engineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical
factory toads. People she’s known for three years, mostly ignored, and
never thought about missing. “Listen, you going to come visiting?”
“Visit?” Ang sounds dubious. “When will it be
ready?”
“Oh, soon enough.” At four kilograms per
minute of structured-matter output, the printers on the surface have
already built her a bunch of stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an
algae/shrimp farm, a bucket conveyor to bury it with, an airlock. It’s
all lying around waiting for her to put it together and move into her
new home. “Once the Borg get back from Amalthea.”
“Hey! You mean they’re moving? How did you
figure that?”
“Go talk to them,” Amber says. Actually, she’s
a large part of the reason the Sanger
is about to crank its orbit up and out toward the other moon: she wants
to be alone in comms silence for a couple of million seconds. The
Franklin collective is doing her a big favor.
“Ahead of the curve, as usual,” Pierre cuts
in, with something that sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears.
“You too,” she says, a little too fast. “Come
visit when I’ve got the life-support cycle stabilized.”
“I’ll do that,” he replies. A red glow
suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in
time to see the glaring blue laser-line of the Sanger’s
drive torch powering up.
Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of
a Jupiter year, passes.
The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as
he stares at the traffic-control display. These days, every shift seems
to bring a new crewed spaceship into Jupiter system: space is getting
positively crowded. When he arrived, there were less than two hundred
people here: now there’s the population of a small city, and many of
them live at the heart of the approach map centered on his display. He
breathes deeply—trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks—and
studies the map. “Computer, what about my slot?” he asks.
“Your slot: cleared to commence final approach
in six nine five seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside
ten kilometers, drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer.
Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now.” Chunks of the approach
map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other
craft in the area.
Sadeq sighs. “We’ll go in on Kurs. I assume
their Kurs guidance is active?”
“Kurs docking target support available to
shell level three.”
“Praise the Prophet, peace be unto him.” He
pokes around through the guidance subsystem’s menus, setting up the
software emulation of the obsolete (but highly reliable) Soyuz docking
system. At last, he can leave the ship to look after itself for a bit.
He glances around: for two years he has lived in this canister, and
soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems real.
The radio, usually silent, crackles with
unexpected life. “Bravo One One, this is Imperial Traffic Control.
Verbal contact required, over.”
Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds
inhuman, paced with the cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many
of Her Majesty’s subjects. “Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I’m
listening, over.”
“Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing
slot on tunnel four, airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance
is set to seven four zero and slaved to our control.”
He leans over the screen and rapidly checks
the docking system’s settings. “Control, all in order.”
“Bravo One One, stand by.”
The next hour passes slowly as the traffic
control system guides his Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange
dust streaks his one optical-glass porthole: a kilometer before
touch-down, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, locking
down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls
his mat against the floor in front of the console and floats above it
for ten minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It’s not the landing that
worries him, but what comes next.
Her Majesty’s domain stretches out before the
battered Almaz module like a rust-stained snowflake half-a-kilometer in
diameter. Its core is buried in a loose snowball of grayish rubble, and
it waves languid brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of
Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the molecular level,
split off the main collector arms at regular intervals; a cluster of
habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive
cluster. Already, he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb
from either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma: the
Jovian rings form a rainbow of darkness rising behind them.
Finally, the battered space station is on
final approach. Sadeq watches the Kurs simulation output carefully,
piping it direct into his visual field: there’s an external camera view
of the rockpile and grapes, expanding toward the convex ceiling of the
ship, and he licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go
around again—but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he’s
close enough to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead
of the ship, it’s measured in centimeters per second. There’s a gentle
bump, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the docking ring latches
fire—and he’s down.
Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to
stand. There’s gravity here, but not much: walking is impossible. He’s
about to head for the life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a
noise from the far end of the docking node. Turning, he is just in time
to see the hatch opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and
then—
Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the
throne room, moodily fidgeting with the new signet ring her Equerry has
designed for her. It’s a lump of structured carbon massing almost fifty
grams, set in a plain band of iridium. It glitters with the blue and
violet speckle highlights of its internal lasers, because, in addition
to being a piece of state jewelry, it is also an optical router, part
of the industrial control infrastructure she’s building out here on the
edge of the solar system. Her Majesty wears plain black combat pants
and sweatshirt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun glass, but
her feet are bare: her taste in fashion is best described as youthful,
and, in any event, certain styles—skirts, for example—are simply
impractical in microgravity. But, being a monarch, she’s wearing a
crown. And there’s a cat sleeping on the back of her throne.
The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic
engineer) ushers Sadeq to the doorway, then floats back. “If you need
anything, please say,” she says shyly, then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq
approaches the throne, orients himself on the floor—a simple slab of
black composite, save for the throne growing from its center like an
exotic flower—and waits to be noticed.
“Doctor Khurasani, I presume.” She smiles at
him, neither the innocent grin of a child nor the knowing smirk of an
adult: merely a warm greeting. “Welcome to my kingdom. Please feel free
to make use of any necessary support services here, and I wish you a
very pleasant stay.”
Sadeq holds his expression still. The queen is
young—her face still retains the puppy fat of childhood, emphasized by
microgravity moon-face—but it would be a bad mistake to consider her
immature. “I am grateful for Your Majesty’s forbearance,” he murmurs,
formulaic. Behind her the walls glitter like diamonds, a glowing
kaleidoscope vision. Her crown, more like a compact helm that covers
the top and rear of her head, also glitters and throws off diffraction
rainbows: but most of its emissions are in the near ultraviolet,
invisible except in the faint glowing nimbus it creates around her
head. Like a halo.
“Have a seat,” she offers, gesturing: a
ballooning free-fall cradle squirts down and expands from the ceiling,
angled toward her, open and waiting. “You must be tired: working a ship
all by yourself is exhausting.” She frowns ruefully, as if remembering.
“And two years is nearly unprecedented.”
“Your Majesty is too kind.” Sadeq wraps the
cradle arms around himself and faces her. “Your labors have been
fruitful, I trust.”
She shrugs. “I sell the biggest commodity in
short supply on any frontier…. ”a momentary grin. “This isn’t the wild
west, is it?”
“Justice cannot be sold,” Sadeq says stiffly.
Then, a moment later: “My apologies, please accept that while I mean no
insult. I merely mean that while you say your goal is to provide the
rule of Law, what you sell is and
must be something different. Justice without God, sold to the highest
bidder, is not justice.”
The queen nods. “Leaving aside the mention of
God, I agree: I can’t sell it. But I can sell participation in a just
system. And this new frontier really is a lot smaller than anyone
expected, isn’t it? Our bodies may take months to travel between
worlds, but our disputes and arguments take seconds or minutes. As long
as everybody agrees to abide by my arbitration, physical enforcement
can wait until they’re close enough to touch. And everybody does agree that my legal framework is
easier to comply with, better adjusted to space, than any earthbound
one.” A note of steel creeps into her voice, challenging: her halo
brightens, tickling a reactive glow from the walls of the throne room.
Five billion inputs
or more, Sadeq marvels: the crown is an engineering marvel,
even though most of its mass is buried in the walls and floor of this
huge construct. “There is law revealed by the Prophet, peace be unto
him, and there is Law that we can establish by analyzing his
intentions. There are other forms of law by which humans live, and
various interpretations of the law of God even among those who study
his works. How, in the absence of the word of the Prophet, can you
provide a moral compass?”
“Hmm.” She taps her fingers on the arm of her
throne, and Sadeq’s heart freezes. He’s heard the stories from the
claim-jumpers and boardroom bandits, from the greenmail experts with
their roots in the earthbound jurisdictions that have made such a hash
of arbitration here: how she can experience a year in a minute, rip
your memories out through your cortical implants and make you relive
your worst mistakes in her nightmarishly powerful simulation system.
She is the queen—the first
individual to get her hands on so much mass and energy that she could
pull ahead of the curve of binding technology, and the first to set up
her own jurisdiction and rule certain experiments to be legal so that
she could make use of the mass/energy intersection. She has force majeure—even the Pentagon’s
infowarriors respect the Ring Imperium’s firewall. In fact, the body
sitting in the throne opposite him probably contains only a fraction of
her identity; she’s by no means the first upload or partial, but she’s
the first-gust front of the storm of power that will arrive when the
arrogant ones achieve their goal of dismantling the planets and turning
dumb and uninhabited mass into brains throughout the observable reaches
of the universe. And he’s just questioned the rectitude of her vision.
The queen’s lips twitch. Then they curl into a
wide, carnivorous grin. Behind her, the cat sits up and stretches, then
stares at Sadeq through narrowed eyes.
“You know, that’s the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I’m full of
shit. You haven’t been talking to my mother again, have you?”
It’s Sadeq’s turn to shrug, uncomfortably. “I
have prepared a judgment,” he says slowly.
“Ah.” Amber rotates the huge diamond ring
around her finger, seemingly unaware. It is Amber that looks him in the
eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could possibly do to make her comply with any decree—
“Her motive is polluted,” Sadeq says shortly.
“Does that mean what I think it does?” she
asks.
Sadeq breathes deeply again. “Yes.”
Her smile returns. “And is that the end of
it?” she asks.
He raises a dark eyebrow. “Only if you can
prove to me that you can have a conscience in the absence of divine
revelation.”
Her reaction catches him by surprise. “Oh,
sure. That’s the next part of the program. Obtaining divine
revelations.”
“What? From the aliens?”
The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its
way down to her lap and waits to be held and stroked. It never once
takes its eyes off him. “Where else?” she asks. “Doctor, I didn’t get
the Franklin trust to loan me the wherewithal to build this castle just
in return for some legal paperwork. We’ve known for years that there’s
a whole alien packet-switching network out there and we’re just getting
spillover from some of their routes: it turns out there’s a node not
far away from here, in real space. Helium three, separate
jurisdictions, heavy industrialization on Io—there is a purpose to all this activity.”
Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. “You’re
going to narrowcast a reply?”
“No, much better than that: we’re going to visit them. Cut the delay cycle down to
realtime. We came here to build a ship and recruit a crew, even if we
have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to pay for the
exercise.”
The cat yawns, then fixes him with a
thousand-yard stare. “This stupid girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with
something so smart it might as well be a god,” it says, “and you’re it.
There’s a slot open for the post of ship’s theologian. I don’t suppose
I can convince you to turn the offer down?”
Terry Bisson
[www.terrybisson.com] lives in Oakland, California these days. He
continues to write fantasy and science fiction, full of detail and
fascination with how things work, with deadpan humor, wit, and stylish
precision. He has been publishing in the genre since the late 1970s. Of
his SF novels, Voyage to the Red Planet (1990)
is perhaps both the most heroic and the funniest chronicle of the first
voyage to Mars in all science fiction. His latest novel is
The Pickup Artist (2001), which somehow
combines the traditions of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. In the
1990s, Bisson began to write short stories. One of his first was “Bears
Discover Fire,” which won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, among others. His
stories are collected in Bears Discover Fire (1993) and in In the Upper Room and Other
Likely Stories (2000).
“I Saw the Light”
appeared electronically at SciFiction; this is its first appearance in
print. It is classic Bisson, an object of contemplation as well as a
fine SF story in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Sentinal.”
Astronauts discover on the Moon evidence that humanity was uplifted by
alien visitors in the distant past. This is SF as the literature of
ideas, especially unsettling ideas. How much free will do we have,
anyway? This is a story about an astronaut and her dog.
I saw the light. So did you. Everybody
did.
Remember where you were the first time you saw
it? Of course you do. I was living in Arizona, Tucson, more or less
retired. I was throwing sticks. They say you can’t teach an old dog new
tricks, but who would want to? There aren’t any new tricks, just the
old tried and true. “Good boy, Sam,” I would say, and he would say
“woof,” and there we would go again. I used to amuse myself thinking it
was Sam who was teaching me to throw, but I don’t think that anymore.
It was night, and desert nights are bright, even with a quarter moon.
Sam stopped, halfway back to me, dropped his stick and began to howl.
He was looking up, over my head. I turned and looked up toward the
moon, and you know the rest. There it was, blinking in threes: dot dot dot, twice a minute. On the Moon,
where no one had been in thirty years. Twenty nine, eight months, and
four days, exactly; I knew, because I had been the last to leave, the
one who locked the door behind me.
Sam’s a big yellow mutt; his first name is
Play it Again, so I always call him by his last. He was a parting gift
from my third ex, who was himself a parting gift from my second. Lunar
subcrust engineers shouldn’t marry: our peculiar talents take us to too
many faraway places. Or to one, anyway.
“Come on boy,” I said, and we headed back into
the minimally furnished condo I call home, leaving the stick
behind—even though sticks are not all that easy to find in Arizona, or
for that matter on the Moon.
The light on the Moon was front page news
the next morning—dot dot dot—and by
the third day it was estimated that all but a tiny fraction of Earth’s
six point four billion had seen it. UNASA confirmed that the light was
not from Marco Polo Station (I could have told them that) but from a
spot almost a hundred kilometers away, on the broad, dark plain of the
Sinus Medii: the exact center of the Moon as seen from Earth.
I figured there would have to be an
investigation, so I made a few calls. I was not really hopeful, but you
never knew. I still had a few friends in the Agency. I was hoping that,
if nothing else, this light would get us back to the Moon. It wasn’t
only or even primarily for myself that I was hoping; it was for
humanity, all of us, past and future. It seemed a shame to learn to
soar off the planet and then quit.
Okay, so it’s not soaring: it’s more like a
push-up, grunting and heaving, but you know what I mean.
First Contact: strange lights on the Moon:
may we have your attention, please. The tabs speculated, the pundits
punded, and UNASA prepared the first international expedition since the
abandonment of Marco Polo in 20—. I had made, as I mentioned, a few
calls, but I hadn’t really expected anything. A sixty-one-year-old
woman does not exactly fit the profile for space flight and lunar
exploration. So Imagine, as they say, My Surprise, when the phone rang.
It was Berenson, my Russian-English boss from the old days. I knew him
immediately by his accent even though it had been twenty-nine years
eight months and seven days.
“Bee!?” (Which is what we called him.)
“I requested you as number two for the tech
team. Logistically this is a cake walk and age is not a problem, if
you’re still in shape. There will be five altogether, three SETI and
two tech.”
“How soon?” I asked, trying to hide my
excitement.
“Start packing.”
I hung up and screamed, or howled, or
whatever. Sam came running. “I’m going back to the Moon!” I said.
“Woof!” he said, jowls flopping; as always,
happier for me than for himself.
Our trip was put together with a minimum of
publicity and fanfare. We were due at Novy Mir in less than a week. I
wasn’t to tell anyone where I was going. Of course, I had already told
Sam.
“I’m leaving you here with Willoughby,” I
said. “I’ll be back soon. Three, four weeks max. Meanwhile, you be
good, hear?”
“Where are you going, exactly?” My next door
neighbor, Willoughby, is a retired FBI agent, a type that both hates
and loves secrets, depending on who is keeping them, and why.
“An old lover,” I said, with a wink. It was
one of my better moments.
Zero G felt perfectly normal; you don’t
forget how to fly, just as you don’t forget how to walk. I felt ten
years younger immediately. It was great to be back in the Big Empty,
even if it meant a night or two on Novy Mir, the sprawling, smelly
space station in Clarke orbit.
Bee was the first one I saw when I entered the
day room we had been assigned. He was with Yoshi, his old number two.
“I thought I was number two!” I complained.
“You are,” Bee replied with a laugh. “Yoshi is
number one.” Turned out he was leading SETI. His partners were a
scowling Chinese biologist named Chang, and a smiling Indian linguist
named Erin Vishnu whose mother had gotten pregnant during Julia
Roberts’Academy Awards acceptance speech. I didn’t learn this until
later, of course; at first the “sadies” (as Yoshi and I called them)
were very reserved.
It was a two-day trip from high Earth orbit
to the Moon. Bee and I caught up on old times (he had saved my life
twice, which cements a friendship) while Yoshi flew the ship and
studied the manuals, which she already knew by heart. So did I. I had
helped her and Bee run the pumps, extracting environmentals from buried
comet ice, for almost six years at Polo.
The SETI team, the sadies, were the scientific
payload. The heart of the matter, as it were. They had been established
to deal directly, discreetly, and creatively with any First Contact
situation, answerable to no government—not even UNASA.
“No one really thought it would ever happen,”
Bee told me. “So we have complete autonomy; for two weeks anyway.”
We were just preparing for lunar capture
when I got the call from Willoughby—my next door neighbor, remember? It
was Sam. He was desolate, disconsolate, wouldn’t eat; he just howled—at
the moon, of course, as if he knew where I was headed.
“How the Hell did you get through to me here?”
I asked. I needn’t have. Those FBI guys never let go of their
connections. I could hear Sam in the background, whining.
Willoughby held the phone, and I said, “Hang
in there, boy, I’ll be home soon.”
“Woof,” was his answer; he was nothing if not
unconvinced.
The light source was about a hundred kliks
from Marco Polo, and we crossed over the old station on our recon
orbit. I got all teary-eyed, seeing our domes and tunnels, still intact
here where the weather runs in billion year cycles; every scratch and
scuff in the lunar dust just as we had left it, twenty-nine years eight
months and eighteen days before.
Then we saw the light itself as we passed over
Sinus Medii. It was coming from a perfect jet black pyramid, ten meters
on a side, too small to show up in amateur photos but plenty large
enough to have been studied from Novy Mir.
“There haven’t been any pictures of this!” I
said. “Not even on the internet.” Bee just smiled and I realized then
that his SETI team had powers that belied their modest size and
relative obscurity.
The pyramid was pure black, the only pure
thing on the Moon, which is all shades of gray.
It was still throwing light, dot dot dot, a new sequence every
twenty-seven seconds.
We set down next to the pyramid in a cloud
of slow-settling dust. If we had hoped to be greeted by the aliens when
the dust cleared (and we had; hopes are less restricted than
expectations), we were duly disappointed.
The pyramid was silent and still, as black as
a rip in the Universe. It was still (we confirmed from Novy Mir)
transmitting its dot dot dot twice
a minute, but the light was, for some reason, invisible from our
position beside it.
Still teary-eyed, I felt like a dancer; light
on my feet, without the creaking that comes with age and miles. I
realized that it was not the moon I had missed all these years, but the
one-sixth gravity, and of course my youth.
SETI had arranged for a two week stay, so I
immediately sunk a probe and hit pay dirt (or ice). The sadies went to
work, photographing the pyramid from all sides, while Yoshi and I
unfolded the dome and adjusted the environmentals to break down the
oxygen and hydrogen (for fuel) extracted from the cometary trash
imbedded under the lunar crust.
By Day Two (sticklers for tradition, we ran on
Houston time) we had the ship for a dorm, and the attached geodesic as
a day room and observation dome, complete with fast-plants and a hot
tub which also heated the dome and ship. By Day Three I knew I should
have been bored. Shouldn’t something have happened by now?
“What would you have us do?” Bee asked.
“Knock?”
“Why not?” I said, returning his smile. I was
in no hurry; I was just glad to have a reason to be here, back home, on
the Moon. It felt—right. Even Yoshi, an olympic complainer, was not
complaining, though her narrow face was not exactly wreathed in smiles.
“What about ground control?” she asked. “Aren’t they pushing you?”
“There isn’t any ground control,” Bee said.
“Or haven’t you noticed?” The SETI mandate was a blank slate, designed
to remove First Contact, if it ever came to pass, from the constraints
of diplomacy and politics. The pace of events was their call.
By Day Four Yoshi and I had nothing to do
except watch the sadies in their clumsy white suits measure and
photograph and analyze the pyramid. I kept my doubts to myself,
reluctant to interfere, but Yoshi was never one to recognize such
restraints. “Aren’t you guys disappointed?” she asked at the end of the
day.
“Not yet. It feels right to go slow,” Bee
replied. He was sitting with us in the hot tub, soaking off the chill
that comes with EVAs, even in a suit. “Can’t you feel it?”
Feel what?
We both looked at him, puzzled.
“The familiarity. I feel it; we all feel it. A
feeling that we are in the right place, doing the right thing.”
“I thought it was just me,” I said. “Being
back here.”
“We all feel it,” said Chang, who was sitting
on the floor in his long johns, tapping on a laptop. “We are here to
record and evaluate everything. Feelings included. Right, Vish?”
“Right.”
“You’ve got another week,” said Yoshi.
“Knock and you shall enter,” I said.
“Hmmmm,” said Bee.
And knock he did. The next day, at the end
of their routine explorations, he reached up with a heavy gloved mitt
and rapped three times on the side of the pyramid.
Yoshi and I were watching from the dome.
“I knocked,” Bee said to me, as he was
unsuiting just inside the airlock (we entered and exited through the
ship). Instead of answering, I pulled all three of the sadies into the
dome, and pointed across the little plain of dust toward the pyramid.
“Damn,” said Chang. He all but smiled. Vishnu
looked amazed. Bee, delighted. There it was:
A handprint, in bright yellow, against the
darker-than-midnight black, halfway up the pyramid.
The next “morning” the print was still
there, and the sadies were suited up early. Yoshi and I watched them
jumping clumsily around, stirring up the dust, fitting their stiff
gloves against the handprint, waiting for something to happen. Hoping
for something to happen.
Nothing did.
Later in the hot tub we were all silent.
Outside the dome, we could see the print, bright yellow in the Moon’s
cruel gray. We felt gloomy and hopeful at the same time. Familiarity
had been replaced by a kind of desperate eagerness.
“It wants something,” said Bee.
“Maybe it wants a touch,” I said.
“A touch?” Chang was scornful.
I ignored him and addressed myself to Bee.
“You know, not a glove.”
“It’s high vac out there,” Vishnu reminded me.
“We can’t exactly take off our gloves.”
“But of course we can!” Bee said, slapping the
water like a boy. I grinned and gave him five. There were the peels.
Peels are emergency spray-on suits to be
used in case of sudden decompression. Coupled with a “paper” helmet, a
peel will give you anywhere from two to twenty minutes to find an
airlock or an emergency vehicle—or say your prayers.
I was in fact the only one present who had
actually used a peel, after a sudden rockslide collapsed Polo’s ag
dome. Thanks to the peel I had survived the twelve minutes it took Bee
to get to me with a Rover. I could still feel the cold of those long
twelve minutes in my bones.
The next “day” (Six) they tried it. Yoshi and
I watched from the dome as Bee in his peel and the sadies in their
white suits approached the pyramid, Bee in the lead. He was hurrying,
of course; there’s no other way to moonwalk in a peel. I could feel how
cold he was.
They all stopped and stood in a line, right in
front of the print. With his left hand Bee grabbed Chang’s mitt, and
Chang grabbed Vishnu’s. Then Bee placed his right hand high on the side
of the pyramid, directly over the print.
And it happened.
Something—a lens, a door?—opened in the side
of the pyramid, and they stepped through: one, two, three: Bee, Chang,
Vishnu. It closed behind them and they were gone.
“Holy shit,” said Yoshi.
“Knock and you shall enter,” I said. It was
another of my better moments.
Yoshi and I watched the pyramid, wordlessly.
Was there air in there? How could Bee survive? After twenty minutes
Yoshi began to suit up for a rescue EVA. I was the only one watching
two minutes later (twenty-one point four minutes from entry, timed on
the sadies’ fixed video camera) when the lens opened and the three
emerged, stumbling, Bee in the lead. Yoshi opened the airlock for them
and they staggered in, Bee falling into my arms. While Yoshi helped the
other sadies un-suit, I ripped off his paper helmet and pulled him into
the hot tub, which would dissolve his peel. He was shivering and
grinning.
Yoshi joined us, feet only. “Why’s he
grinning?”
“Ask him,” I said. I was rubbing one of his
feet while he rubbed the other.
Bee was opening his mouth and closing it
without making a sound, like a fish.
“It was big in there,” he said, finally; still
with the goofy grin. “Bigger on the inside than on the outside.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“We went in and the door closed behind us. It
was dark but we could see, don’t ask me why. We took our helmets off…”
“Took your helmets off!?” Yoshi was offended.
“Don’t ask me why. We just did, all of us.
Then we stepped forward, all together I think, and saw the light.”
“Wait a minute,” I said.
“It was like a glow.”
“But bright,” said Chang, who had joined us.
“The brightest thing I have ever seen.”
“The next thing I knew I was on my knees,”
said Bee. “I could feel this hand on the top of my head.”
“A hand?” Yoshi was offended again.
“It felt like a yellow hand,” Vishnu said,
peeling off her long johns; it was the first time I had seen her
undressed.
“It was definitely a hand,” Bee said. “I could
tell it was a hand though I couldn’t see anything. I don’t think I even
looked.”
“It was all light,” said Chang. “And this
feeling. It was a hand on the top of my head.”
“It felt so good,” said Vishnu, lowering
herself into the water. She had the body of a girl.
“Sounds like an acid trip,” I said. “Or a
three-armed alien.”
“What was the communication?” Yoshi asked.
“What was said?”
“The feeling was the communication,” Bee said.
“That was all. Nothing was said. We were just there, all three of us,
on our knees, looking into the light.”
“With a feeling of…of…” Chang gave up.
“I don’t like this,” said Vishnu, looking down
at herself, as if just realizing she was nude. “Shouldn’t we be talking
about this among ourselves first?”
“It’s okay,” said Bee. “We can proceed any way
we decide is best, and this feels okay, doesn’t it? These are our
closest comrades here, after a million years of evolution.”
Huh? He looked stoned to me.
“So whatever it is, it came all this way to
pat you on the head?” Yoshi grumbled.
Bee and Chang just grinned. Vishnu looked
troubled. I wondered if she were wishing she had kept her long johns
on.
“Maybe it’s God,” I said.
“It’s a they,” Bee said, shaking his head.
“More than one,” said Vishnu. “Many.”
“And they know us,” Chang said.
“Yes! That’s the communication,” Bee said.
“They know us, and we know them. That was the feeling, more than a
feeling, really. That’s what they wanted to tell us.”
“They?” Yoshi rolled her eyes. “They called
you up here for a feeling? There’s no communication?”
“Feelings are real,” said Bee. “Maybe that’s
all it will be. Who knows. The idea behind SETI is that First Contact
will probably be something unexpected.”
“This is unexpected,” said Vishnu. “But not
unfamiliar. Very familiar. We have been here before.”
“Here?” I asked.
“In their company,” said Chang. “Being with
them felt good. Better than good. Great.”
“Great,” said Yoshi, looking disgusted.
“And now?” I asked. “Next?”
“I don’t know,” said Bee, looking out toward
the black pyramid, with its yellow print halfway up the side. “There’s
something, something else. I guess we go back.”
And so they did. The next “morning” they all
went out again, Chang and Vishnu suited and Bee leading, in his peel.
They emerged after only twenty minutes this time, with the same lunatic
grins.
“It’s not like we aren’t conscious in there,”
said Chang, as his helmet came off. “It’s more like we’re conscious for
the first time.”
“Right,” said Vishnu.
I would have made another acid trip joke, but
I didn’t want to discourage them. This was, after all, I told myself,
the long awaited First Contact, for which humanity had waited a million
years or more.
Wasn’t it?
“Who are they? What are they? What do they
want from us?” asked Yoshi.
“They want to be with us,” said Vishnu,
dreamily peeling off her long johns. “Just like we want to be with
them.”
“It’s all feelings,” said Bee, slipping into
the pool beside me. He looked like the Michelin tire man in his foam
suit, before it started to dissolve into harmless polymer chains. “But
the feelings contain information.”
“They sort of precipitate into information,”
said Chang.
“The feelings are
information,” said Vishnu, nude again. “We are in contact with an
entity that we have been in contact with before. And have always wanted
to be in contact with again.”
“That’s the feeling!” said Chang eagerly.
“Desire, and the fulfillment of desire.”
“Sounds sort of sexy,” I said.
“It’s a wonderful feeling,” said Bee, taking
me more seriously than I took myself. “But it’s changing, too. There’s
something else.”
“Something dark,” said Vishnu.
“Dark how? Dark what?” Yoshi was putting the
helmets and suits away, looking annoyed.
“It’s too soon to say,” said Bee. “First we
all need to get some sleep. That’s an order.”
“Wake up.”
It was Yoshi.
“It’s Berenson, he’s gone. He’s in there.”
“What?” I sat up, almost spilling out of my
hammock. I had been dreaming I was home on Earth with Sam, trying to
explain something to him, about sticks.
“I thought I saw him, in a peel, going in,
about five minutes ago.”
“Are you sure?”
“I thought I might be dreaming, so I checked.
The other sadies are in their hammocks, but Berenson is gone.”
“So what do you think we should do?”
Twenty minutes later I was in boots and long
johns, spraying on a peel. I shook open a paper helmet, checking to
make sure it had two full air cans (twenty minutes). I had thought I
remembered the cold and was prepared for it, but I wasn’t. It was
insulting, crushing, humbling.
I hurried toward the pyramid. The dust cracked
under my feet with that weird squeak of molecules that have never—not
by wind, not by water, not by weather—been rubbed together. The squeak came up through my bones as sound.
I had forgotten it.
I saw Yoshi and the sadies, awake now,
watching from the dome. I waved as I ran. I could feel the vacuum
slicing my fingertips, like steel knives.
I put my hand against the side of the pyramid,
covering the print, and something
happened. I wasn’t sure what. It opened, I went in; it was dark, I was
alone.
I was inside. I didn’t know, still don’t
know, how I got there. Before I knew what I was doing, I was taking off
my helmet.
The air smelled like lemons. It was cold, but
not Moon cold. The pyramid was larger inside, just as Bee had said,
tapering up to a cone of darkness in the center.
And there was a light. Also in the center. It
had a kind of substance light doesn’t always, doesn’t often, doesn’t
ever, have. It was beckoning; I approached. It all seemed natural, as
if everything I was doing was what I had always wanted to do. It felt
good; very good. It felt great. The light grew brighter and I fell to
my knees, but it was more like rising, really. I couldn’t stand but I
didn’t want to stand. I felt a hand on my head: I knew it was a hand,
and I knew what hand it was! I had a million questions, I knew, but I
couldn’t think, even when I tried. I was so very glad to be here, back
here, where I belonged. Where I was glad to be.
I felt a hand in mine. Bee. He was pulling me
backward, away from the light, into the cold and the darkness. We were
putting on our helmets, Bee and I. We were stepping together across the
squeaky surface of the moon, toward the lighted dome, which looked like
a zoo, full of puzzled friendly faces, pressed against the glass.
“Are you okay?” Yoshi asked.
I saw my breasts floating in front of me and
realized I was in the hot tub. I laughed. Bee laughed with me. I knew
that the grin on his face was a reflection of my own. We were in the
water and someone was handing me a cup of coffee. Joe, they used to
call it. A cup of joe. “I’m okay,” I said. “I went in to get you, Bee.”
“I know, but you shouldn’t have. You should
have awakened the others.”
I understood. It was a break in the protocol.
“We know them and they know us,” I said. It was like remembering
something; it was easy, and yet impossible if you couldn’t do it. “They
are glad to see us.”
“Not exactly,” said Bee. “There’s a
melancholy, too.”
“Something very sad,” said Vishnu. She was
wearing her nightgown and her tiny feet were in the water next to my
shoulder.
She was right. There had been a reproach, a
disappointment. “I can feel it, too,” said Chang.
“Feel what?” asked Yoshi, tapping me on the
head with a long finger, like a teacher admonishing a bad student.
“Tell me what happened. Now.”
“There are just these feelings,” I said. “Then
afterward, they sort of turn into, not ideas exactly, sort of like
memories. Is that what you want to know?”
“I want to know what’s fucking happening. And
I want you to tell me.”
“Don’t be hard on her,” said Bee. “We’re all
just figuring it out.”
“Figuring what out?!”
“What they want,” said Chang. “They love us,
they wanted to find us. They found us.”
“And we love them!” I said. “That’s why we
can’t see them.”
“That’s right!” said Bee, looking at me as if
I were a genius. “We love them so much that all we can see is the light
of our love.”
“I hope this is all going in your fucking
report,” said Yoshi, sounding disgusted.
“They found us again,” said Chang. “That’s why
we are so happy.”
“But something is wrong,” said Bee. “We have
to go back in. Once more.”
“And do I get to go?” I could still feel the
hand on my head. I wanted to feel it there again, more than anything.
“We’ll all go this time,” Bee said.
But we didn’t all go. Yoshi had no desire to
go; plus, she explained, she felt that somebody had to stay behind and
stay on top of systems.
“Designated driver,” said Bee, laughing as we
sprayed each other. He and I were the only ones in peels. Chang and
Vishnu wore suits. I felt I was one of the sadies now, and they treated
me as such. Even Chang. We crossed the squeaky dust and held hands by
the pyramid. Looking back I saw Yoshi in the dome, looking a little bit
abandoned.
Bee hit the print and there we were, inside. I
unstuck my helmet and looked for the light. I fell to my knees. “Oh
boy,” I said when I felt the hand on my head.
Something was wrong. Everything was okay but
something was wrong. After a few moments of confusion, we were pushed
out the door, holding hands, into the cold. I couldn’t remember putting
my helmet on, but I was breathing as we hurried toward the lights of
the dome.
We were shaking. I was shaking all over. I sat
in the hot tub and watched my suit dissolve, like dry ice, leaving no
trace.
“Hey, don’t cry,” said Bee. “I know we’re all
upset.”
“It’s okay to cry,” said Vishnu.
I was crying.
“What happened?” asked Yoshi. “God damn it,
tell me.”
“They’re leaving,” said Bee.
“They don’t want us,” I said. “They don’t
want us any more.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“We should all just be still for a while,”
said Bee. “Come and get in the water, Chang. Vishnu. Claire.”
Claire. My parents gave me that name. I hadn’t
thought about them in a long time. I started to cry again, really hard
this time.
By noon we were warmed and fed—and dejected.
“It’s over,” Bee said finally.
“They’re leaving,” Chang said. I knew it too.
We all knew the same things. The feelings turned into ideas, gradually,
like the graphics in a slow web connection. Sooner or later we all had
the same pictures in our minds.
“They’re disappointed in us,” I said.
“I want them to stay,” said Vishnu.
“Of course, we want to be with them,” said
Bee. “But we can’t make them want to be with us.”
“What in the hell are you all talking about?”
asked Yoshi.
“They’re leaving,” I said. I pointed outside.
The yellow print was gone, and the pyramid looked black and forbidding.
Closed.
“Explain, damn it.”
“The thing is, we knew them long ago,” said
Bee. As I listened, my emotions were spinning, like dust in sunlight,
settling as he spoke onto the table of my mind, in which his voice,
like a fingertip, traced his words: “This is not first contact, it is
second contact.”
And what he was saying, we all knew.
“They were our gods,” said Chang.
“Not exactly,” said Vishnu. “We were their
companion species, their helper. We lived only to please them. We
looked up to them.”
“Their favorite,” I said. “Their pet.”
“And they loved us,” said Chang. “And they
love us still.”
“But they wanted more,” said Bee. “They set us
free so we could develop without them. They put us down on Earth, where
we could escape the worship of them that makes our knees go weak and
our minds go blank. They wanted a true companion. They thought if they
left us alone we would develop into a sentient race on our own.”
“And we did,” I said, surprised at how much I
knew; at the depth of the ideas and images that had been implanted in
me. “The light was a test, to see if we had developed enough to leave
the Earth and come to them.”
“They knew better than to appear among us,”
said Chang. “Can you imagine the chaos?”
“It might have been great,” said Vishnu.
“It was a test,” said Bee. “And we did it, we
passed. They were so pleased.”
“But then disappointed,” I said. “Because
nothing had really changed.”
“It might have been great,” said Vishnu,
again.
“We still can’t see them; our minds still go
blank in their presence. We fall to our knees and worship them, and
that’s all we can do, even now.”
“We can’t love them less,” said Chang
bitterly. “How can they expect us to love them less?”
“There’s a message for you,” said Yoshi.
“For me?” My mind wrenched itself back to the
real world. I stood up, dripping. Water drips in long sheets on the
Moon. I looked outside and saw that the pyramid was gone.
“How did you find me here?”
“Haven’t we been through that before?” It was
Willoughby, my next door neighbor, the retired FBI agent. “The light’s
gone out, what did you guys do?”
“Put Sam on,” I said.
“He won’t eat. How long before you get back?”
“A week, probably,” I said. “We will have to
write a report.” I heard a noise behind me; it was Chang in tears.
“Is something wrong?”
“No, we’re fine,” I said. It was over and I
was glad. “Put Sam on.”
“Hold on.”
Yoshi had joined them in the pool, standing
there in her orange coveralls, wet to the knees. They were hugging and
crying. I heard a sort of gruff whine.
“Sam, is that you?”
“Woof!”
“Sam, listen carefully. Can you hear me?”
I could imagine Sam looking around, sniffing,
trying to locate the face and hand and smell that went with the voice.
“I’ll be back soon,” I said. “Did you miss
me?”
“Woof.”
“I’m coming home, and I won’t leave you alone
again, I promise.”
A(lyx) M.
Dellamonica (http://www.sff.net/people/alyx) lives in Vancouver, B.C.
Her stories have appeared in Crank!, Realms of Fantasy, and a number of other venues, most recently the
Canadian SF anthology Tesseracts 8.
She writes book and software reviews for SF Weekly and Amazon.com.
“A Slow Day at the
Gallery” is from Asimov’s. It is a
perceptive and carefully controlled story of contemporary political
relevance. It is about the clash of cultures, an allegory of
imperialism and cultural appropriation, and about the possibility of
real and meaningful communication between radically unlike cultures,
between the human and the alien. But that’s all in addition to an
involving story in the tradition of James Tiptree, Jr., about an
idealist about to do something terrible.
The museum escort Christopher had
requested arrived just as he was winding up a self-guided tour of the
Earth exhibit. Staring at Monet’s Waterlily
Pond, he was lost in a passion more intense, he suspected,
than any he had expended during either of his two brief marriages.
The painting had been reframed, but was
otherwise unchanged since the last time he had seen it, fifty years
before. As he gazed at its placid flowers and vibrant willow leaves,
Christopher even began to imagine that the grooves time had left on
him—age, injuries, bitterness—were just as superficial.
Same man, different frame. He could do this.
Leaning heavily on his cane—museum air
exhausted him, even here—he tore his gaze away from the shimmering
canvas and faced the Tsebsra museum guide. It looked like a badly
executed balloon-animal: a tubular sac of tight, rubbery skin balanced
on lumpy legs. Stringy eyestalks dangled from the bulb at its top,
while the bottom of its body tapered into a long, rubbery tail
decorated with blue stripes. The markings meant it was young, probably
still ungendered. It wore a floor-length apron printed with its museum
ident and, at the moment, it was standing almost upright. The pose
could have been reminiscent of a praying mantis, if only the insect had
been bleach-white, headless, and lacking its four upper limbs.
As the guide approached, a faint chime sounded
in Christopher’s left ear. “Museum staff member, late adolescent, name
on ident equates to Vita,” said his protocol software in a smooth,
feminine voice. He had named the program Miss Manners—Em for short.
“Posture indicates polite, professional interest and includes
appropriate respect for an adult of your years. Vita is curious about
the camera you are carrying.”
Christopher smiled at the guide.
“Your expression has been interpreted by
Vita’s proto and it appears receptive to conversation.”
So. Converse. He opened his hand to fully
reveal the camera, which had captured a shot of the Monet on its tiny
screen. “Just didging some postcards for the grandkids.”
The alien speech was a series of
intestinal-sounding gurgles, almost like water boiling on a stove.
There was no variation that Christopher could hear, but the translation
came through Em immediately. “It looks different from the ones I’ve
seen before. Bigger.”
“It’s antique. Like me.”
“Would you like me to take a shot of you with
the painting?”
“Sure,” he said. At that, one of its feet
whipped up with alarming speed to snatch the device out of
Christopher’s hand; its tail slewed around to balance its body weight
and its spine bent into an S-curve. Thus contorted, it was able to drop
an eye-stalk directly on the scanner. Heart pounding, Christopher
grinned into the lens, resisting an urge to wipe the palms of his hands
on his hips. It snapped the picture quickly and returned the camera.
“It would be polite to look away now,” Em
said, so Christopher turned back to Monet. The guide sidled up close
and then shifted away. It had probably been advised to widen the space
between them to a more human-appropriate distance.
“Do you have many?”
“Many what?”
“Grandchildren, sir.”
“Three boys, four girls.”
“Ah. So they’re all grown?”
“No. Humans are gendered at birth.”
“Vita appears mortified,” reported Em. “You
should have corrected it more gently.”
“My apologies,” the alien said.
He shrugged—let its software interpret that.
He had first seen this painting eighty years
earlier, when he was in his teens. He had seen digital prints of it
when he was even younger, of course—Monet was inescapable. Even so,
Christopher had never understood the big fuss until he’d taken a school
trip to the National Gallery.
He had been fooling around with his friends,
ignoring the tour, aggravating his teachers and the guards before
finally ducking the group altogether. In search of a place to smoke, he
had rounded a corner and found the Monet. Recognition had stopped him,
nothing more—he paused, frowned, noticed that it was different from the
digitals he had seen. Prints couldn’t do justice to oil; couldn’t
communicate the singular way these paintings glowed. Monet’s luminous
sunlight on water had crept up on him like a pickpocket. He barely
noticed when it made away with his heart.
“This was painted around 1900 A.D. as you
reckon time, at a population cluster in Europe called Giverny. Monet
had a house there. He painted this garden many times….”
“France,” he growled.
“Pardon?”
“Giverny is in France.”
A pause. “Are you all right, sir? My proto
believes I have upset you.”
“Upset?” he managed. “Nah, just older’n hell.”
“It would be perfectly understandable if
receiving instruction in your home culture from an offworlder….”
What? Made me want to gut you?
“I just need to sit down,” he said, retreating
to the cushioned bench in the middle of the room. This gallery was
built to look like an authentic Earth museum—off-white plaster walls,
smooth hardwood floors, ceiling lights angled to spotlight each work.
Furniture, thank Christ, to ease the aching feet of contemplative
patrons. The paintings were displayed too close to each other, though,
crammed practically into a collage that extended from floor to ceiling.
There was a mishmash of periods and styles: Andy Warhol’s soup cans
cuddled next to an amateurish painting of a dog. This was, in turn,
located beneath Sir Stanley Spencer’s Saint
Francis and the Birds and above an Ansel Adams photograph of
an American mountain. Only the Monet had any space to itself, and that
was probably because there was extra security hidden in the wall on
which it was mounted.
“Grandkids made me promise to snap ’em the
damned painting,” he puffed.
A bubble of fluid jittered beneath Vita’s
skin, indicating—according to Em—surprise. “You didn’t come…it wasn’t
your wish to see it?”
Keep a lid on your emotions, old boy,
Christopher lectured himself. “Don’t go for the impressionist stuff,
and I saw it in London once anyway. I’m more of a sculpture man. I came
for the Tsebsra sculpture.”
“I see. Then…you don’t like it at all?” Vita’s
eyestalks quivered. “The way it glints? The shades of green…”
“It’s all right. You do like it, I take it?”
“I think it’s wonderfully natural,” Vita
gushed. “Tseb work is so formal and mannered. I visit it every day, as
soon as I come in. My parents brought me, the day it arrived.”
“When was that…ten years ago, surely?”
“As your time is reckoned. The Nandi sold it
to the museum after…” Vita shut up abruptly and Christopher didn’t need
Em for once to tell him the pause was an awkward one.
“Oh. The Lloyds of London thing?” He managed
to keep his tone off-hand. The National Gallery had lent a Nandieve
museum the Monet and a quartet of other paintings. The aliens had paid
a ludicrous sum for the loan. A sweetheart deal, or so it must have
seemed to the Gallery’s perpetually underfunded curators.
Unfortunately, failure to check the fine print
of cultural difference led to disaster in short order. To the Nandi,
the word “loan” implied an indefinite term of visitation. They refused
to return the paintings.
The Gallery spent fifteen years trying to get Waterlily Pond back. They were deep in
negotiations when some bright bulb in Gallery management decided to put
in an insurance claim, asking to be compensated for the value of the
time the painting had spent offworld. Reasonable enough, perhaps—but
when Lloyds cut the check to the museum, the Nandi claimed this made
the painting theirs. The next thing anyone knew, they had auctioned it
off to the Tsebsra.
Fumbling in his vest pocket, Christopher
produced a case of small gelatinous tablets, selecting a marked placebo
and pressing it under his tongue. He massaged his left armpit gently,
pretending to work out a pain that wasn’t there. “You only get two
heart transplants these days before they list you as inoperable,” he
commented to Vita, figuring that the bunching of its many eyes
indicated interest in his movements.
He’d guessed wrong. “Personal medical
information is not discussed openly here,” Em scolded, but before it
could tell him how to apologize, Vita piped up, forcing it to translate
instead.
“It’s okay. We’re not all as rigid as the
protos are programmed to say we are.” A previously invisible fissure
opened under the eyes, revealing an immense empty space bordered by
sharp black ridges. “I’m not offended.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I forget I’m not home. Get
to be my age, it’s more or less a license to be rude.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. No family is complete without a
cantankerous retired war—” His turn to stop short: he had almost said
veteran, and soldiers were never allowed here.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Vita is alarmed,” Em reported.
“Warhorse,” he said. “It’s a saying. It means
I’m old meat, child. Unfit for dogs.”
Its head expanded slightly and a grinding
sound issued from its throat. “Noise equates to a laugh, tone denotes
relief,” reported Em.
It and me both, Christopher thought. What was
wrong with him?
“I came to see the Spine,” he said finally,
getting to his feet. “Would you take me?”
“Are you feeling better?”
“Well enough.”
“This way, then.” Tail swirling, it crooked a
toe in the direction of the exit. Christopher got one last hurried
glance at the water lilies and then they were gone.
Outside the authentic human museum with its
authentic humidity-controlled air, he felt himself reviving. They
passed into an ornately carved walkway, lined with windows and meant to
communicate with the sensitive feet of the Tsebs, a lumpy obstacle
course of knobs and gaps. Christopher’s ankles ached as he struggled to
traverse it without falling. Just another hurdle, he told himself, like
ducking the police or smuggling his false ident out of humanspace. He’d
been retired for twenty-four years when the boys approached him for
this job. Until a minute ago, he would have sworn he remembered his
business.
His cane twisted unexpectedly at the apex of
the arch, causing him to wobble. He had braced it in what looked like a
knothole, but the knot was mobile, rotating against the force of his
weight. Vita caught his elbow with one foot, swung its tail around an
upward-thrusting piece of walkway, and heaved in counter-balance. Its
grip was weak, and Christopher could feel that the Tseb’s strength
would never hold his full weight.
Between them, though, they managed to keep him
upright. Vita moved his cane to more solid ground. Christopher offered
solemn, mumbled thanks. After that, the alien stood closer to him.
Coming off the bridge, Em instructed him to
keep his eyes right, toward the ocean. Christopher looked left instead,
to a massive hill that rose like a bell-curve from the beach.
“That is one of our burial mounds,” Vita said.
“Look away.”
“I thought you were a bohemian, Vita. Hard to
offend?”
“Vita’s expression has turned playful. It is
receptive to this conversation,” Em said. “However, the topic chosen is
highly improper.”
“You want to know about the mound?”
“Why not? I didn’t come five thousand
lightyears for Andy Warhol or the damned cuisine.”
“There isn’t much to tell. When we feel that
our spirit is about to break with the physical plane…”
“Is that supposed to mean when you die?”
Its head contracted, the skin wrinkling
momentarily before expansion somewhere else in its body took up the
slack. “Die, yes. When we are dying, we go to a mound and climb as high
as we can before weakness overcomes us. It is a last chance to measure
the worth of our lives.”
“What if you’re too sick to get there?”
“Someone takes you to the base of the mound.
If you are very respected, they may even carry you up.”
“But not always?”
“Nobody can return from a dying place.”
“So you heft your troublesome old Uncle Pete
up the hill—”
A loud rush of Vita’s internal fluids startled
him so badly he stopped speaking.
“Sound equates to a giggle,” Em said.
“Carry someone up, watch them die…and then you
stay until you starve?”
“Yes.” Vita paused; Em reported it was afraid
of being overheard. “In that case, the measure of worth is not by how
high you climb, but by how long you survive.”
“I suppose that makes as much sense as
anything.”
Light steps behind them made them turn
simultaneously, continuing along the lumpy walkway like the
well-behaved pair they weren’t. He glanced Vita’s way and offered a
conspiratorial wink just as a trio of eye stalks swiveled his way in a
gesture that, according to Em, meant almost exactly the same thing.
He kept his voice lowered. “Say, what if
you’re too sick to be moved?”
“The effort is always made.”
“Even if it kills you?”
“Even then.”
“How come?”
“We are sun people, Christopher. It is
unconscionable to fail to die out of doors.”
They stepped out of the walkway and into a
darkened gallery. “So what if I was to seize up in here?”
Another alarming giggle. “You’re not a sun
person.”
“Good. I’d hate to—”
“Yes?”
“Do something unconscionable,” he finished
quietly. His eyes adjusted to the dimness and he saw he was in another
three-dimensional nightmare—a door of knobs, lumps and potholes. Little
orifices covered the outer wall, soft and penetrable, intended for Tseb
tails. The ceiling was low and the air smelled sickly sweet, laden with
alien pollens. Dark shaggy moss like the hide of a buffalo covered the
nooks and crannies. A few cameras were tucked here and there in the
corners, but overall security was lax. The Tsebs were a civilized
people, after all. They had nothing to fear from their own. As for the
few human terrorists who had made it through their security screens,
they had been ordered—just like Christopher—to destroy the Monet.
Vita was still savoring their rebellion
against decorum. “I promise you can die right here, Christopher, and
nobody will hold it against you.”
“Swear?”
Instructed by its proto, it awkwardly made a
heart-crossing gesture with one upraised foot. “I swear.”
“What if I was one of you?”
It was quiet for long enough that he wondered
if he had gone too far, but at last the translation came. “That
depends.”
“On what?”
“If it was instantaneous, unexpected,
painless—you would be forgiven,” it said. “If not…if you knew you were
dying, if you tried to get to the sun and failed, or you didn’t try…”
“Big time transgression, huh?”
Its gesture equated, Em said, to a vehement
nod. “Every-thing associated with your death would be shunned.”
“Your culture only takes forgiveness to a
point, then?”
“You have to draw the line somewhere.”
“Indeed,” he agreed. “Quite so.”
He let Vita slide back into the proper tour,
narrating the history of the Spine as they descended down through the
treacherous footing of the gallery. They passed shelves of fungus, tiny
statues etched from eggshells, ornately carved crystals and black
scrolled wands made of a substance called sea root. Everything was
three-dimensional, tactile. Feigning awe, Christopher touched things
that felt like peanut butter, dead flesh, adhesive tape, cold steel. He
snapped the occasional historical treasure with his too-bulky camera
and asked dozens of questions.
There wasn’t a flat surface anywhere. The Tseb
didn’t do two-dimensional depiction. Probably that was why human
painting fascinated them so.
Art you can’t touch. Daft primitives.
Down and around, hobbled by the lumpy floor,
he was genuinely winded by the time they arrived at the Spine.
It was a single glowing sculpture within a
massive subterranean chamber, a giant-sized, abstract depiction of the
Tsebsra body. Indentations in its belly suggested femininity without
insisting upon it; faded bands on its tail hinted at both maturity and
youth. It was delicately curved, less knobby than the grotesqueries
that had preceded it in the upper galleries.
A pair of Tsebs were lounging at its base,
running their feet over the structure, their sluglike pouches extended
to lick the surface. They tucked back in when Vita appeared with
Christopher, moving back through the exit without a backward glance.
They were alone.
Good. Fewer witnesses, less trouble. He
detached the bottom cartridge of his camera and surreptitiously affixed
it to the wall beside the door.
“Vita’s sound equates to a contented sigh,” Em
reported.
Christopher hadn’t heard anything.
Looking up to the bulging top of the statue,
he realized he was disappointed. This was the Tsebs’ Mona Lisa. He had hoped to understand its
beauty. He had come so far….
“Come on!” Vita gripped his arm, urging him
closer. They worked their way to the edge of the sculpture and the
alien’s tail stretched out to roam over it lovingly.
Christopher touched the cool surface. Visually
it was seamless, a single white structure made of unidentifiable
material. But under his fingers the texture and temperature varied:
parts of it were woody, others metallic, still others plastic. Towering
above them, the statue’s shadow was washed out by the steady golden
light emitted from six light globes which encircled it like a wide
halo.
This thing predates Columbus and Shakespeare,
Christopher thought. It has been sitting here since before my kind
invented the printing press.
Nothing. His old heart refused to be moved.
Vita hissed; Em chirped a translation. “When I
was new-hatched my parents brought me here. I climbed all the way to
the top. The holds look worn down from here at the bottom, but the
effect is intentional. You’d be surprised how firm they are! When you
are very young, Christopher, you can sit on the top, inflate your sacs,
and leap down.”
“That’s a long way to fall,” he said.
“Oh, it’s perfectly safe. Inside the coiled
tail is a soft moss, and as babies our bodies are very light. Craket
the Maker intended it this way. She felt it was important for the Spine
to speak to us differently at the various stages of our lives.”
He squinted at the bulb at the top of the
sculpture. “It’s a long way up. Weren’t you scared?”
“Terrified. I had to be coaxed down. My
parents were deeply shamed.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“I am the better for it. Many of my kind only
come to see the Spine once or twice. The embarrassment brought me back
again and again. It remade my soul.”
“I see,” Christopher said.
“Perhaps you should take a rest. I think it
would be comfortable if you wanted to sit here.”
He looked at it dubiously. It was about as
high and thick as a park bench, even reasonably, flat, but streaks of
dried saliva were flaking away where the other Tsebs had been licking
it.
Gentle white toes closed on his scarred elbow.
“Are you all right? I know I said it was
acceptable for you to die indoors but you would alert me if you were
unwell, wouldn’t you?”
“Old man’s prerogative,” he murmured. The grip
on his arm tightened and he leaned against it experimentally. Vita
gurgled.
“Sound denotes physical exertion,” Em said.
He let himself fall.
He landed atop the alien, tangling a leg and
an arm over its twisting body. One of the bumps in the floor caught him
in the kidney, a blinding, sudden pain that dulled his awareness of
Vita beneath him, bucking and squeaking. Liquids in its body compressed
under his weight and its thin skin stretched against him. The sounds it
made, according to Em, equated to surprise and minor pain.
“Christopher? Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” he grunted. “Sorry. I’ll get off you
in a sec—just need my pills. Are you hurt?”
“Just pressed,” it said. “Your body is so
warm! How do you stand it?”
“Cold blood,” he muttered. Then, opening the
packet of tablets, he bounced the golden globs down the length of the
white body.
“Bloody hell,” he said, maintaining the
façade for one more second. Then the tabs reacted to the room’s
ambient moisture. They popped, releasing a gelatinous payload that
bound the Tseb to the floor of the chamber.
A chatter like rocks grinding together from
the body beneath him.
“Vita is alarmed.”
He rolled off it, backed away. The jelly
splotches spread and welded it down—tail, toes, body. It tugged at one
with its foot and tore a hunk of skin away. Fluid the color of motor
oil flowed into the fuzz that covered the floor.
“Stay still,” he ordered. “You’ll injure
yourself.”
“Christopher?”
Retrieving his cane, he leaned hard against
the Spine and caught his breath. Vita was still wiggling on the floor.
“Don’t move,” he said again. The web packet
from his camera had already expanded to seal the room’s only entrance,
encasing it in a gelatinous webwork. It wouldn’t seal them in for long,
but he didn’t need long.
“What are you doing?”
“Causing a diplomatic incident,” he said,
unpacking the cane.
“What do you mean?”
“Some chaps I know wanted me to destroy the
Monet. You see, people back home have been sitting around with their
thumbs up their arses for rather a long time, as we reckon it, doing
squat about getting the painting back from you.”
The cane was filled with three different
harmless fluids, all under pressure. His pals had thought he would
spray it over the paintings in the Earth gallery. One two, game over.
Instead he unpacked its tripod and took careful aim at the top of the
Spine. He started the mechanism that would mix the chemicals into an
acid. A single green droplet hissed from the tip of the device.
“Squeal denotes pain,” Em said.
He looked at the child. Vita was struggling
against its bonds again, and a great hunk of its leg had been torn
open.
“Listen to me,” he told it. “Those capsules
were meant to hold a human. Your skin is obviously very delicate. You
must lie still…you’re going to be seriously injured if you don’t stop.”
Vita shuddered once. Little fissures bled at
the edges of the jellies that bound it to the floor.
“All right,” Vita said. After a moment, when
it had clearly stopped moving, Christopher returned to his destruction
of the statue. The cane beeped, indicating that the acid’s mix cycle
was complete. He took careful aim at the top of the Spine.
Strong toes gripped his knee then, hurling him
backward, off-balance. He fell, tangled in the grip of Vita’s bleeding
leg. The cane, still in his hand, rained droplets of acid over them
both. He closed his eyes, covered his face. His jacket caught most of
it, although he could smell his hair burning.
“Don’t do this, Christopher,” Vita pleaded.
“It’s too late.” He struggled to free himself
without tearing Vita’s skin further, wincing as its body gurgled
beneath him. The acid was blistering long sticky lines near its eyes,
the flesh running like melted cheese. Finally he rolled off of it,
propped himself up on his elbows. Taking aim from down on the floor, he
began to spray. He laid the acid on the Spine in a straight, consistent
layer, just like paint.
Vita yanked his leg and hissed; Em translated.
“Stop!”
He struggled to breathe. “The general idea was
that by destroying the Monet, you see, we would punish both your museum
and the people in my government who let it go. The boys had whipped up
these clever gadgets they thought I could slip into this place. They
wanted an old man, preferably one who had one toe in the crematorium
anyway. But the Earth exhibit is too well protected.” Acrid smoke
burned at his eyes, the first chemical reaction of acid burning the
statue. “Besides, that painting means more to me than my own mother.
You might say it remade my soul.”
“You haven’t got one,” Vita whispered.
“I was going to tell them to stuff their job.
But someone else would have gone, don’t you see? And what if I was
wrong? What if they did destroy it? It would have been a pointless
sacrifice. Cutting off our nose, as they say. I even considered warning
the authorities, just to save the painting.”
“Sound equates to a contemptuous snort,” Em
said.
“But then I thought—if we’re going to take all
these lovely toys halfway across the galaxy, why not put them to real
use? Punish the guilty, I reckoned, instead of the innocent.”
Drops of water dribbled down from the ceiling,
an immense and sudden profusion of moisture. Striking the acid, it
sizzled and steamed. Christopher saw that the Spine was discolored, but
not destroyed. The damage was probably reparable, and the acid was
being dispersed by the fire system. He was failing.
There was nothing more he could do; he was out
of weapons. The boys had tried to build a bomb into a hearing aid or a
proto, and all they’d done was blow the tester right into a coma.
He’d come all this way, and at best he would
have scared them.
“Vita requires immediate medical attention.”
Em gave the words a plaintive tone.
“All right, all right.”
The grip on his knee had loosened, and he
managed to stand upright again. The cane’s payload was half used, and
so he spent the rest of the cartridge spreading acid on the door seal.
Security must be outside by now, trying to cut their way in…there was
no reason not to help them now.
“Bring a doctor,” he shouted.
He spared a last glance for the intact Spine
and then, finally, forced himself to look down. The knobby floor around
Vita’s body was filled with golden blood and water, and its struggles
were weakening. It had torn itself apart trying to stop him.
And the funny thing was he’d never been the
sort who could bear to see someone who was hurt—even scratched—but he
could look right at Vita. It was like seeing a movie monster, a
stop-motion death-scene. Before he retired, he had bombed a shuttle
full of Tsebs over Earth’s lost paintings. He had lain awake nights,
imagining they died like humans. Now…
“They’re coming,” he said. “Hang on.”
“Sound denotes great pain.”
Take its mind off it, he thought. “I had a
part-time job when I was a kid,” he said. “Guided museum tours in my
home town. I worked slow days only at first—they wouldn’t trust me with
whole groups, just the random wandering tourist. I’m tempted to think
that’s what your job here is like, Vita—that we have that much, at
least, in common.”
“We have nothing in common,” Em translated.
“I’m not like you.”
“I wanted to stay on with that museum, but
nobody at home wanted to look at paintings anymore. It’s all digital
home galleries and knobby bric-a-brac. There was no job for me.” He
knelt, lifted a flap of Tseb skin and tried to press it back against
the wound. Frothy orange foam was seeping from its throat.
“Why are you telling me this?” Vita asked,
twitching away from the hand he’d clapped over its injury.
“Distraction,” he said.
“From what? Your desecration?”
He glanced at the Spine again, mottled with
faint black streaks where the various materials merged. “It didn’t
work.”
It laughed bitterly. “You’re saying that
because you think I’m dying.”
“No,” Christopher said. He didn’t insult it by
apologizing. “You’ll be fine. I’m trying to take your mind off the
discomfort.”
“Do you mean pain?” If its body language
showed a reaction, Em didn’t catch it.
“Sorry.”
“Chattering at me like a scatbug doesn’t
help.”
“They’ll be through the door in a minute. I
didn’t know your skin was so delicate, Vita—”
“Shut up.” With that, the alien wound its toes
along a hold in the floor and tried to pull itself to the blockaded
exit. Pieces of its innards unraveled, stringing along the lumpy floor.
Its tail tore loose, lashing the Spine with fading vigor.
It was within a yard of the exit when he
finally heard Security breaking through the acid-weakened blockade with
a cutting tool. Their faces filled a small gap in the webbing, and then
they desperately tore at the rest of it, trying to open the gateway for
Vita. One of them extended its tail through the hole, dangling it like
a rescue rope.
They weren’t fast enough. The injured guide
had stopped moving. Air blatted, escaping the tears in the rubbery
white skin as if it were a deflating life raft. Vita’s body shrank, and
then went still.
After a moment, the guard’s tail retracted to
the other side of the door. Tseb eyestalks crowded the opening. Four or
five of them stared at Christopher through the shredded jelly of the
once-blocked entrance.
“It was only meant to immobilize,” he said.
There was no response. He threw away the cane
and put his hands up. Didn’t they have protos?
“I’m unarmed now,” he said.
No reaction. They actually backed up the
corridor, away from him and out of sight.
“Aren’t you going to arrest me?” He rubbed his
face, was surprised to find it wet.
Silence. He looked at the knobby, impassable
floor. His cane, disassembled and empty, would never hold his weight
again. “Hey. You cops. Going to cart me off or not?”
A chime, suddenly, from Em. “You are located
in a dying place. Please leave the chamber and surrender yourself to
the authorities.”
“What the hell?” He opened his mouth to shout
again and then realization hit. They wouldn’t come in. Their art
treasure was sealed away, ostracized by rigid beliefs and the blood of
a child. They were going to leave Vita’s body here to rot with its
beloved Spine.
And who was he to be offended by that?
When another minute passed and they still
didn’t come after him, Christopher heaved his body over the base of the
Spine so he was inside the curve of its tail. He lay inside, head and
legs raised by its height, and found that it fit him just right. The
mossy floor was blessedly comfortable, just as the tour had advertised.
“Something soft to land on,” he murmured,
settling in. His leg was aching from the pratfall he’d taken onto the
lumpy floor and both feet were throbbing. He kicked off his shoes,
waggled his toes in the warm, moist air.
One last lump pressed into his hip—the camera.
He took it out, set it to slideshow, and projected images onto the
curvy white interior of the Spine. Warhol. Spencer. Malta. A fake
Picasso. A Bill Reid sketch. The Monet. Himself, posing for fake
grandkids. Vita. The Mound. Vita again.
“Expression equates to a friendly smile,” Em
said.
Christopher tore the proto speaker out of his
ear and flipped back to the paintings.
After a couple of hours, he started to get
hungry.
Paul Di Filippo
lives in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the most active literary
denizen of Providence in the genre since H.P. Lovecraft, a reviewer,
correspondent, and prolific writer of fiction. If there’s a literary
movement or school, he’s part of it, or tries it on for size, or joins
it. He has been publishing fantasy and SF since 1985, and widely in the
last decade. His books include Ciphers (1990),
The Steampunk Trilogy (1995),
Ribofunk (1996), Fractal Paisleys (1997), Lost Pages (1998),
Joe’s Liver (2000), and Strange
Trades (2001). His books out in 2002 include
Babylon Sisters and the short story collection
Little Doors.
“Ailoura,” an SF
story based on “Puss in Boots,” appeared in Out of this
World, an anthology of SF using fairy tales as
templates, edited by Wil McCarthy, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Jon
Helfers. It was one of the better SF anthologies of the year. The theme
of the anthology plays to Di Filippo’s postmodern strengths. Despite
the hyperbolic style, the family intrigue to murder dad during his
high-tech rejuvenation treatment and deprive the virtuous younger son
of his inheritance has a ring of odd plausibility. It is an interesting
story in which the SF and fairy-tale elements blend nicely.
The small aircraft swiftly bisected the
cloudless chartreuse sky. Invisible encrypted transmissions raced ahead
of it. Clearance returned immediately from the distant, turreted
manse—Stoessl House—looming in the otherwise empty riven landscape like
some precipice-perching raptor. The ever-unsleeping family marchwarden
obligingly shut down the manse’s defenses, allowing an approach and
landing. Within minutes, Geisen Stoessl had docked his small deltoid
zipflyte on one of the tenth-floor platforms of Stoessl House,
cantilevered over the flood-sculpted, candy-colored arroyos of the
Subliminal Desert.
Geisen unseamed the canopy and leaped easily
out onto the broad sintered terrace, unpeopled at this tragic,
necessary, hopeful moment. Still clad in his dusty expeditionary
clothes, goggles slung around his neck, Geisen resembled a living
marble version of some young roughneck godling. Slim, wiry, and alert,
with his laughter-creased, soil-powdered face now set in solemn lines
absurdly counterpointed by a mask of clean skin around his recently
shielded green eyes, Geisen paused a moment to brush from his
protective suit the heaviest evidence of his recent wildcat digging in
the Lustrous Wastes. Satisfied that he had made some small improvement
in his appearance upon this weighty occasion, he advanced toward the
portal leading inside. But before he could actuate the door, it opened
from within.
Framed in the door stood a lanky, robe-draped
bestient: Vicuna, his mother’s most valued servant. Set squarely in
Vicuna’s wedge-shaped hirsute face, the haughty maid’s broad velveteen
nose wrinkled imperiously in disgust at Geisen’s appearance, but the
moreauvian refrained from voicing her disapproval of that matter in
favor of other upbraidings.
“You arrive barely in time, Gep Stoessl. Your
father approaches the limits of artificial maintenance, and is due to
be reborn any minute. Your mother and brothers already anxiously occupy
the Natal Chambers.”
Following the inhumanly articulated servant
into Stoessl House, Geisen answered, “I’m aware of all that, Vicuna.
But traveling halfway around Chalk can’t be accomplished in an
instant.”
“It was your choice to absent yourself during
this crucial time.”
“Why crucial? This will be Vomacht’s third
reincarnation. Presumably this one will go as smoothly as the first
two.”
“So one would hope.”
Geisen tried to puzzle out the subtext of
Vicuna’s ambiguous comment, but could emerge with no clue regarding the
current state of the generally complicated affairs within Stoessl
House. He had obviously been away too long—too busy enjoying his own
lonely but satisfying prospecting trips on behalf of the family
enterprise—to be able to grasp the daily political machinations of his
relatives.
Vicuna conducted Geisen to the nearest
squeezer, and they promptly dropped down fifteen stories, far below the
bedrock in which Stoessl House was rooted. On this secure level, the
monitoring marchwarden hunkered down in its cozy low-Kelvin isolation,
meaningful matrices of B-E condensates. Here also were the family’s
Natal Chambers. At these doors blazoned with sacred icons Vicuna left
Geisen with a humid snort signifying that her distasteful attendance on
the latecomer was complete.
Taking a fortifying breath, Geisen entered the
rooms.
Roseate illumination symbolic of new creation
softened all within: the complicated apparatus of rebirth as well as
the sharp features of his mother, Woda, and the doughy countenances of
his two brothers, Gitten and Grafton. Nearly invisible in the
background, various bestient bodyguards hulked, inconspicious yet
vigilant.
Woda spoke first. “Well, how very generous of
the prodigal to honor us with his unfortunately mandated presence.”
Gitten snickered, and Grafton chimed in,
pompously ironical. “Exquisitely gracious behavior, and so very typical
of our little sibling, I’m sure.”
Tethered to various life-support devices,
Vomacht Stoessl—unconscious, naked and recumbent on a padded pallet
alongside his mindless new body—said nothing. Both he and his clone had
their heads wrapped in organic warty sheets of modified Stroonian brain
parasite, an organism long ago co-opted for mankind’s ambitious and
ceaselessly searching program of life extension. Linked via a thick
living interparasitical tendril to its younger doppelganger, the
withered form of the current Vomacht, having reached the limits of
rejuvenation, contrasted strongly with the virginal, soulless vessel.
During Vomacht Stoessl’s first lifetime, from
239 to 357 PS, he had sired no children. His second span of existence
(357 to 495 PS) saw the birth of Gitten and Grafton, separated by some
sixty years and both sired on Woda. Toward the end of his third,
current lifetime (495 to 675 PS), a mere thirty years ago, he had
fathered Geisen upon a mystery woman whom Geisen had never known.
Vanished and unwedded, his mother—or some other oversolicitous
guardian—had denied Geisen her name or image. Still, Vomacht had
generously attended to all the legalities granting Geisen full parity
with his half brothers. Needless to say, little cordiality existed
between the older members of the family and the young interloper.
Geisen made the proper obeisances at several
altars before responding to the taunts of his stepmother and
step-brothers. “I did not dictate the terms governing Gep Stoessl’s
latest reincarnation. They came directly from him. If any of you
objected, you should have made your grievances known to him
face-to-face. I myself am honored that he chose me to initiate the
transference of his mind and soul. I regret only that I was not able to
attend him during his final moments of awareness in this old body.”
Gitten, the middle brother, tittered, and
said, “The hand that cradles the rocks will now rock the cradle.”
Geisen looked down at his dirty hands,
hopelessly ingrained with the soils and stone dusts of Chalk. He
resisted an impulse to hide them in his pockets. “There is nothing
shameful about my fondness for fieldwork. Lolling about in luxury does
not suit me. And I did not hear any of you complaining when the Eventyr
Lode that I discovered came online and began to swell the family
coffers.”
Woda intervened with her traditional maternal
acerbity. “Enough bickering. Let us acknowledge that no possible
arrangement of this day’s events would have pleased everyone. The
quicker we perform this vital ritual, the quicker we can all return to
our duties and pleasures, and the sooner Vomacht’s firm hand will
regrasp the controls of our business. Geisen, I believe you know what
to do.”
“I studied the proper Books
of Phowa en route.”
Grafton said, “Always the grind. Whenever do
you enjoy yourself, little brother?”
Geisen advanced confidently to the mechanisms
that reared at the head of the pallets. “In the proper time and place,
Grafton. But I realize that to you, such words imply every minute of
your life.” The young man turned his attention to the controls before
him, forestalling further tart banter.
The tethered and trained Stroonian life-forms
had been previously starved to near hibernation in preparation for
their sacred duty. A clear cylinder of pink nutrient fluid laced with
instructive protein sequences hung from an ornate tripod. The fluid
would flow through twin IV lines, once the parasites were hooked up,
enlivening their quiescent metabolisms and directing their proper
functioning.
Murmuring the requisite holy phrases, Geisen
plugged an IV line into each enshrouding creature. He tapped the proper
dosage rate into the separate flow-pumps.
Then, solemnly capturing the eyes of the onlookers, he activated the
pumps.
Almost immediately the parasites began to flex
and labor, humping and contorting as they drove an infinity of
fractally minuscule auto-anesthetizing tendrils into both full and
vacant brains in preparation for the transfer of the vital engrams that
comprised a human soul.
But within minutes, it was plain to the
observers that something was very wrong. The original Vomacht Stoessl
began to writhe in evident pain, ripping away from his life supports.
The all-observant marchwarden triggered
alarms. Human and bestient technicians burst into the room. Grafton and
Gitten and Woda rushed to the pumps to stop the process. But they were
too late. In an instant, both membrane-wrapped skulls collapsed to
degenerate chunky slush that plopped to the floor from beneath the
suddenly destructive cauls.
The room fell silent. Grafton tilted one of
the pumps at an angle so that all the witnesses could see the glowing
red numerals.
“He quadrupled the proper volume of nutrient,
driving the Stroonians hyperactive. This is murder!”
“Secure him from any escape!” Woda commanded.
Instantly Geisen’s arms were pinioned by two
burly bestient guards. He opened his mouth to protest, but the sight of
his headless father choked off all words.
Gep Vomacht Stoessl’s large private study
was decorated with ancient relics of his birthworld, Lucerno: the
empty, age-brittle coral armature of a deceased personal exoskeleton; a
row of printed books bound in sloth-hide; a corroded aurochs-flaying
knife large as a canoe paddle. In the wake of their owner’s death, the
talismans seemed drained of mana.
Geisen sighed, and slumped down hopelessly in
the comfortable chair positioned on the far side of the antique desk
that had originated on the Crafters’ planet, Hulbrouck V. On the far
side of the nacreous expanse sat his complacently smirking half
brother, Grafton. Just days ago, Geisen knew, his father had hauled
himself out of his sickbed for one last appearance at this favorite
desk, where he had dictated the terms of his third reincarnation to the
recording marchwarden. Geisen had played the affecting scene several
times en route from the Lustrous Wastes, noting how, despite his
enervated condition, his father spoke with his wonted authority,
specifically requesting that Geisen administer the paternal rebirthing
procedure.
And now that unique individual—distant and
enigmatic as he had been to Geisen throughout the latter’s relatively
short life—the man who had founded Stoessl House and its fortunes, the
man to whom they all owed their luxurious independent lifestyles, was
irretrievably gone from this plane of existence.
The human soul could exist only in organic
substrates. Intelligent as they might be, condensate-dwelling entities
such as the marchwarden exhibited a lesser existential complexity.
Impossible to make any kind of static “backup” copy of the human
essence, even in the proverbial bottled brain, since Stroonian
transcription was fatal to the original. No, if destructive failure
occurred during a rebirth, that individual was no more forever.
Grafton interpreted Geisen’s sigh as
indicative of a need to unburden himself of some secret. “Speak freely,
little brother. Ease your soul of guilt. We are completely alone. Not
even the marchwarden is listening.”
Geisen sat up alertly. “How have you
accomplished such a thing? The marchwarden is deemed to be
incorruptible, and its duties include constant surveillance of the
interior of our home.”
Somewhat flustered, Grafton tried to
dissemble. “Oh, no, you’re quite mistaken. It was always possible to
disable the marchwarden selectively. A standard menu option—”
Geisen leaped to his feet, causing Grafton to
rear back. “I see it all now! This whole murder, and my seeming
complicity, was planned from the start! My father’s last
testament—faked! The flow codes to the pumps—overriden! My role—stooge
and dupe!”
Recovering himself, Grafton managed with
soothing motions and noises to induce a fuming Geisen to be seated
again. The older man came around to perch on a corner of the desk. He
leaned over closer to Geisen and, in a smooth voice, made his own
shockingly unrepentant confession.
“Very astute. Too bad for you that you did not
see the trap early enough to avoid it. Yes, Vomacht’s permanent death
and your hand in it were all neatly arranged—by mother, Gitten, and
myself. It had to be. You see, Vomacht had become irrationally surly
and obnoxious toward us, his true and loving first family. He
threatened to remove all our stipends and entitlements and authority,
once he occupied his strong new body. But those demented codicils were
edited from the version of his speech that you saw, as was his insane
proclamation naming you sole factotum of the family business. All of
Stoessl Strangelet Mining and its affiliates was to be made your
fiefdom. Imagine! A young desert rat at the helm of our venerable
corporation!”
Geisen strove to digest all this sudden
information. Practical considerations warred with his emotions. Finally
he could only ask, “What of Vomacht’s desire for me to initiate his
soul-transfer?”
“Ah, that was authentic. And it served as the
perfect bait to draw you back, as well as the peg on which we could
hang a murder plot and charge.”
Geisen drew himself up proudly. “You realize
that these accusations of deliberate homicide against me will not stand
up a minute in court. With what you’ve told me, I’ll certainly be able
to dig up plenty of evidence to the contrary.”
Smiling like a carrion lizard from the Cerise
Ergstrand, Grafton countered, “Oh, will you, now? From your jail cell,
without any outside help? Accused murderers cannot profit from the
results of their actions. You will have no access to family funds other
than your small personal accounts while incarcerated, nor any real
partisans, due to your stubbornly asocial existence of many years. The
might of the family, including testimony from the grieving widow, will
be ranked against you. How do you rate your chances for exculpation
under those circumstances?”
Reduced to grim silence, Geisen bunched his
muscles prior to launching himself in a futile attack on his brother.
But Grafton held up a warning hand first.
“There is an agreeable alternative. We really
do not care to bring this matter to court. There is, after all, still a
chance of one percent or less that you might win the case. And legal
matters are so tedious and time-consuming, interfering with more
pleasurable pursuits. In fact, notice of Gep Stoessl’s death has not
yet been released to either the news media or to Chalk’s authorities.
And if we secure your cooperation, the aftermath of this tragic
‘accident’ will take a very different form than criminal charges. Upon
getting your binding assent to a certain trivial document, you will be
free to pursue your own life unencumbered by any obligations to Stoessl
House or its residents.”
Grafton handed his brother hard copy of
several pages. Geisen perused it swiftly and intently, then looked up
at Grafton with high astonishment.
“This document strips me of all my share of
the family fortunes, and binds me from any future role in the estate.
Basically, I am utterly disenfranchised and disinherited, cast out
penniless.”
“A fair enough summation. Oh, we might give
you a small grubstake when you leave. Say—your zipflyte, a few hundred
esscues, and a bestient servant or two. Just enough to pursue the kind
of itinerant lifestyle you so evidently prefer.”
Geisen pondered but a moment. “All attempts to
brand me a patricide will be dropped?”
Grafton shrugged. “What would be the point of
whipping a helpless, poverty-stricken nonentity?”
Geisen stood up. “Reactivate the marchwarden.
I am ready to comply with your terms.”
Gep Bloedwyn Vermeule, of Vermeule House,
today wore her long blond braids arranged in a complicated nest, piled
high atop her charming young head and sown with delicate fairylights
that blinked in time with various of her body rhythms. Entering the
formal reception hall of Stoessl House, she marched confidently down
the tiles between ranks of silent bestient guards, the long train
dependent from her formfitting scarlet sandworm-fabric gown held an
inch above the floor by tiny enwoven agravitic units. She came to a
stop some meters away from the man who awaited her with a nervously
expectant smile on his rugged face.
Geisen’s voice quaked at first, despite his
best resolve. “Bloedwyn, my sweetling, you look more alluring than an
oasis to a parched man.”
The pinlights in the girl’s hair raced in
chaotic patterns for a moment, then settled down to a stable
configurations that somehow radiated a frostiness belied by her neutral
facial expression. Her voice, chorded suggestively low and husky by
fashionable implants, quavered not at all.
“Gep Stoessl, I hardly know how to approach
you. So much has changed since we last trysted.”
Throwing decorum to the wind, Geisen closed
the gap between them and swept his betrothed up in his arms. The
sensation Geisen enjoyed was rather like that derived from hugging a
wooden effigy. Nonetheless, he persisted in his attempts to restore
their old relations.
“Only superficial matters have changed, my
dear! True, as you have no doubt heard by now, I am no longer a scion
of Stoessl House. But my heart, mind, and soul remain devoted to you!
Can I not assume the same constancy applies to your inner being?”
Bloedwyn slipped out of Geisen’s embrace. “How
could you assume anything, since I myself do not know how I feel? All
these developments have been so sudden and mysterious! Your father’s
cruelly permanent death, your own capricious and senseless abandonment
of your share of his estate—How can I make sense of any of it? What of
all our wonderful dreams?”
Geisen gripped Bloedwyn’s supple hide-mailed
upper arms with perhaps too much fervor, judging from her wince. He
released her, then spoke. “All our bright plans for the future will
come to pass! Just give me some time to regain my footing in the world.
One day I will be at liberty to explain everything to you. But, until
then, I ask your trust and faith. Surely you must share my confidence
in my character, in my undiminished capabilities?”
Bloedwyn averted her tranquil blue-eyed gaze
from Geisen’s imploring green eyes, and he slumped in despair, knowing
himself lost. She stepped back a few paces and, with voice steeled,
made a formal declaration she had evidently rehearsed prior to this
moment.
“The Vermeule marchwarden has already
communicated the abrogation of our pending matrimonial agreement to
your house’s governor. I think such an impartial yet decisive move is
all for the best, Geisen. We are both young, with many lives before us.
It would be senseless to found such a potentially interminable
relationship on such shaky footing. Let us both go
ahead—separately—into the days to come, with our extinct love a fond
memory.”
Again, as at the moment of his father’s death,
Geisen found himself rendered speechless at a crucial juncture, unable
to plead his case any further. He watched in stunned disbelief as
Bloedwyn turned gracefully around and walked out of his life, her
fluttering scaly train still visible for some seconds after the rest of
her had vanished.
The cluttered, steamy, noisy kitchens of
Stoessl House exhibited an orderly chaos proportionate to the magnitude
of the preparations under way. The planned rebirth dinner for the
paterfamilias had been hastily converted to a memorial banquet, once
the proper, little-used protocols had been found in a metaphorically
dusty lobe of the marchwarden’s memory. Now scores of miscegenational
bestients under the supervision of the lone human chef, Stine Pursiful,
scraped, sliced, chopped, diced, cored, deveined, scrubbed, layered,
basted, glazed, microwaved, and pressure-treated various foodstuffs,
assembling the imported luxury ingredients into the elaborate fare that
would furnish out the solemn buffet for family and friends and business
connections of the deceased.
Geisen entered the aromatic atmosphere of the
kitchens with a scowl on his face and a bitterness in his throat and
heart. Pursiful spotted the young man and, with a fair share of
courtesy and deference, considering the circumstances, stepped forward
to inquire of his needs. But Geisen rudely brushed the slim punctilious
chef aside, and stalked toward the shelves that held various MREs. With
blunt motions, he began to shovel the nutri-packets into a dusty
shoulder bag that had plainly seen many an expedition into Chalk’s
treasure-filled deserts.
A small timid bestient belonging to one of the
muskrat-hyrax clades hopped over to the shelves where Geisen fiercely
rummaged. Nearsighted, the be-aproned moreauvian strained on tiptoe to
identify something on a higher shelf.
With one heavy foot, Geisen kicked the servant
out of his way, sending the creature squeaking and sliding across the
slops-strewn floor. But before the man could return to his rough
provisioning, he was stopped by a voice familiar as his skin.
“I raised you to show more respect to all the
Implicate’s creatures than you just exhibited, Gep Stoessl. Or if I did
not, then I deserve immediately to visit the Unborn’s Lowest Abattoir
for my criminal negligence.”
Geisen turned, the bile in his craw and soul
melting to a habitual affection tinged with many memories of juvenile
guilt.
Brindled arms folded across her queerly
configured chest, Ailoura the bestient stood a head shorter than
Geisen, compact and well-muscled. Her heritage mingled from a thousand
feline and quasi-feline strains from a dozen planets, she resembled no
single cat species morphed to human status, but rather all cats
everywhere, blended and thus ennobled. Rounded ears perched high atop
her densely pelted skull. Vertical slitted eyes and her patch of wet
leathery nose contrasted with a more-human-seeming mouth and chin. Now
anger and disappointment molded her face into a mask almost
frightening, her fierce expression magnified by a glint of sharp tooth
peeking from beneath a curled lip.
Geisen noted instantly, with a small shock,
the newest touches of gray in Ailoura’s tortoiseshell fur. These tokens
of aging softened his heart even further. He made the
second-most-serious conciliatory bow from the Dakini Rituals toward his
old nurse. Straightening, Geisen watched with relief as the anger
flowed out of her face and stance, to be replaced by concern and
solicitude.
“Now,” Ailoura demanded, in the same tone with
which she had often demanded that little Geisen brush his teeth or do
his schoolwork, “what is all this nonsense I hear about your voluntary
disinheritance and departure?”
Geisen motioned Ailoura into a secluded corner
of the kitchens and revealed everything to her. His account prompted
low growls from the bestient that escaped despite her angrily
compressed lips. Geisen finished resignedly by saying, “And so,
helpless to contest this injustice, I leave now to seek my fortune
elsewhere, perhaps even on another world.”
Ailoura pondered a moment. “You say that your
brother offered you a servant from our house?”
“Yes. But I don’t intend to take him up on
that promise. Having another mouth to feed would just hinder me.”
Placing one mitteny yet deft hand on his
chest, Ailoura said, “Take me, Gep Stoessl.”
Geisen experienced a moment of confusion. “But
Ailoura—your job of raising me is long past. I am very grateful for the
loving care you gave unstintingly to a motherless lad, the guidance and
direction you imparted, the indulgent playtimes we enjoyed. Your
teachings left me with a wise set of principles, an admirable will and
optimism, and a firm moral center—despite the evidence of my
thoughtless transgression a moment ago. But your guardian duties lie in
the past. And besides, why would you want to leave the comforts and
security of Stoessl House?”
“Look at me closely, Gep Stoessl. I wear now
the tabard of the scullery crew. My luck in finding you here is due
only to this very demotion. And from here the slide to utter inutility
is swift and short—despite my remaining vigor and craft. Will you leave
me here to face my sorry fate? Or will you allow me to cast my fate
with that of the boy I raised from kittenhood?”
Geisen thought a moment. “Some companionship
would indeed be welcome. And I don’t suppose I could find a more
intimate ally.”
Ailoura grinned. “Or a slyer one.”
“Very well. You may accompany me. But on one
condition.”
“Yes, Gep Stoessl?”
“Cease calling me ‘Gep.’ Such formalities were
once unknown between us.”
Ailoura smiled. “Agreed, little Gei-gei.”
The man winced. “No need to regress quite that
far. Now, let us return to raiding my family’s larder.”
“Be sure to take some of that fine fish, if
you please, Geisen.”
No one knew the origin of the tame
strangelets that seeded Chalk’s strata. But everyone knew of the
immense wealth these cloistered anomalies conferred.
Normal matter was composed of quarks in only
two flavors: up and down. But strange-flavor quarks also existed, and
the exotic substances formed by these strange quarks in combination
with the more domestic flavors were, unconfined, as deadly as the more
familiar antimatter. Bringing normal matter into contact with a naked
strangelet resulted in the conversion of the feedstock into energy.
Owning a strangelet was akin to owning a pet black hole, and just as
useful for various purposes, such as powering star cruisers.
Humanity could create strangelets, but only at
immense cost per unit. And naked strangelets had to be confined in
electromagnetic or gravitic bottles during active use. They could also
be quarantined for semipermanent storage in stasis fields. Such was the
case with the buried strangelets of Chalk.
Small spherical mirrored nodules—“marbles,” in
the jargon of Chalk’s prospectors—could be found in various recent
sedimentary layers of the planet’s crust, distributed according to no
rational plan. Discovery of the marbles had inaugurated the reign of
the various Houses on Chalk.
An early scientific expedition from
Preceptimax University to the Shulamith Wadi stumbled upon the
strangelets initially. Preceptor Fairservis, the curious discoverer of
the first marble, had realized he was dealing with a stasis-bound
object and had unluckily managed to open it. The quantum genie inside
had promptly eaten the hapless fellow who freed it, along with
nine-tenths of the expedition, before beginning a sure but slow descent
toward the core of Chalk. Luckily, an emergency response team swiftly
dispatched by the planetary authorities had managed to activate a new
entrapping marble as big as a small city, its lower hemisphere
underground, thus trapping the rogue.
After this incident, the formerly disdained
deserts of Chalk had experienced a land rush unparalleled in the
galaxy. Soon the entire planet was divided into domains—many consisting
of noncontiguous properties—each owned by one House or another.
Prospecting began in earnest then. But the practice remained more an
art than a science, as the marbles remained stealthy to conventional
detectors. Intuition, geological knowledge of strata, and sheer luck
proved the determining factors in the individual fortunes of the
Houses.
How the strangelets—plainly artifactual—came
to be buried beneath Chalk’s soils and hardpan remained a mystery. No
evidence of native intelligent inhabitants existed on the planet prior
to the arrival of humanity. Had a cloud of strangelets been swept up
out of space as Chalk made her eternal orbits? Perhaps. Or had alien
visitors planted the strangelets for unimaginable reasons of their own?
An equally plausible theory.
Whatever the obscure history of the
strangelets, their current utility was beyond argument.
They made many people rich.
And some people murderous.
In the shadow of the Tasso Escarpments,
adjacent to the Glabrous Drifts, Carrabas House sat desolate and
melancholy, tenanted only by glass-tailed lizards and stilt-crabs, its
poverty-overtaken heirs dispersed anonymously across the galaxy after a
series of unwise investments, followed by the unpredictable yet
inevitable exhaustion of their marble-bearing properties—a day against
which Vomacht Stoessl had more providently hedged his own family’s
fortunes.
Geisen’s zipflyte crunched to a landing on one
of the manse’s grit-blown terraces, beside a gaping portico. The
craft’s doors swung open and pilot and passenger emerged. Ailoura now
wore a set of utilitarian roughneck’s clothing, tailored for her
bestient physique and matching the outfit worn by her former charge,
right down to the boots. Strapped to her waist was an antique yet
lovingly maintained variable sword, its terminal bead currently dull
and inactive.
“No one will trouble us here,” Geisen said
with confidence. “And we’ll have a roof of sorts over our heads while
we plot our next steps. As I recall from a visit some years ago, the
west wing was the least damaged.”
As Geisen began to haul supplies—a
heater-cum-stove, sleeping bags and pads, water condensers—from their
craft, Ailoura inhaled deeply the dry tangy air, her nose wrinkling
expressively, then exhaled with zest. “Ah, freedom after so many years!
It tastes brave, young Geisen!” Her claws slipped from their sheaths as
she flexed her pads. She unclipped her sword and flicked it on, the
seemingly untethered bead floating outward from the pommel a meter or
so.
“You finish the monkey work. I’ll clear the
rats from our quarters,” promised Ailoura, then bounded off before
Geisen could stop her. Watching her unfettered tail disappear down a
hall and around a corner, Geisen smiled, recalling childhood games of
strength and skill where she had allowed him what he now realized were
easy triumphs.
After no small time, Ailoura returned, licking
her greasy lips.
“All ready for our habitation, Geisen-kitten.”
“Very good. If the bold warrior will deign to
lend a paw…?”
Soon the pair had established housekeeping in
a spacious, weatherproof ground floor room (with several handy exits),
where a single leering window frame was easily covered by a sheet of
translucent plastic. After distributing their goods and sweeping the
floor clean of loess drifts, Geisen and Ailoura took a meal as their
reward, the first of many such rude campfire repasts to come.
As they relaxed afterward, Geisen making notes
with his stylus in a small pocket diary and Ailoura dragging her left
paw continually over one ear, a querulous voice sounded from thin air.
“Who disturbs my weary peace?”
Instantly on their feet, standing back to
back, the newcomers looked warily about. Ailoura snarled until Geisen
hushed her. Seeing no one, Geisen at last inquired, “Who speaks?”
“I am the Carrabas marchwarden.”
The man and bestient relaxed a trifle.
“Impossible,” said Geisen. “How do you derive your energy after all
these years of abandonment and desuetude?”
The marchwarden chuckled with a trace of
pride. “Long ago, without any human consent or prompting, while
Carrabas House still flourished, I sunk a thermal tap downward hundreds
of kilometers. The backup energy thus supplied is not much, compared
with my old capacities, but has proved enough for sheer survival,
albeit with much dormancy.”
Ailoura hung her quiet sword back on her belt.
“How have you kept sane since then, marchwarden?”
“Who says I have?”
Coming to terms with the semideranged
Carrabas march-warden required delicate negotiations. The protective
majordomo simultaneously resented the trespassers—who did not share the
honored Carrabas family lineage—yet on some different level welcomed
their company and the satisfying chance to perform some of its
programmed functions for them. Alternating ogreish threats with
embarrassingly humble supplications, the marchwarden needed to hear
just the right mix of defiance and thanks from the squatters to fully
come over as their ally. Luckily, Ailoura, employing diplomatic wiles
honed by decades of bestient subservience, perfectly supplemented
Geisen’s rather gruff and patronizing attitude. Eventually, the ghost
of Carrabas House accepted them.
“I am afraid I can contribute little enough to
your comfort, Gep Carrabas.” During the negotiations, the marchwarden
had somehow self-deludingly concluded that Geisen was indeed part of
the lost lineage. “Some water, certainly, from my active conduits. But
no other necessities such as heat or food, or any luxuries either.
Alas, the days of my glory are long gone!”
“Are you still in touch with your peers?”
asked Ailoura.
“Why, yes. The other Houses have not forgotten
me. Many are sympathetic, though a few are haughty and indifferent.”
Geisen shook his head in bemusement. “First I
learn that the protective omniscience of the marchwardens may be
circumvented. Next, that they keep up a private traffic and society. I
begin to wonder who is the master and who is the servant in our global
system.”
“Leave these conundrums to the preceptors,
Geisen. This unexpected mode of contact might come in handy for us some
day.”
The marchwarden’s voice sounded enervated.
“Will you require any more of me? I have overtaxed my energies, and
need to shut down for a time.”
“Please restore yourself fully.”
Left alone, Geisen and Ailoura simultaneously
realized how late the hour was and how tired they were. They bedded
down in warm bodyquilts, and Geisen swiftly drifted off to sleep to the
old tune of Ailoura’s drowsy purring.
In the chilly viridian morning, over fish
and kava, cat and man held a war council.
Geisen led with a bold assertion that
nonetheless concealed a note of despair and resignation.
“Given your evident hunting prowess, Ailoura,
and my knowledge of the land, I estimate that we can take half a dozen
sandworms from those unclaimed public territories proved empty of
strangelets, during the course of as many months. We’ll peddle the
skins for enough to get us both off-planet. I understand that lush
homesteads are going begging on Nibbriglung. All that the extensive
water meadows there require is a thorough desnailing before they’re
producing golden rice by the bushel—”
Ailoura’s green eyes, so like Geisen’s own,
flashed with cool fire. “Insipidity! Toothlessness!” she hissed. “Turn
farmer? Grub among the waterweeds like some platypus?
Run away from those who killed your sire and cheated you out of your
inheritance? I didn’t raise such an unimaginative, unambitious coward,
did I?”
Geisen sipped his drink to avoid making a
hasty affronted rejoinder, then calmly said, “What do you recommend,
then? I gave my legally binding promise not to contest any of the
unfair terms laid down by my family, in return for freedom from
prosecution. What choices does such a renunciation leave me? Shall you
and I go live in the shabby slums that slump at the feet of the Houses?
Or turn thief and raider and prey upon lonely mining encampments? Or
shall we become freelance prospectors? I’d be good at the latter job,
true, but bargaining with the Houses concerning hard-won information
about their own properties is humiliating, and promises only slim
returns. They hold all the high cards, and the supplicant offers only a
mere saving of time.”
“You’re onto a true scent with this last idea.
But not quite the paltry scheme you envision. What I propose is that we
swindle those who swindled you. We won’t gain back your whole
patrimony, but you’ll surely acquire greater sustaining riches than you
would by flensing worms or flailing rice.”
“Speak on.”
“The first step involves a theft. But after
that, only chicanery. To begin, we’ll need a small lot of strangelets,
enough to salt a claim everyone thought exhausted.”
Geisen considered, buffing his raspy chin with
his knuckles. “The morality is dubious. Still—I found a smallish
deposit of marbles on Stoessl property during my aborted trip, and
never managed to report it. They were in a flood-plain hard by the
Nakhoda Range, newly exposed and ripe for the plucking without any
large-scale mining activity that would attract satellite surveillance.”
“Perfect! We’ll use their own goods to con the
ratlings! But once we have this grubstake, we’ll need a proxy to deal
with the Houses. Your own face and reputation must remain concealed
until all deals are sealed airtight. Do you have knowledge of any such
suitable foil?”
Geisen began to laugh. “Do I? Only the perfect
rogue for the job!”
Ailoura came cleanly to her feet, although she
could not repress a small grunt at an arthritic twinge provoked by a
night on the hard floor. “Let us collect the strangelets first, and
then enlist his help. With luck, we’ll be sleeping on feathers and
dining off golden plates in a few short weeks.”
The sad and spectral voice of the abandoned
marchwarden sounded. “Good morning, Gep Carrabas. I regret keenly my
own serious incapacities as a host. But I have managed to heat up
several liters of water for a bath, if such service appeals.”
The eccentric caravan of Marco Bozzarias and
his mistress Pigafetta had emerged from its minting pools as a
top-ofthe-line Baba Yaya model of the year 650 PS. Capacious and agile,
larded with amenities, the moderately intelligent stilt-walking cabin
had been designed to protect its inhabitants from climatic extremes in
unswaying comfort while carrying them surefootedly over the roughest
terrain. But plainly, for one reason or another (most likely poverty)
Bozzarias had neglected the caravan’s maintenance over the twenty-five
years of its working life.
Raised now for privacy above the sands where
Geisen’s zipflyte rested, the vehicle-cum-residence canted several
degrees, imparting a funhouse quality to its interior. Swellings at its
many knee joints indicated a lack of proper nutrients. Additionally,
the cabin itself had been patched with so many different
materials—plastic, sandworm hide, canvas, chitin—that it more closely
resembled a heap of debris than a deliberately designed domicile.
The caravan’s owner, contrastingly, boasted an
immaculate and stylish appearance. To judge by his handsome,
mustachioed looks, the middle-aged Bozzarias was more stage-door idler
than cactus hugger, displaying his trim figure proudly beneath crimson
ripstop trews and utility vest over bare hirsute chest. Despite this
urban promenader’s facade, Bozzarias held a respectable record as a
freelance prospector, having pinpointed for their owners several
strangelet lodes of note, including the fabled Gosnold Pocket. For
these services, he had been recompensed by the tightfisted landowners
only a nearly invisible percentage of the eventual wealth claimed from
the finds. Despite his current friendly grin, it would be impossible
for Bozzarias not to harbor decades-worth of spite and jealousy.
Pigafetta, Bozzarias’ bestient paramour, was a
voluptuous, pink-skinned geisha clad in blue and green silks. Carrying
perhaps a tad too much weight—hardly surprising, given her particular
gattaca—Pigafetta radiated a slack and greasy carnality utterly at odds
with Ailoura’s crisp and dry efficiency. When the visitors had entered
the cabin, before either of the humans could intervene, Geisen and
Bozzarias had been treated to an instant but decisive bloodless
catfight that had settled the pecking order between the moreauvians.
Now, while Pigafetta sulked winsomely in
canted corner amid her cushions, the furry female victor consulted with
the two men around a small table across which lay spilled the stolen
strangelets, corralled from rolling by a line of empty liquor bottles.
Bozzarias poked at one of the deceptive
marbles with seeming disinterest, while his dark eyes glittered with
avarice. “Let me recapitulate. We represent to various buyers that
these quantum baubles are merely the camel’s nose showing beneath the
tent of unconsidered wealth. A newly discovered lode on the Carrabas
properties, of which you, Gep Carrabas—” Bozzarias leered at Geisen,
“—are the rightful heir. We rook the fools for all we can get, then hie
ourselves elsewhere, beyond their injured squawks and retributions. Am
I correct in all particulars?”
Ailoura spoke first. “Yes, substantially.”
“And what would my share of the take be? To
depart forever my cherished Chalk would require a huge stake—”
“Don’t try to make your life here sound
glamorous or even tolerable, Marco,” Geisen said. “Everyone knows
you’re in debt up to your nose, and haven’t had a strike in over a
year. It’s about time for you to change venues anyway. The days of the
freelancer on Chalk are nearly over.”
Bozzarias sighed dramatically, picking up a
reflective marble and admiring himself in it. “I suppose you speak the
truth—as it is commonly perceived. But a man of my talents can carve
himself a niche anywhere. And Pigafetta had
been begging me of late to launch her on a virtual career—”
“In other words,” Ailoura interrupted, “you
intend to pimp her as a porn star. Well, you’ll need to relocate to a
mediapoietic world then for sure. May we assume you’ll become part of
our scheme?”
Bozzarias set the marble down and said, “My
pay?”
“Two strangelets from this very stock.”
With the speed of a glass-tailed lizard
Bozzarias scooped up and pocketed two spheres before the generous offer
could be rescinded. “Done! Now, if you two will excuse me, I’ll need to
rehearse my role before we begin this deception.”
Ailoura smiled, a disconcerting sight to those
unfamiliar with her tender side. “Not quite so fast, Gep Bozzarias. If
you’ll just submit a moment—”
Before Bozzarias could protest, Ailoura had
sprayed him about the head and shoulders with the contents of a
pressurized can conjured from her pack.
“What! Pixie dust! This is a gross insult!”
Geisen adjusted the controls of his pocket
diary. On the small screen appeared a jumbled, jittering image of the
caravan’s interior. As the self-assembling pixie dust cohesed around
Bozzarias’ eyes and ears, the image stabilized to reflect the
prospector’s visual point of view. Echoes of their speech emerged from
the diary’s speaker.
“As you well know,” Ailoura advised, “the
pixie dust is ineradicable and self-repairing. Only the ciphers we hold
can deactivate it. Until then, all you see and hear will be shared with
us. We intend to monitor you around the clock. And the diary’s input is
being shared with the Carrabas marchwarden, who has been told to watch
for any traitorous actions on your part. That entity, by the way, is a
little deranged, and might leap to conclusions about any actions that
even verge on treachery. Oh, you’ll also find that your left ear hosts
a channel for our remote, ah, verbal advice. It would behoove you to
follow our directions, since the dust is quite capable of liquefying
your eyeballs upon command.”
Seemingly inclined to protest further,
Bozzarias suddenly thought better of dissenting. With a dispirited wave
and nod, he signaled his acquiescence to their plans, becoming quietly
businesslike.
“And to what Houses shall I offer this
putative wealth?”
Geisen smiled. “To every House at first—except
Stoessl.”
“I see. Quite clever.”
After Bozzarias had caused his caravan to
kneel to the earth, he bade his new partners a desultory good-bye. But
at the last minute, as Ailoura was stepping into the zipflyte,
Bozzarias snagged Geisen by the sleeve and whispered in his ear.
“I’d trade that rude servant in for a mindless
pleasure model, my friend, were I you. She’s much too tricky for
comfort.”
“But, Marco—that’s exactly why I cherish her.”
Three weeks after first employing the wily
Bozzarias in their scam, Geisen and Ailoura sat in their primitive
quarters at Carrabas House, huddled nervously around Geisen’s diary,
awaiting transmission of the meeting they had long anticipated. The
diary’s screen revealed the familiar landscape around Stoessl House as
seen from the windows of the speeding zipflyte carrying their agent to
his appointment with Woda, Gitten, and Grafton.
During the past weeks, Ailoura’s plot had
matured, succeeding beyond their highest expectations.
Representing himself as the agent for a
mysteriously returned heir of the long-abandoned Carrabas estate—a
fellow who preferred anonymity for the moment—Bozzarias had visited all
the biggest and most influential Houses—excluding the Stoessls—with his
sample strangelets. A major new find had been described, with its
coordinates freely given and inspections invited. The visiting teams of
geologists reported what appeared to be a rich new lode, deceived by
Geisen’s expert saltings. And no single House dared attempt a midnight
raid on the unprotected new strike, given the vigilance of all the
others.
The cooperative and willing playacting of the
Carrabas marchwarden had been essential. First, once its existence was
revealed, the discarded entity’s very survival became a seven-day
wonder, compelling a willing suspension of disbelief in all the lies
that followed. Confirming the mystery man as a true Carrabas, the
marchwarden also added its jiggered testimony to verify the discovery.
Bozzarias had informed the greedily gaping
families that the returned Carrabas scion had no desire to play an
active role in mining and selling his strangelets. The whole
estate—with many more potential strangelet nodes—would be sold to the
highest bidder.
Offers began to pour in, steadily escalating.
These included feverish bids from the Stoessls, which were rejected
without comment. Finally, after such high-handed treatment, the
offended clan demanded to know why they were being excluded from the
auction. Bozzarias responded that he would convey that information only
in a private meeting.
To this climactic interrogation the wily rogue
now flew.
Geisen turned away from the monotonous video
on his diary and asked Ailoura a question he had long contemplated but
always forborne from voicing.
“Ailoura, what can you tell me of my mother?”
The cat-woman assumed a reflective expression
that cloaked more emotions than it revealed. Her whiskers twitched.
“Why do you ask such an irrelevant question at this crucial juncture,
Gei-gei?”
“I don’t know. I’ve often pondered the matter.
Maybe I’m fearful that if our plan explodes in our faces, this might be
my final opportunity to learn anything.”
Ailoura paused a long while before answering.
“I was intimately familiar with the one who bore you. I think her
intentions were honorable. I know she loved you dearly. She always
wanted to make herself known to you, but circumstances beyond her
control did not permit such an honest relationship.”
Geisen contemplated this information.
Something told him he would get no more from the closemouthed bestient.
To disrupt the solemn mood, Ailoura reached
over to ruffle Geisen’s hair. “Enough of the useless past. Didn’t
anyone ever tell you that curiosity killed the cat? Now, pay attention!
Our Judas goat has landed—”
Ursine yet doughy, unctuous yet fleering,
Grafton clapped Bozzarias’ shoulder heartily and ushered the foppish
man to a seat in Vomacht’s study. Behind the dead padrone’s desk sat
his widow, Woda, all motile maquillage and mimicked mourning. Her teeth
sported a fashionable gilt. Gitten lounged on the arm of a sofa,
plainly bored and resentful, toying with a handheld hologame like some
sullen adolescent.
After offering drinks—Bozzarias requested and
received the finest vintage of sparkling wine available on
Chalk—Grafton drove straight to the heart of the matter.
“Gep Bozzarias, I demand to know why Stoessl
House has been denied a chance to bid on the Carrabas estate.”
Bozzarias drained his glass and dabbed at his
lips with his jabot before replying. “The reason is simple, Gep
Stoessl, yet of such delicacy that you would not have cared to have me
state it before your peers. Thus this private encounter.”
“Go on.”
“My employer, Timor Carrabas, you must learn,
is a man of punctilio and politesse. Having abandoned Chalk many
generations ago, Carrabas House still honors and maintains the old ways
prevalent during that golden age. They have not fallen into the lax and
immoral fashions of the present, and absolutely condemn such behavior.”
Grafton stiffened. “To what do you refer?
Stoessl House is guilty of no such infringements on custom.”
“That is not how my employer perceives
affairs. After all, what is the very first thing he hears upon
returning to his ancestral homeworld? Disturbing rumors of patricide,
fraternal infighting, and excommunication, all of which emanate from
Stoessl House and Stoessl House alone. Leery of stepping beneath the
shadow of such a cloud, he could not ethically undertake any dealings
with your clan.”
Fuming, Grafton started to rebut these
charges, but Woda intervened. “Gep Bozzarias, all mandated
investigations into the death of my beloved Vomacht resulted in one
uncontested conclusion: pump failure produced a kind of alien
hyperglycemia that drove the Stroonians insane. No human culpability or
intent to harm was ever established.”
Bozzarias held his glass up for a refill and
obtained one. “Why, then, were all the bestient witnesses to the
incident terminally disposed of? What motivated the abdication of your
youngest scion? Giger, I believe he was named?”
Trying to be helpful, Gitten jumped into the
conversation. “Oh, we use up bestients at a frightful rate! If they’re
not dying from floggings, they’re collapsing from overuse in the mines
and brothels. Such a flawed product line, these moreauvians. Why, if
they were robots, they’d never pass consumer-lab testing. As for
Geisen—that’s the boy’s name— well, he simply got fed up with our
civilized lifestyle. He always did prefer the barbaric outback
existence. No doubt he’s enjoying himself right now, wallowing in some
muddy oasis with a sandworm concubine.”
Grafton cut off his brother’s tittering with a
savage glance. “Gep Bozzarias, I’m certain that if your employer were
to meet us, he’d find we are worthy of making an offer on his
properties. In fact, he could avoid all the fuss and bother of a
full-fledged auction, since I’m prepared right now to trump the highest
bid he’s yet received. Will you convey to him my invitation to enjoy
the hospitality of Stoessl House?”
Bozzarias closed his eyes ruminatively, as if
harkening to some inner voice of conscience, then answered, “Yes, I can
do that much. And with some small encouragement, I would exert all my
powers of persuasiveness—”
Woda spoke. “Why, where did this small but
heavy bag of Tancredi moonstones come from? It certainly doesn’t belong
to us. Gep Bozzarias—would you do me the immense favor of tracking down
the rightful owner of these misplaced gems?”
Bozzarias stood and bowed, then accepted the
bribe. “My pleasure, madame. I can practically guarantee that Stoessl
House will soon receive its just reward.”
“Sandworm concubine!” Geisen appeared ready
to hurl his eavesdropping device to the hard floor, but restrained
himself. “How I’d like to smash their lying mouths in!”
Ailoura grinned. “You must show more restraint
than that, Geisen, especially when you come face-to-face with the
scoundrels. Take consolation from the fact that mere physical
retribution would hurt them far less than the loss of money and face we
will inflict.”
“Still, there’s a certain satisfaction in
feeling the impact of fist on flesh.”
“My kind calls it ‘the joy when teeth meet
bone,’ so I fully comprehend. Just not this time. Understood?”
Geisen impulsively hugged the old cat. “Still
teaching me, Ailoura?”
“Until I die, I suppose.”
“You are appallingly obese, Geisen. Your
form recalls nothing of the slim blade who cut such wide swaths among
the girls of the various Houses before his engagement.”
“And your polecat coloration, fair Ailoura,
along with those tinted lenses and tooth caps, speak not of a bold
mouser, but of a scavenger through garbage tips.”
Regarding each other with satisfaction,
Ailoura and Geisen thus approved of their disguises.
With the aid of Bozzarias, who had purchased
for them various sophisticated, semiliving prosthetics, dyes, and
off-world clothing, the man and his servant—Timor Carrabas and
Hepzibah—resembled no one ever seen before on Chalk. His pasty face
rouged, Geisen wobbled as he waddled, breathing stertorously, while the
limping Ailoura diffused a moderately repulsive scent calculated to
keep the curious at a certain remove.
The Carrabas marchwarden now spoke, a touch of
excitement in its artificial voice. “I have just notified my Stoessl
House counterpart that you are departing within the hour. You will be
expected in time for essences and banquet, with a half hour allotted to
freshen up and settle into your guest rooms.”
“Very good. Rehearse the rest of the plan for
me.”
“Once the funds are transferred from Stoessl
House to me, I will in turn upload them to the Bourse on Feuilles
Mortes under the name of Geisen Stoessl, where they will be immune from
attachment. I will then retreat to my soulcanister, readying it for
removal by your agent, Bozzarias, who will bring it to the space
field—specifically the terminal hosting Gravkosmos Interstellar. Beyond
that point, I cannot be of service until I am haptically enabled once
more.”
“You have the scheme perfectly. Now we thank
you, and leave with the promise that we shall talk again in the near
future, in a more pleasant place.”
“Good-bye, Gep Carrabas, and good luck.”
Within a short time the hired zipflyte
arrived. (It would hardly do for the eminent Timor Carrabas to appear
in Geisen’s battered craft, which had, in point of fact, already been
sold to raise additional funds to aid their subterfuge.) After
clambering clumsily on board, the schemers settled themselves in the
spacious rear seat while the chauffeur—a neat-plumaged and discreet
raptor-derived bestient—lifted off and flew at a swift clip toward
Stoessl House.
Ailoura’s comment about Geisen’s
attractiveness to his female peers had set an unhealed sore spot within
him aching. “Do you imagine, Hepzibah, that other local luminaries
might attend this evening’s dinner party? I had in mind a certain Gep
Bloedwyn Vermeule.”
“I suspect she will. The Stoessls and the
Vermeules have bonds and alliances dating back centuries.”
Geisen mused dreamily. “I wonder if she will
be as beautiful and sensitive and angelic as I have heard tell she is.”
Ailoura began to hack from deep in her throat.
Recovering, she apologized, “Excuse me, Gep Carrabas. Something
unpleasant in my throat. No doubt a simple hairball.”
Geisen did not look amused. “You cannot deny
reports of the lady’s beauty, Hepzibah.”
“Beauty is as beauty does master.”
The largest ballroom in Stoessl House had
been extravagantly bedecked for the arrival of Timor Carrabas. Living
luminescent lianas in dozens of neon tones festooned the heavy-beamed
rafters. Decorator dust migrated invisibly about the chamber, cohering
at random into wallscreens showing various entertaining videos from the
mediapoietic worlds. Responsive carpets the texture of moss crept
warily along the tessellated floor, consuming any spilled food and
drink wasted from the large collation spread out across a
servitor-staffed table long as a playing field. (House chef Stine
Pursiful oversaw all with a meticulous eye, his upraised ladle serving
as baton of command. After some argument among the family members and
chef, a buffet had been chosen over a sit-down meal, as being more
informal, relaxed, and conducive to easy dealings.) The floor space was
thronged with over a hundred gaily caparisoned representatives of the
Houses most closely allied to the Stoessls, some dancing in stately
pavanes to the music from the throats of the octet of avian bestients
perched on their multibranched stand. But despite the many diversions
of music, food, drink, and chatter, all eyes had strayed ineluctably to
the form of the mysterious Timor Carrabas when he entered, and from
time to time thereafter.
Beneath his prosthetics, Geisen now sweated
copiously, both from nervousness and the heat. Luckily, his disguising
adjuncts quite capably metabolized this betraying moisture before it
ever reached his clothing.
The initial meeting with his brothers and
stepmother had gone well. Hands were shaken all around without anyone
suspecting that the flabby hand of Timor Carrabas concealed a slimmer
one that ached to deliver vengeful blows.
Geisen could see immediately that since
Vomacht’s death, Grafton had easily assumed the role of head of
household, with Woda patently the power behind the throne and Gitten
content to act the wastrel princeling.
“So, Gep Carrabas,” Grafton oleaginously
purred, “now you finally perceive with your own eyes that we Stoessls
are no monsters. It’s never wise to give gossip any credence.”
Gitten said, “But gossip is the only kind of
talk that makes life worth liv—oof!”
Woda took a second step forward, relieving the
painful pressure she had inflicted on her younger son’s foot. “Excuse
my clumsiness, Gep Carrabas, in my eagerness to enhance my proximity to
a living reminder of the fine old ways of Chalk. I’m sure you can teach
us much about how our forefathers lived. Despite personal longevity, we
have lost the institutional rigor your clan has reputedly preserved.”
In his device-modulated, rather fulsome voice,
Geisen answered, “I am always happy to share my treasures with others,
be they spiritual or material.”
Grafton brightened. “This expansiveness bodes
well for our later negotiations, Gep Carrabas. I must say that your
attitude is not exactly as your servant Bozzarias conveyed.”
Geisen made a dismissive wave. “Simply a local
hireling who was not truly privy to my thoughts. But he has the virtue
of following my bidding without the need to know any of my ulterior
motivations.” Geisen felt relieved to have planted that line to protect
Bozzarias in the nasty wake of the successful conclusion of their
thimblerigging. “Here is my real counselor. Hepzibah, step forward.”
Ailoura moved within the circle of speakers,
her unnaturally flared and pungent striped musteline tail waving
perilously close to the humans. “At your service, Gep.”
The Stoessls involuntarily cringed away from
the unpleasant odor wafting from Ailoura, then restrained their
impolite reaction.
“Ah, quite an, ah, impressive moreauvian.
Positively, um, redolent of the ribosartor’s art. Perhaps your, erm,
adviser would care to dine with others of her kind.”
“Hepzibah, you are dismissed until I need
you.”
“As you wish.”
Soon Geisen was swept up in a round of
introductions to people he had known all his life. Eventually he
reached the food, and fell to eating rather too greedily. After weeks
spent subsisting on MREs alone, he could hardly restrain himself. And
his glutton’s disguise allowed all excess. Let the other guests gape at
his immoderate behavior. They were constrained by their own greed for
his putative fortune from saying a word.
After satisfying his hunger, Geisen finally
looked up from his empty plate.
There stood Bloedwyn Vermeule.
Geisen’s ex-fiancée had never shone
more alluringly. Threaded with invisible flexing pseudo-myofibrils, her
long unfettered hair waved in continual delicate movement, as if she
were a mermaid underwater. She wore a gown tonight loomed from golden
spider silk. Her lips were verdigris, matched by her nails and eye
shadow.
Geisen hastily dabbed at his own lips with his
napkin, and was mortified to see the clean cloth come away with enough
stains to represent a child’s immoderate battle with an entire
chocolate cake.
“Oh, Gep Carrabas, I hope I am not
interrupting your gustatory pleasures.”
“Nuh—no, young lady, not at all. I am fully
sated. And you are?”
“Gep Bloedwyn Vermeule. You may call me by my
first name, if you grant me the same privilege.”
“But naturally.”
“May I offer an alternative pleasure, Timor,
in the form of a dance? Assuming your satiation does not extend to all recreations.”
“Certainly. If you’ll make allowances in
advance for my clumsiness.”
Bloedwyn allowed the tip of her tongue
delicately to traverse her patinaed lips. “As the Dompatta says, ‘An
earnest rider compensates for a balky steed.’ ”
This bit of familiar gospel had never sounded
so lascivious. Geisen was shocked at this unexpected temptress behavior
from his ex-fiancée. But before he could react with real or mock
indignation, Bloedwyn had whirled him out onto the floor.
They essayed several complicated dances before
Geisen, pleading fatigue, could convince his partner to call a halt to
the activity.
“Let us recover ourselves in solitude on the
terrace,” Bloedwyn said, and conducted Geisen by the arm through a
pressure curtain and onto an unlit open-air patio. Alone in the
shadows, they took up positions braced against a balustrade. The view
of the moon-drenched arroyos below occupied them in silence for a time.
Then Bloedwyn spoke huskily.
“You exude a foreign, experienced sensuality,
Timor, to which I find myself vulnerable. Perhaps you would indulge my
weakness with an assignation tonight, in a private chamber of Stoessl
House known to me? After any important business dealings are
successfully concluded, of course.”
Geisen seethed inwardly, but managed to
control his voice. “I am flattered that you find a seasoned fellow of
my girth so attractive, Bloedwyn. But I do not wish to cause any
intermural incidents. Surely you are affianced to someone, a young lad
both bold and wiry, jealous and strong.”
“Pah! I do not care for young men, they are
all chowder-heads! Pawing, puling, insensitive, shallow, and vain, to a
man! I was betrothed to one such, but luckily he revealed his true
colors and I was able to cast him aside like the churl he proved to
be.”
Now Geisen felt only miserable self-pity. He
could summon no words, and Bloedwyn took his silence for assent. She
planted a kiss on his cheek, then whispered directly into his ear.
“Here’s a map to the boudoir where I’ll be waiting. Simply take the
east squeezer down three levels, then follow the hot dust.” She pressed
a slip of paper into his hand, supplementing her message with extra
pressure in his palm, then sashayed away like a tainted sylph.
Geisen spent half an hour with his mind
roiling before he regained the confidence to return to the party.
Before too long, Grafton corralled him.
“Are you enjoying yourself, Timor? The food
agrees? The essences elevate? The ladies are pliant? Haw! But perhaps
we should turn our minds to business now, before we both grow too
muzzy-headed. After conducting our dull commerce, we can cut loose.”
“I am ready. Let me summon my aide.”
“That skun—That is, if you absolutely insist.
But surely our marchwarden can offer any support services you need.
Notarization, citation of past deeds, and so forth.”
“No. I rely on Hepzibah implicitly.”
Grafton partially suppressed a frown. “Very
well, then.”
Once Ailoura arrived from the servants’ table,
the trio headed toward Vomacht’s old study. Geisen had to remind
himself not to turn down any “unknown” corridor before Grafton himself
did.
Seated in the very room where he had been
fleeced of his patrimony and threatened with false charges of murder,
Geisen listened with half an ear while Grafton outlined the terms of
the prospective sale: all the Carrabas properties and whatever wealth
of strangelets they contained, in exchange for a sum greater than the
Gross Plantetary Product of many smaller worlds.
Ailoura attended more carefully to the
contract, even pointing out to Geisen a buried clause that would have
made payment contingent on the first month’s production from the new
fields. After some arguing, the conspirators succeeded in having the
objectionable codicil removed. The transfer of funds would be complete
and instantaneous.
When Grafton had finally finished explaining
the conditions, Geisen roused himself. He found it easy to sound bored
with the whole deal, since his elaborate scam, at its moment of
triumph, afforded him surprisingly little vengeful pleasure.
“All the details seem perfectly managed, Gep
Stoessl, with that one small change of ours included. I have but one
question. How do I know that the black sheep of your House, Geisen,
will not contest our agreement? He seems a contrary sort, from what
I’ve heard, and I would hate to be involved in judicial proceedings,
should he get a whim in his head.”
Grafton settled back in his chair with a broad
smile. “Fear not, Timor! That wild hair will get up no one’s arse!
Geisen has been effectively rendered powerless. As was only proper and
correct, I assure you, for he was not a true Stoessl at all.”
Geisen’s heart skipped a cycle. “Oh? How so?”
“The lad was a chimera! A product of the
ribosartors! Old Vomacht was unsatisfied with the vagaries of honest
mating that had produced Gitten and myself from the noble stock of our
mother. Traditional methods of reproduction had not delivered him a
suitable toady. So he resolved to craft a better heir. He used most of
his own germ plasm as foundation, but supplemented his nucleotides with
dozens of other snippets. Why, that hybrid boy even carried bestient
genes. Rat and weasel, I’m willing to bet! Haw! No, Geisen had no place
in our family.”
“And his mother?”
“Once the egg was crafted and fertilized,
Vomacht implanted it in a host bitch. One of our own bestients. I
misapprehend her name now, after all these years. Amorica, Orella,
something of that nature. I never really paid attention to her fate
after she delivered her human whelp. I have more important properties
to look after. No doubt she ended up on the offal heap, like all the
rest of her kind.”
A red curtain drifting across Geisen’s vision
failed to occlude the shape of the massive aurochs-flaying blade
hanging on the wall. One swift leap and it would be in his hands. Then
Grafton would know sweet murderous pain, and Geisen’s bitter heart
would applaud—
Standing beside Geisen, Ailoura let slip the
quietest cough.
Geisen looked into her face.
A lone tear crept from the corner of one
feline eye.
Geisen gathered himself and stood up,
unspeaking.
Grafton grew a trifle alarmed. “Is there
anything the matter, Gep Carrabas?”
“No, Gep Stoessl, not at all. Merely that old
hurts pain me, and I would fain relieve them. Let us close our deal. I
am content.”
The star liner carrying Geisen, Ailoura, and
the stasis-bound Carrabas marchwarden to a new life sped through the
interstices of the cosmos, powered perhaps by a strangelet mined from
Stoessl lands. In one of the lounges, the man and his cat nursed drinks
and snacks, admiring the exotic variety of their fellow passengers and
reveling in their hardwon liberty and security.
“Where from here—son?” asked Ailoura with a
hint of unwonted shyness.
Geisen smiled. “Why, wherever we wish, Mother
dear.”
“Rowr! A world with plenty of fish, then, for
me!”
J. R. Dunn lives
in New Jersey, which he describes as “a small, barbarous region between
New York and Pennsylvania.” He’s sold to most of the magazines,
including Analog, Asimov’s, Omni, Century,
and Amazing. Most of his stories
have been cited on best-of-year lists, with many selected for
anthologies. His novels include This Side of Judgment (1994), Days of Cain (1997),
and Full Tide of Night (1998). He
is an accomplished writer with a clear, lucid style.
“The Names of all
the Spirits” appeared online at SciFiction, and this is its first print
appearance. It concerns the isolated space miners who work in the outer
solar system, in an era when powerful, threatening artificial
intelligences are on the loose outside the sphere of human control. But
Dunn’s vision of the situation, seen through the investigation of a
Mandate agent into the mystery of a miner who survived when he should
not have, transforms this standard SF situation in a compelling way.
It was a busier sky than I was used to.
The stars were invisible, outshone by an apparently solid tower of
light dominating the view out the window. It was about as wide as an
outstretched hand, narrowing steadily to a point high enough to make me
tilt my head before twisting into a curve and vanishing from sight. Or
perhaps not completely so: obscured by a fog of leakage, a thin
filament that might be its distant tail extended into a darkness not
quite the absolute black of space. At eye level another stream flowed
off at a right angle, pure white to the tower’s mottled yellow, ending
in a sunburst bright enough to make me squint.
It was all very impressive, an undertaking of
a scale you don’t often find inside the system, almost astronomical in
both scope and imagery. And I was impressed, on the intellectual,
so-many-megatons-per-second level. But nothing more. Similar operations
were going on all across this lobe of the cometary halo. If you’ve seen
one, you’ve seen ’em all. I’ve seen one.
Somebody Solward needed ice cubes. That’s what
it came down to. Those two streams were stripped comets, hydro-carbons
separated from volatiles and each sent off in different directions, to
freeze again in the cold of extrasolar space. The ice would be shipped
in while the hydrocarbons and solids remained. They wouldn’t go far,
not as we judge distances these days, and somebody, someday in the
fullness of time, would find a use for them.
A rustle of impatience recalled me to the
room. The window reflected the scene behind me: a dozen or so figures
in a motley array of gear centered on a man perched on a small chair.
One of them seemed to have grown a second head directly atop his first
in the time my back had been turned. I realized it was a piece of scrim
resting on a shelf behind him. Not even jacks are that weird.
I turned to the seated man. Through some means
I couldn’t detect (the place wasn’t spinning, that much was certain),
they’d created a one-gee field. If meant as a courtesy, it was
misplaced—I’d been out in Kuiper-Oort as long as any of them. “Let’s
hear your side, Morgan. That’s what I came for.”
The only sound was a voice muttering, “…n’t
have a side.”
Morgan himself simply stared, saying nothing,
the same as he had the first two times I’d asked the question. He could
well have been tranced, lost in a private world or daydream, though
some small tremor of attention told me he was not.
I’d thought it was going to be easy. Open and
shut, as the ancient phrase went. Get the story out of Morgan, lase it
in, take him into custody and back to the System by the swiftest means
possible, without even waiting for a reply. They’d given me the
impression he’d talked, which was obviously not the case. I shouldn’t
have questioned him in front of them. A single glance at this
crew—Morgan’s workmates, the “Powder Monkeys,” of all conceivable
names—was enough to strike terror into a sponge.
But I didn’t think it was fear holding Morgan
back. It was something else. Something I was going to get at, however
deep I had to go. Because this was no mere legal matter, and Rog Morgan
was not simply a jack in trouble. This was an impi problem, and Morgan
was my ticket home.
I saw no point in anymore questions. I turned
to Witcove. “You’ve got a secure spot for him?”
“He ain’t going noplace, Sandoval.” Witcove
snorted. “We got his processor and remotes.”
I raised a hand. “Why don’t you give me
those.”
Witcove frowned. He hadn’t quite worked out
how to handle me yet. Who was I, after all, but one man come out of the
dark? What gave me the right to throw my mass around? Where did I get
off giving orders to the foreman of the Powder Monkeys?
Mystique came to my rescue. Back on the Blue
Rock, at a time when Texas was—in the mind’s system of measurement,
anyway—only marginally smaller than the Halo, there existed an
organization with a mission not at all unlike the Mandate’s and the
motto, “One riot, one Ranger.” A single Texas Ranger could be relied on
to ride into any given bad town and straighten the place out with only
his two hands and the sure knowledge that hundreds just like him were
ready to saddle up. It seldom failed.
It didn’t fail now. With a grunt, Witcove
reached into a thigh pouch and pulled out what appeared to be a handful
of black geometrical solids of various sizes. Forgetting we were under
gee, he made as if to toss them to me, curtailing the throw at the very
last second as the thought occurred to him. He succeeded only in
scattering components across the floor between us.
That triggered the kind of laughter you’d
expect, along with the first visible reaction from Morgan as he gazed
at the components with an expression mixing frustration and annoyance.
Somebody was living behind that vacuum-habituated mask after all.
At my feet the scattered remotes began to
move, sliding together to form a little pile. Witcove swung on Morgan
with a wordless roar.
The components went still. With a sigh of
impatience Morgan looked away. “Once more, mister,” Witcove told him.
“You issue one more command and I will personally—”
“Foreman…” Witcove raised his eyebrows.
Someone stepped forward to collect the remotes and hand them to me. I
was absently thanking him when I felt a burst of heat in my palm. The
jack kept his eyes lowered. “Foreman, can we break things up for the
moment?”
“Sure, you…got enough for now.”
“I do.”
Behind him two crewmen hustled Morgan to his
feet and out the exit. I moved off, pretending interest in the scrim
collection. Scrim is the vacuum jack’s one notable hobby, dignified as
art by some. Small carvings comprised of asteroidal junk, scrap, what
have you, of a size easily carried in a suit pouch and worked on at odd
moments with atelier remotes and occasionally heavier machinery. Scrim
touches every subject matter conceivable: women, ships, animals,
vehicles, instruments, self-portraits, and items not easily catalogued.
It wasn’t crude. They worked on it too long for that, almost
obsessively, often overshooting the baroque to land deep in the
grotesque. I didn’t care for scrim. It spoke to me only of loneliness
and exile.
Witcove sidled up next to me. “You come to a
decision, you’ll…”
“I’ll let you know.”
That wasn’t precisely what he wanted to hear.
“Look…” he glanced behind him. Morgan had vanished. “He’s not gonna
tell you anything. It’s locked up. Something wrong there. When the
runaways grab a guy—”
“Shift change in five,” somebody said. The
room began clearing. I gestured at Witcove, half thanks, half
dismissal.
“I’ll let you know,” I repeated.
Clearly dissatisfied, he walked off. A crewman
intercepted him to talk operations. With a final glance in my
direction, Witcove left.
The room empty at last, I reached into my
pocket. The components made a handful. The big one, an inch and a half
by two, had to be the processor, a lifetime of experience and training
imbedded within it. I wondered what Witcove would do if somebody abused
his. The other nine were remote sensors, appendages, actuators, the
vacuum jack’s tools of the trade. With these, a jack could see into the
infrared and radio ranges, expand his sensory horizon a hundred or a
thousand miles, control instruments and machinery that far away and
more. I examined one resembling a length of thick wire. A jack would be
able to tell exactly what make it was, its capabilities, its cost. Hard
to believe that zero-gee work was once done with tools held in gloved
hands….
Something in my palm emitted a flash. I looked
down. Five seconds passed before the flash repeated. Dropping the thin
piece, I picked up a sphere that my thumb revealed to be flattened on
one end. A glow appeared as I held it at eye level, a glow made up of
words. I smiled. A tap and a shake failed to evoke anything further. I
popped the remote into a pocket and stared off into space, only to have
my gaze arrested by a particularly odd piece of scrim. I picked it up.
Close inspection failed to tell me what in Heaven, Hell, or the Halo it
was supposed to represent. It fell over when I set it down. Someone
once told me that oceanic sailors had produced something like scrim. It
seems unlikely. Hard to see what they’d have used for material.
Whoever cracks the impi problem can write his
own ticket. They were out there. That much was known. Rogues, duppies,
runaways…impis, in a word. Artificial Intelligences that had slipped
away, one day here, overseeing a refinery, shepherding a comet,
repairing a system, the next gone, with never a sign of where. Only
five or six a year, but numbers build. Surely they existed in the
hundreds by now, a group large enough to leave undeniable evidence of
its presence: signals encoded so deeply that ages wouldn’t decrypt
them, resources diverted to open trajectories, hacking that revealed
the signature of machine capabilities, along with missing vessels,
inexplicable damage to isolated machinery, individuals vanished into
night.
Discover a path into the impi’s kingdom, learn
the names of the spirits, find the hidden places where they slept, and
you would be set. You’d be the man with the expert’s badge, and
everyone would have to come to you. Back amid civilization, operating
from behind a screen at Charon or even Triton, with a sun in the sky
and a society around you. No more years spent in the cold and dark,
enduring the grinding boredom of Kuiper-Oort, no more confrontations
with misfits suitable only for work on the edge of civilization.
Standing orders stated that suspect
human-renegade interaction took precedence over all other
activities—criminal investigation, medical evacuation, mercy mission,
what have you. We had no idea where they were, what they were doing,
what motivated them. The stories were legion—they were evolving into
something alien and malevolent. They were duplicating themselves,
running off copies like cheap commercial ware, pushing their numbers
into the millions or even higher. They were out to take over the Halo
or sweep back into the system and brush humanity right off the board.
All no more than rumor, urban legend on the grand scale.
But what had happened here was no legend, and
I was already plotting the quickest, most energy-intensive,
least-number-of-stops course back into the system.
I stepped to the window. A v-jack passed about
fifty yards away, turning to regard me as he went. I wondered if he was
my contact. I eyed the remote. The one that didn’t belong to Rog
Morgan.
There was neither flash nor glimmer nor repeat
of the message: “Meet in 1 hr.” Three-quarters of that hour remained.
The Halo had taught me patience, but that was still forty-five minutes
too many for the way I was feeling.
My skin tautened as I stepped into vacuum
and the striated tissue in my third dermal layer reacted. I paused
while my airway valves adjusted themselves, squinted against the sudden
pressure of the retinal membranes. My system was nowhere near as
elaborate as those of the crew—I could remain in vacuum a few hours at
most, and I lacked radiation protection—but neither situation was a
factor here. Time was irrelevant, the only radiation the odd cosmic
ray.
The one-gee pull continued, giving me cause to
wonder whether they’d been doing me a favor after all. Stepping to the
platform’s edge, I took a look around.
There’s no such thing as resupply in the Halo.
You either bring it along, fabricate it, or do without, and the crews
with the broadest capabilities get the best jobs. The Powder Monkeys
were no slouches at capability, as any offhand examination of their
work hall revealed. A structure of considerable size, several hundred
yards in each dimension of a space that could be called a
rough-to-the-extreme cube, the object within it having no particular
relation to any actual shape whatsoever. A hall is part warehouse, part
refinery, part industrial center, part barracks, and part vehicle,
though no amount of study could separate one component from the other
amid the mass of catapults, effectuators, nets, tankage, piping,
cables, power sources, and mystery boxes.
Beneath my feet the glare of the work area
silhouetted the torpedo shape of my ride. As much as I shaded my eyes I
could make out next to nothing; it was too hazy for details. I felt a
rumbling which gave me a short spell of goosebumps: a jack had
mentioned that vapor pressure sometimes got so high you could actually
hear the cometary fluids being pumped. On second thought, I decided it
was more likely some piece of machinery within the hall.
Five minutes passed without anyone showing up.
I was early, but I also suspected that time-honored motive common to
all such situations: the urge not to be seen ratting to a cop. I took
out the remote. I still had no idea what it was for, which was probably
begging the question—most models were multifunctional.
Without turning, I took a step back toward the
lock. The remote flashed red, obligingly repeated when I moved to the
left. A swing to the right resulted in a reassuring green. I looked
around, fulfilling the age-old cop tradition of trying not to be
spotted before a meet, then took another step. The remote blinked green
once again.
The gee-field’s disappearance at the edge of
the platform didn’t quite take me unaware, though I was glad no one was
around to criticize my form when I kicked off. I landed on a catwalk
that swung 90° around a dark box with a man-sized “3” painted on
the side before plunging into the fractal mess of the hall. Inside I
passed a quivering set of tanks, ducked beneath some pipes, then went
up a ramp and through a pressurized area (no oxygen—my skin remained
taut) before again turning toward the hall’s exterior. Back in the open
I endured a moment’s confusion while figuring out that the remote
wanted me to go vertical, up the side of a huge tank open to space, its
top invisible from where I stood. I was well past the curve before I
caught sight of him, waiting at the crown of the tank in an enclosure
containing pumping controls. He floated above the platform, legs
crossed, helmetless head slightly bowed, eyes taking in endless night.
I felt a flash of irritation. A
monastic—wasn’t that fine. Not everyone out here is schizo. We get all
kinds: the grand pioneers who can’t live without a frontier to push at,
researchers trying to pin answers on various arcane questions (e.g.,
whether Kuiper-Oort is a strictly local phenomenon or simply the solar
portion of a cometary field stretching across the whole wide Universe),
the odd tourist aching to be able to say that he’d really
been further out than anybody else, fugitives on the run from assorted
cops or tongs, and these: the seekers, contemplatives in search of some
kind of spirituality evidently unavailable inside the Heliopause,
looking for the ultimate quiet place that might hold a door into the
center of things.
There’s a lot of them, following every
conceivable religion, system, or cult, even a few original to
themselves, and while I don’t disrespect them, they’re not the first
I’d go to for any given set of facts.
So it was with a sense of wasted time that I
finally reached the platform. As I’d expected, it was the small man
who’d handed me the remotes. He displayed no reaction as I slipped a
foot through the railing to steady myself, simply continued gazing off
into the abyss, face as blank as the sky itself. It would be just my
luck to show up seconds after this guy had at last made contact with
the infinite ground of being.
We were on the far side of the hall, shielded
from the work site. The sky was darker here, though not as dark as open
space—about the same as a moonlit night on Earth. Knowing we were
facing home, I tried to find Sol. I could have used one of the crew’s
processors to tell me if it was that particularly bright one there…
I glanced over to find the man’s eyes on me.
He took me by surprise, and it was a moment before I showed him the
remote, mouthed “Yours, I suppose,” and flicked it in his direction.
He tossed it right back, with the quick
precise movement of a trained v-jack. I was clumsier in catching it. As
I did he touched his ear. I imitated him. The remote stuck thanks to
some force of its own.
“Right there.” He pointed at the bright dot
I’d been watching a moment before. “So it is,” I replied, not bothering
to move my lips.
“Don’t look like much, eh?”
“You come out here a lot?”
“Enough.” He could have been meditating again,
for all the animation he revealed. “Morg ain’t workin’ with no
duppies.”
“I didn’t think he was,” I told him. “What was
he doing?”
“What happens with him?”
“I get him out of here, one way or another.”
He raised a finger. “Now…I tell you once. No
testify, no repeat, nothing.”
“Just for the record, why not?”
He faced me again. “I don’t stand with cops, I
don’t stand with courts.”
“Fair enough.”
“OK. All this happen last year, before Morg
join up with the Monkeys…You know what stridin’ is, right?” I nodded.
You don’t have to spend much time in the Halo to grasp the nature of
striding. Space travel is expensive. In Kuiper-Oort, the cost is
multiplied by distance, rarity, and demand. Like workers everywhere,
vacuum jacks have methods of cutting corners. One is to fit their suits
out with extra oxy, power, and supplies, get somebody to launch them by
catapult in the precise direction of their destination, then trance
down for the weeks or months required to get there. Somebody else will
snag them with a probe when at last they arrive.
Dangerous, you say? Yeah, it’s dangerous, as
the Mandate, most companies, and every active authority in the Halo
never cease repeating. It does no good. Jacks are proud of striding, as
they are of every other aspect of living like rodents in the outer
dark. There’s betting over length, speed, and duration of trip, same as
with any other insanely stupid activity Sapiens comes up with. I met
the current record holder once. Eighteen months in a trajectory of ten
AUs. He’s a little hard to understand due to slight, untreatable brain
damage, but quite pleased with himself all the same. Cats will bask in
the street, kids will tag rides on trucks, and jacks will stride. A
certain inevitable percentage will get run over, flung onto the
pavement, or miss their rendezvous.
Which was what happened to Rog Morgan. Few
stride alone, in case of emergencies. There were five jacks, bored with
the job or after a better offer or just hankering to move, who set out
on a month-long, quarter-AU journey to the second-nearest site. The
other four were picked up. Not Morgan. Somebody erred, and even as the
others awoke from their weeks-long trance, he kept going.
Days passed before he became aware of his
situation. He responded as a jack, and jacks take things in order. He
checked the time. He checked the charts. He tried the radio. Then he
went through it all again, step by step, before allowing himself to
stare the thing in the face.
It’s impossible to say what he felt. There’s
nothing to compare it to. No man in a lifeboat, or stranded in a
desert, or broken and freezing on any pole was ever as alone as Rog
Morgan was at that moment. No fear is so great, no regret so deep, as
can grow in that place that is no place, where space and time are as
close to bare as we are ever likely to know them. We can’t grasp what
Morgan felt, any more than he could afterward; it was simply too vast
for memory to hold. But consider this: out of the handful of lost
striders recovered (a half-dozen out of hundreds, who happened to be
aimed Solward, toward the more populous sections of the Halo), five
shut down their systems and blew their helmets in preference to
enduring another second of what Morgan faced.
At last his panic and grief receded enough to
allow him to resume control. He made a hopeless survey of known work
sites, outposts, and Mandate stations to confirm what he already knew.
Settled points are few and far between in the Halo, and he would pass
none of them.
He composed a mayday and set his comm system
to repeat it on the most power-stingy schedule that made sense. He
noted that he was headed in the direction of Sagittarius, a section of
sky that he would grow to hate as much as he’d ever hated anything. He
turned his head slightly to take in Sol. He patted a side pocket
holding a piece of scrim he’d been working on for years. He ate a
cracker. And then, jacks being stolid types and Morgan more so than
most, he tranced down.
He traveled a measurable percentage of the
width of the solar system before he again awoke. Nothing had changed.
He had not expected that anything would. The stars remained frozen. The
radio wavelengths were quiet. The world was doing just fine without Rog
Morgan. He contemplated the fact, sipped a little glucose, some water,
threw a curse or two at Sagittarius, and went back to sleep.
He didn’t know how many times he awoke after
that. More than twice, fewer than ten. They were all the same, and he
recalled little more than that sameness. The only thing that varied was
difficulty. His power cells began to give out. Then his small store of
food. (He put aside some dried fruit, some protein, a few ounces of
glucose in case he should need it, but somewhere along the line,
without ever remembering, he ate it all.) Jacks use very little water,
being enhanced to recycle most of that amount, but even a little gains
in importance when you can’t find it. It seemed that between the cold,
the hunger, and the thirst (all of which he could control but not
evade), Rog Morgan was going to become a member of that elite among men
who are killed by more things than one.
Ketosis set in a short time later. The only
sign that his body was cannibalizing his own muscular mass was an
abiding and growing sense of weakness far more complete than any he had
ever felt before.
If he dreamed he never spoke of it, and as for
prayer, well, a priest once told me that all men pray when things get
bad enough. Morgan didn’t say if he did. But I think what Father
Danziger meant was that they often pray without knowing it. Maybe
hanging on as long as he did, far longer than most could, was Morgan’s
form of prayer.
After a while the dreams turned concrete. His
metabolism was breaking down, slowly but inevitably poisoning itself
with byproducts it was unable to shed. His dreams began to speak, and
he began to answer back. He found himself explaining things to whatever
was listening, to Sagittarius, to his past, to something closer than
both that he shortly became convinced was contemplating him from out in
the dark. He told it how ravaged he was, how lost, how little he had
done with his time, how many mistakes he’d made before this last, fatal
one. What he might have done had he not been so sure of himself. What
he would do if he were given another lifetime to do it in.
At last he ran down. No answer had come, but
he had expected none. A sense of clarity had returned to him, the
clarity of approaching night. His mind was as focused as it was ever
going to be again. He checked his systems, the way a jack does.
Everything, every last element capable of measurement, was deep into
the red. It would have horri-fied him a few weeks ago. Now it didn’t
bother him at all.
He unsnapped a battery pouch and with fingers
scarcely able to feel put in his ID and a few other personal items. At
the last minute he paused to take out the piece of scrim. He held it a
moment before slipping it back. He sealed the pouch. With as much
strength as he could gather he threw it in the direction of Sol. He
watched for a second or two, telling himself he could see it dwindle
toward home.
He listened to the silence, the silence he
would be part of within minutes. He looked out at Sagittarius,
considering whether there were any words to match what he now knew. He
found none. He licked cracked lips with a dry, swollen tongue. “So
that’s it…”
Later he would have sworn that he heard it
before actually hearing it, that somehow he’d gotten some echo of it as
it surged across the shrunken space his universe had become: “No it’s
not.”
I don’t know what alerted me to the fact
that the jack had vanished. I didn’t see him go. The remote went
silent, and when I looked up, he’d disappeared. I wasted no time
searching—there were too many places he could have gone. What had sent
him away was another question, answered the minute I bent over the
railing to see three jacks approaching from below. I switched to open
freq.
“…it’s him.”
“It’s the mandy.” The two wearing helmets
waved.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I told them, trying to keep
any trace of annoyance out of my voice. The third was as bareheaded as
my contact. Once you’re fitted with vacuum mods, helmets are
unnecessary, really. People wear them for the same reason they do at
construction sites on Earth, that and the fact that a helmet carries a
lot of instrumentation and apps. “A jack’s office,” you often hear them
called.
I backed away as the one in the lead shot a
line and reeled them all in, the other two hanging on to various suit
projections. “Taking a look at home?” the leader bawled as he hooked a
foot under the top rail.
“That’s Sol right there.” Second helmet
indicated a star totally separate and discrete from the one my contact
had pointed out.
“Thanks,” I said. I must have sounded more
stiff than I intended—the lead jack raised a hand and said, “We feel a
whole lot better now you’re here.”
“How’s that?”
“That duppie, man—”
“Ever see an impi close up…?”
“Wait—” glanced between them. The one lacking
a helmet said nothing, simply continued staring. I wondered if he was
out of the loop. “You guys actually saw it? You were there?”
“I was,” the lead jack said.
“What happened?”
“Well, it was like this—”
“That thing came out of nowhere—” the second
helmet said.
“Wait one…”I pointed at the lead jack. “How’d
it start?”
“We were over the other side of the cracker,
inspecting the MHD loops—”
“Cracker’s what busts up the comets and
separates the fluids, see.”
“Yeah, and loops are the things…well, they’re
not things, they’re fields. They separate and contain the fluids, so
they’re important. Particularly down near the cracker mouth. Lot of
pressure there. Loop starts oscillating, you get leakage—”
“Contaminate the product,” second helmet said.
“Right. So—”
“So you keep an eye on it,” I said, hoping to
move him along.
“Inspect ’em once a day,” first helmet nodded.
“And it ain’t easy.”
“Hard to see down there.”
“That’s right. Hydrocarbon-water fog. Sticky,
wet, screws with your remote signals.”
“You gotta look close,” second helmet held up
his hands to show me how close. “Loops are tight, down near the mouth.
Just millimeters apart, vibrating to pump the fluids. And you’re matter, right? Solid matter.
So you can slip right through the field—”
“And they find you froze down around Venus in
sixty years.”
I was getting the picture. Hazardous duty, not
something you wanted to be interrupted doing. “So you were inspecting
the…loops.”
“Right, six of us. Working our way out from
the mouth, one loop after the other, like a cone, see. Almost out of
the haze into open space. And there she was.”
“She? How’d you know it was a ‘she’?”
The leader gaped at me. Hard as it is to read
expression on a vacuum-adapted face, I knew puzzlement when I saw it.
He glanced at his partner. The one with no helmet just stared.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told them. “She was
there.”
“Right. We might not of noticed except she
grazed a remote—”
“Stash’s.”
“Yeah. Stash thinks its debris broke out of
the processing stream—”
“Then he says, ‘holy shit!’ ”
“Yeah, when he sees the readout. Modulated
signals, shielded and enciphered, no ID—”
I crossed my arms. “So what’d you do?”
“We got the hell outta there!”
“And she came right after ’em!”
Second helmet was, if anything, more excited
than the one who had actually been there. I had a feeling I’d have
gotten a nice, wild, blood-and-thunder yarn out of him, accuracy be
damned. “Go ahead.”
“We yell for help, and kinda spread out with
the thing in the middle, see. Pasha—that’s Rey Murat, the string chief,
we call him Pasha—grabs our remotes to fill in the gaps. He can do
that—he’s got the codes. He says close in, throw an EMP at it. Knock it
out or slow it down, at least.”
“What did it look like?”
“Hard to say—it brought some fog with it, like
a plasma? Couldn’t make out the shape.”
I nodded, picturing it in my mind: the
surrounding haze aglare in the work lights, the rough sphere of
spacesuited jacks, that unknown and unknowable blob dashing around
between them.
“So the rest of the shift comes around the
funnel—”
“I saw this part!”
“It went straight at Morg—”
“And he let it through.”
I contemplated that for a moment. They watched
me in something approaching anxiety. Finally I nodded.
“Then Pasha started yelling—”
“Yeah, and Wit, back in the hall. Wanting to
know what was goin’ on—”
“—thing just zipped off, jamming every
possible freq—”
“It was fast—”
“Then you busted Morgan.” They looked at each
other.
“Right.”
“He say anything?”
They shook their heads. “No idea what the AI
was doing?”
“It was up to something—”
“You can’t tell. They get too strange. They
need humans around to keep ’em straight—”
“None of you guys thought of making a
recording?”
“Oh yeah!”
“Sure we did. The remotes copied. That’s SOP
in case of a mishap. Wit confiscated ’em all.”
“Witcove did?”
“Right. Said he wanted to keep the evidence
clean.”
I was thinking of a reply when the helmetless
one slipped off the railing and shot toward me. Halting himself with
one foot, he glared at me from a yard away.
“You guys got remotes too?”
I touched the unit at my ear. “Uhh…yeah.
Sometimes. Not everybody.”
He frowned. “What make is that?”
“Ah, that’s a Kiwi,” the second jack said.
“Remi’s got one of them.”
Mr. No-Helmet nodded. “Good unit.
High-density, lotta options.”
“Uh-huh,” I told him. “They mentioned that at
the outlet.”
Satisfied, he resumed his silent perch.
“Tell me something…” I looked between them.
“What if Morgan was guilty?”
Making a slicing noise, No-Helmet pulled a
finger across his throat, with a smile I could have done without.
“Yeah,” the leader agreed. “I hate to say it,
but—”
“Once they touch a guy, he’s no good anymore.”
I was prepared to ask where they’d ever come
across anyone who’d been “touched,” but decided to pass. All I’d
succeed in doing would be to release the entire corpus of impi campfire
lore, and there was no point in that.
“So where you guys headed?”
“Oh, we just finished shift,” second helmet
said.
“We’re going to eat some real food.”
“Just did three 24s in vac,” second helmet
said proudly.
“Three straight?” I understood that a lot of
jacks actually like spending time in vacuum. “That’s pretty good.”
The leader swung around without using his
hands, the way jacks do. Second helmet followed him with a
pleased-to-meet-ya thrown in my direction. But no-helmet remained where
he was. I waited a moment, and was about to ask what his immediate
plans were when he bent forward.
“Whatcha gotta do to become a cop?”
Act sane, for starters. “Fill out an ap, send
it in. They’ll get in touch.”
“Where I get an ap?”
I had him give me his address and ordered my
ship to send him one. “You can put my name on it,” I told him.
“Deep,” he said. His head swung toward a spot
over my right shoulder. “He’s right up there,” he said. “Ha.”
Behind what appeared to be an open-vacuum junk
drawer two levels up rose a small boxlike shape with a single lit
window. When I turned back no-helmet too had kicked off. I watched him
go, thinking about scapegoats, the pressures of living in this kind of
truncated society, and what happened to people who break the unwritten
but unbendable rules. But mostly I thought about the possible reasons
why Witcove had kept the recordings from me.
“Hey, mandy.” I touched the remote. “Yeah,
Remi.” He chuckled. “Mind I stay down, eh?” “Suit yourself. Lot of
traffic. Now…Morgan had just passed out.”
“You sharp. He did pass out.”
It doesn’t take much in the way of sharpness
to grasp how a man dying of starvation and cold would react on hearing
a voice where no voice was possible.
When he awoke, he was in a room that was
comfortable for all its unfamiliarity. He was lying on a cot of some
sort, and for reasons he didn’t bother to examine, he felt no urge to
get up. It wasn’t that he was too weak, he simply wasn’t inclined, and
that was all. He heard music, melodies of Earth, almost recognizable
though he couldn’t quite place them. He had a memory—an impression—that
one had been playing while he was being brought there.
It occurred to him to look around. He took in
the sight of the medical drip with no surprise. Even after centuries of
advances, there’s no better method of getting a lot of material into
the bloodstream fast than a tube in a vein. He clenched his fist,
smiled at the wave of tiredness that overcame him and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again she was standing there.
You can imagine what she looked like to him,
after all the way he’d come, after what he’d been through. Women aren’t
common in the Halo. They’re not rare either, but time often passes
before a jack encounters one. And to put it gently, many of them are
the female equivalents of the type of male yoyo that calls Kuio home.
But nothing ever destroys the deep, instinctive connection of the human
female with safety and security. That’s the way she appeared to him,
symbol made flesh, a saint in stained glass.
With later developments in mind, it’s easy to
speculate that she molded the image to match Morgan’s own expectations,
working from cues he was unaware of and wouldn’t have been able to
change if he had been. The room was dark, and though he could clearly
see the silver bracelets on her wrists, the necklace, the pair of roses
growing from her scalp and intertwined with her hair in that old style
that often fades but always returns, her face was clouded, her features
hazy.
“How you feeling?” was the first thing she
said. Morgan didn’t remember what he replied, but it pleased her; her
wide smile made that clear. He made an attempt at the usual questions,
but she just lay a hand on the blanket, and told him, “You rest.”
He reached for that hand but wasn’t quick
enough to grasp it before she turned and walked away. She looked back
only once, when he asked her name.
He lay down in pain, in disorientation, in
discomfort, but beneath it all with that indescribable sensation that
assured him he was going to live.
She returned the next day, and he saw that she
looked exactly as he might have guessed. When he answered her questions
about how he felt, she cocked her head in a way that he almost
recognized. He didn’t remain awake very long that day, or the next
either, just long enough for her to tell him a story about where he was
and what had happened that isn’t worth repeating because it wasn’t
true. But that didn’t matter to him at the time, nor did he suspect it.
Because he was in no concrete place at all, really. He was in that safe
place we leave behind in childhood, and revisit only in memory.
He remained there two weeks. He slept most of
the next few days—he assumed there was a sedative in the feed coming
down that tube. Whenever he awoke she was there, or arrived
momentarily. Never anyone but her, though he had the impression—gained
he didn’t know how—that others were around. But it was she who examined
him, who checked the medical machinery, who talked to him, who read to
him, who helped him pass the time required for him to regain his
strength.
It was the better part of a week before he
could eat. She let him feed himself—a bowl of clear broth. He kept it
down, and there was solid food to come, small portions so he wouldn’t
be tempted to stuff. She didn’t eat anything.
At last, the time came for him to get up and
exercise the muscles wasted by the weeks of his scarcely-remembered
ordeal. She encouraged him to get up by himself, stepping back to give
him room. He did well, taking five full steps to a chair and then back
to the bed after resting a bit. She was pleased with him, enough so
that he wanted to try it again right away. She told him it was better
to wait.
He must have been a touch overconfident the
next day. That or wanting to please her or maybe a mix of both. He went
a step further than he should have, a little faster than was necessary.
She was living out her own fantasy too, in whatever way an AI does,
because when he lost his balance, she moved to catch him, and her hand
went straight through his outstretched arm.
“Wait one,” I muttered. More alert now, I’d
spotted a movement below as a figure appeared over the curve of the
tank. Even at that distance I knew it was Witcove. I gestured Remi to
remain down.
I maintained a blank expression as Witcove
approached. He landed with a grunt. “So…how’s it going?”
“Out catching a little sun.”
“Little…” he frowned. “Oh…little sun. Sure.
Hehheh…Say, I was taking a look at your ship. Quite a bird.”
“Gets me around.”
“Surprised how quick you got here, but…this is
kind of an important thing, I guess. I mean, lot of people interested,
right? Might go straight back to Charon, or maybe even deeper.”
I nodded.
“So…word will get around. People will talk.
Unless they maybe…classify it? But there’s such things as leaks, too.
See, you can’t win.”
He shook his head and sighed. “Y’know, you get
work out here by rep. Word of mouth. Somebody says, Powder Monkeys do a
great job, never have to tell ’em things twice…That’s how you get
hired. No other way—advertising, bidding, forget about it. You need a
good rep. And you don’t get one overnight see, takes decades of hard,
solid work. We got a good rep, the Monkeys. And we get our share of
contracts. But here’s the thing…”
He bent close, his grotesque, vacuum-adapted
face all intent. “People hear there’s runaways hanging around the hall,
and one of the Monkeys well, working with it. Now that wouldn’t be so
good. For the reputation, see. So I been thinking about that.”
“Go on.”
“What I was thinking, what if it happened
different. What if Morgan quit. A few weeks back. Not too long ago,
month or two. What if nobody could say, ‘Rog Morgan, Powder Monkey.’
What about that?”
“You’re saying you want me to falsify a
report.”
“Noooo—I’m not saying that.” Witcove snorted
at my obtuseness. “But if you waited a bit, so I could mess with
Morgan’s files, see, I could make it look like he was forty AUs from
here, with another outfit, or prospecting on his own…yeah, that’d be
best. He quit and went out on his own. Come back to trade for supplies.
Say, I ever tell you that the Monkeys are a public company?”
He bobbed his head. “That’s right. PM plc.
Traded on all the big boards. Stock went up another tick last week.
Never drops. Better than blue chip. We got a pretty good-size block of
unassigned certificates right in my office and what do you say about
that report?”
“I could change it.” I pronounced the words
carefully, trying to hide the disgust I felt. Witcove seemed to shrink
into himself with relief. “Sure. Or I could bust you and lock you up in
my ship this minute.”
He stared at me in utter silence. “Or maybe
freeze your systems and let you wait six or seven months for a
magistrate to come by.”
His eye membranes flicked once, as if he was
blinking. “Nah—we’ll go for the bust.” Raising my voice as if it could,
in fact, carry through vacuum, I contacted the ship. “…prepare space
for a single perp, charge attempted bribery of a Mandate law
enforcement officer, that calls for maximum security, I believe.”
Witcove came back to life, waving his arms
wildly, swinging his head in all directions as if to catch the ship
sneaking up on him. I watched him for a moment.
“Or maybe we won’t do that either.” He went
still, arms extended. “Instead, maybe you’ll give me the recordings you
held back, you simple SOB.”
His arms fell and he recited the codes in a
monotone. He remained silent as I sent them on to the ship with
instructions to go through them for anomalies. “Wasn’t just for me,” he
muttered after I finished. “I was thinking of the guys—”
“I know that.”
Witcove wasn’t bad. There were any number
worse scattered across the Halo. Foremen and plant owners who didn’t
think of the guys at all, or thought of them only to cheat them,
terrorize them, abuse them, let them down in every conceivable way.
Whatever Witcove might be, he wasn’t one of them. He was on the high
end, as such things are graded. “Now go on.”
I stopped him as he swung over the railing.
“What’s the code to that shed lock?”
He gave it to me and left without another
word.
Remi chuckled. “Knew you’d do that,” I
grimaced. As if I’d take a bribe in front of a witness.
“Go on with the story, Remi.”
“Not much to tell. When he looked up she was
gone, and he went back to bed lay there thinking. You know that old
story about the guy the munchkins took away to Manhattan? Only there
couple weeks but when he got back it was centuries and everybody was
dead, and he had him a long beard. Ever hear that one?”
“Something like it, yeah.”
“I mean, duppies. What they want? Who knows?
Who’s gonna hang around find out? So he waited til it was real quiet,
and got up. His suit was right outside the door, like it was waiting
for him. He put it on, ran a check. All powered up, reservoirs full,
and there was extra supply packs stacked on the floor. He went down
this hallway, and round the corner the lights were on, leading to what
sure as hell looked like a lock. He went over, and he’s just about to
step in and he stops, ’cause he’s sure, see, they gonna grab him…”
Right then I got a buzz from the ship.
Slipping the handset from my belt, I read a message about the recorder
footage. I told it to play.
“…got in the lock, about to shut the door and
he stops again. Helmet still open, see. Heard a sound from inside. A
song, way quiet, like she was saying goodbye…”
The scene playing on my handset was much as
I’d imagined it: the brightly-lit haze, the jacks spread out, that
unwelcome entity feinting between them. A flashing caret marked Rog
Morgan. I watched as the impi swung toward him, as his hands rose, as
the thing slipped past into open sky.
“And whacha think he did?”
The screen displayed another angle of the same
scene: Jacks, Morgan, the impi…I lifted the set, paying close attention
to his hands. “Turned around, went back.”
“You got it!” Remi sounded delighted.
I called for a closeup of Morgan’s hands, went
through it twice in slow motion. “Yeah, that’s what he did. And she
came in a few minutes later, and he was on the bed in his suit, and he
said, ‘I like that song.’ I’da kept going.”
“So would I.”
The screen began another replay. I canceled
and it went dark. No point in watching it again. There was not a single
doubt in my mind as to what had occurred. “Remi…I thank you, the
Mandate thanks you…”I looked up at the shed’s single lonely window. I
didn’t think Morgan was going to thank him.
I started toward the shed, muscles quivering,
mind ablaze with that feeling you get only when a case is coming
together. A warning notice flashed as I approached the next level. I
kicked up and over, barely pausing to catch my balance as I landed.
The impis had gotten to him. There was no way
around it; the footage was clear. Morgan was in full and witting
contact with rogue entities and all that implied. It was the break we’d
been waiting for, the first sign of an active human/impi organization.
I needed immediate backup, every ship within a
month’s radius. The hall’s higher-level activities would have to be
frozen, to make sure it didn’t wander off. A lot of people would be
coming to look the place over. They’d be studying this hall down all
the way down to the gluons for years to come. As for Morgan…I didn’t
want to think about that part.
I paused at the door, almost breathless. With
quick stabs I punched in the code. I charged inside before it was half
open. “Okay, ace—what did she pass to you?”
Morgan barely started. He gave me a mournful
look, then reached into his jacket pocket. He gazed down at the object
in his hand and with a sigh tossed it to me.
It was a piece of scrim. I’d seen that even as
he took it out. I hefted it. Some kind of metal, an alloy I couldn’t
identify. The bust of a woman, head cocked to one side, a smile on her
face, hair lifting away as if blown by an invisible breeze.
I raised my eyes to Morgan. “She went…You’re
telling me the impi went after this for you.”
“No.” Morgan shook his head. “Alerted some
others. They picked it up.”
I turned the statuette over in my hand. It’s
hollow, I told myself. Imprinted on the molecular level with some
message, some command…
I examined the face once again, the laughing
eyes, the lips so lifelike they seemed about to speak, to give word to
everything Morgan had left behind: light, and warmth, air to breathe.
He’d put a lot of work into the thing. It occurred to me, somewhat
belatedly, that it was a portrait of someone he knew. Had once known.
No wonder he wanted it back.
For a second or two my mind struggled against
the evidence of simple kindness, desperate for a reason to raise the
alarm after all. But it wasn’t hollow, and contained nothing, and it
wouldn’t take me anywhere. I tossed it back to Morgan. “Nice piece.” I
got out of my handset. “Okay—does our little pal have a name?”
“Isis,” he said softly. I had to ask him to
repeat it.
I left the door unlocked. The hall’s top
level was only a few yards overhead. I kicked off for it, setting down
amidst a jungle of antennas and cables and junk. That grand glowing
tube of dirty-yellow muck towered above me. I eyed it with the
weariness of years, seeing my own youth vanish over that bright curve,
its roaring song fading relentlessly into gray. Some are meant for the
sunlight and some for the shadowed places. It was pretty clear to me
which portion was mine.
Morgan hadn’t told me much; whatever didn’t
feel like betrayal. I’d lase it back to Charon, where they’d give it to
some specialist to ponder. Maybe they’d find more in it than I had. I
doubted it.
“Hey, mandy.” I turned to see Remi gazing at
me through his helmet visor, ready, I suppose, to go on shift. It was a
moment before I recalled the remote riding on my ear. I plucked it off
and handed it back.
“All straighten out?”
“More or less. He’ll be ready to leave
tomorrow. He wants you to run the catapult.”
“He ain’t stridin’ again?”
“Not like he has a lot to worry about.”
“Ahh…I gotcha.”
“Nice to have friends,” I said. He shook his
head. “Can’t stand him myself. He chatters.”
I watched him leave. For a moment he was
silhouetted against the tower, and I saw him as an impi might, a human
figure outlined by light. Then he vanished, the way jacks do.
It wasn’t as dark as it had been. The shadows
had lifted somewhat. I knew the names of one of the spirits, the right
questions to ask, and the fact that the dragons might not be dragons
after all. A pretty good day, all considered.
I looked over my shoulder toward home. The
stars glared back, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, decide which was
which. After a moment I gave up and went to tell Witcove how it was
going to be.
Carol Emshwiller
(www.sfwa.org/members/emshwiller/) lives in New York City and has been
publishing in the SF field since the 1950s, when her attractive image
graced the covers of many SF books and magazines illustrated by her
husband, Ed Emshwiller, who signed his paintings EMSH. By the early
1970s, her fiction had moved into the area of the literary avant-garde,
and she became a respected feminist writer as well—her first story
collection was Joy in Our Cause (1975).
Her career flowered in the last decade or so, with several collections
of stories— Verging on the Pertinent (1989),
The Start of the End of it All (1990), and
Report to the Men’s Club (2002)—and three
novels—Carmen Dog (1990),
Ledoyt (1995), Leaping Man Hill (1999), and The Mount (2002). In the year 2002, she published at least
four fine new stories and two books.
“Grandma,” from
F&SF , is a feminist SF story rich in
metaphorical resonances, perhaps a satire on superheroes, or perhaps at
the same time an allegory of generational changes in feminism. Grandma
was a superhero (sort of like Wonder Woman) in her younger days, who
spent her time righting wrongs and defending justice. She could fly
through the air, wore a special costume, and was world-famous. Now she
is quite old, and her granddaughter (who, in the shadow of her
reputation, feels that she can never do anything right) lives with her
in the country.
Grandma used to be a woman of action.
She wore tights. She had big boobs, but a teeny weeny bra. Her waist
used to be twenty-four inches. Before she got so hunched over she could
do way more than a hundred of everything, pushups, sit-ups, chinning….
She had naturally curly hair. Now it’s dry and fine and she’s a little
bit bald. She wears a babushka all the time and never takes her teeth
out when I’m around or lets me see where she keeps them, though of
course I know. She won’t say how old she is. She says the books about
her are all wrong, but, she says, that’s her own fault. For a long
while she lied about her age and other things, too.
She used to be on every search and rescue team
all across these mountains. I think she might still be able to rescue
people. Small ones. Her set of weights is in the basement. She has a
punching bag. She used to kick it, too, but I don’t know if she still
can do that. I hear her thumping and grunting around down there—even
now when she needs a cane for walking. And talk about getting up off
the couch!
I go down to that gym myself sometimes and try
to lift those weights. I punch at her punching bag. (I can’t reach it
except by standing on a box. When I try to kick it, I always fall
over.)
Back in the olden days Grandma wasn’t as shy
as she is now. How could she be and do all she did? But now she doesn’t
want to be a bother. She says she never wanted to be a bother, just
help out is all.
She doesn’t expect any of us to follow in her
footsteps. She used to, but not anymore. We’re a big disappointment.
She doesn’t say so, but we have to be. By now she’s given up on all of
us. Everybody has.
It started…we started with the idea of
selective breeding. Everybody wanted more like Grandma: strong, fast
thinking, fast acting, and with the desire…that’s
the most important thing…a desire for her kind of life, a life of
several hours in the gym every single day. Grandma loved it. She says
(and says and says), “I’d turn on some banjo music and make it all into
a dance.”
Back when Grandma was young, offspring weren’t
even thought of since who was there around good enough for her to
marry? Besides, everybody thought she’d last forever. How could
somebody like her get old? is what they thought.
She had three… “husbands” they called them
(donors more like it), first a triathlon champion, then a prize
fighter, then a ballet dancer.
There’s this old wives tale of skipping
generations, so, after nothing good happened with her children, Grandma
(and everybody else) thought, surely it would be us grandchildren. But
we’re a motley crew. Nobody pays any attention to us anymore.
I’m the runt. I’m small for my age, my foot
turns in, my teeth stick out, I have a lazy eye…. There’s lots of work
to be done on me. Grandma’s paying for all of it though she knows I’ll
never amount to much of anything. I wear a dozen different kinds of
braces, teeth, feet, a patch over my good eye. My grandfather, the
ballet dancer!
Sometimes I wonder why Grandma does all this
for me, a puny, limping, limp-haired girl? What I think is, I’m her real baby at last. They didn’t let her
have any time off to look after her own children—not ever until now
when she’s too old for rescuing people. She not only was on all the
search and rescue teams, she was a dozen search and rescue teams all by
herself, and often she had to rescue the search and rescue teams.
Not only that, she also rescued animals. She
always said the planet would die without its creatures. You’d see her
leaping over mountains with a deer under each arm. She moved bears from
camp grounds to where they wouldn’t cause trouble. You’d see her with
handfuls of rattlesnakes gathered from golf courses and carports,
flying them off to places where people would be safe from them and
they’d be safe from people.
She even tried to rescue the climate, pulling
and pushing at the clouds. Holding back floods. Reraveling the ozone.
She carried huge sacks of water to the trees of one great dying forest.
In the long run there was only failure. Even after all those rescues,
always only failure. The bears came back. The rattlesnakes came back.
Grandma gets to thinking all her good deeds
went wrong. Lots of times she had to let go and save…maybe five babies
and drop three. I mean, even Grandma only had two arms. She expected
more of herself. I always say, “You did save lots of people. You kept
that forest alive ten years longer than expected. And me. I’m saved.” That always makes her laugh,
and I am saved. She says, “I guess
my one good eye can see well enough to look after you, you rapscallion.”
She took me in after my parents died. (She
couldn’t save them. There are some things you just can’t do anything
about no matter who you are, like drunken drivers. Besides, you can’t
be everywhere.)
When she took me to care for, she was already
feeble. We needed each other. She’d never be able to get along without
me. I’m the saver of the saver.
How did we end up this way, way out here in
the country with me her only helper? Did she scare everybody else off
with her neediness? Or maybe people couldn’t stand to see how far down
she’s come from what she used to be. And I suppose she has gotten
difficult, but I’m used to her. I hardly notice. But she’s so busy
trying not to be a bother she’s a bother. I have to read her mind. When
she holds her arms around herself, I get her old red sweatshirt with
her emblem on the front. When she says, “Oh
dear,” I get her a cup of green tea. When she’s on the couch and
struggles and leans forward on her cane, trembling, I pull her up. She
likes quiet. She likes for me to sit by her, lean against her, and
listen to the birds along with her. Or listen to her stories. We don’t
have a radio or TV set. They conked out a long time ago and no one
thought to get us new ones, but we don’t need them. We never wanted
them in the first place.
Grandma sits me down beside her, the lettuce
planted, the mulberries picked, sometimes a mulberry pie already made
(I helped), and we just sit. “I had a grandma,” she’ll say, “though I
know, to look at me, it doesn’t seem like I could have. I’m older than
most grandmas ever get to be, but we all had grandmas, even me. Picture
that: Every single person in the world with a grandma.” Then she
giggles. She still has her girlish giggle. She says, “Mother didn’t
know what to make of me. I was opening her jars for her before I was
three years old. Mother…. Even that was a long time ago.”
When she’s in a sad mood she says everything
went wrong. People she had just rescued died a week later of something
that Grandma couldn’t have helped. Hantavirus or some such that they
got from vacuuming a closed room, though sometimes Grandma had just
warned them not to do that. (Grandma believes in prevention as much as
in rescuing.)
I’ve rescued things. Lots of them. Nothing
went wrong either. I rescued a junco with a broken wing. After rains
I’ve rescued stranded worms from the wet driveway and put them back in
our vegetable garden. I didn’t let Grandma cut the suckers off our
fruit trees. I rescued mice from sticky traps. I fed a litter of feral
kittens and got fleas and worms from them. Maybe this rescuing is the
one part of Grandma I inherited.
Who’s to say which is more worthwhile, pushing
atom bombs far out into space or one of these little things I do? Well,
I do know which is more important, but if I were the junco I’d like
being rescued.
Sometimes Grandma goes out, though rarely.
She gets to feeling it’s a necessity. She wears sunglasses and a big
floppy hat and scarves that hide her wrinkled-up face and neck. She
still rides a bicycle. She’s so wobbly it’s scary to see her trying to
balance herself down the road. I can’t look. She likes to bring back
ice-cream for me, maybe get me a comic book and a licorice stick to
chew on as I read it. I suppose in town they just take her for a crazy
lady, which I guess she is.
When visitors come to take a look at her I
always say she isn’t home, but where else would a very, very, very old
lady be but mostly home? If she knew people had come she’d have hobbled
out to see them and probably scared them half to death. And they
probably wouldn’t have believed it was her, anyway. Only the president
of the Town and Country Bank—she rescued him a long time ago—I let him
in. He’ll sit with her for a while. He’s old but of course not as old
as she is. And he likes her for herself. They talked all through his
rescue and really got to know each other back then. They talked about
tomato plants and wildflowers and birds. When she rescued him they were
flying up with the wild geese. (They still talk about all those geese
they flew with and how exciting that was with all the honking and the
sound of wings flapping right beside them. I get goose bumps—geese
bumps?—just hearing them talk about it.) She should have married
somebody like him, potbelly, pock-marked face and all. Maybe we’d have
turned out better.
I guess you could say I’m the one that
killed her—caused her death, anyway.
I don’t know what got into me. Lots of times I don’t know what gets
into me and lots of times I kind of run away for a couple of hours.
Grandma knows about it. She doesn’t mind. Sometimes she even tells me,
“Go on. Get out of here for a while.” But this time I put on her old
tights and one of the teeny tiny bras. I don’t have breasts yet so I
stuffed the cups with Kleenex. I knew I couldn’t do any of the things
Grandma did, I just thought it would be fun to pretend for a little
while.
I started out toward the hill. It’s a long
walk but you get to go through a batch of piñons. But first you
have to go up an arroyo. Grandma’s cape dragged over the rocks and sand
behind me. It was heavy, too. To look at the satiny red outside you’d
think it would be light, but it has a felt lining. “Warm and
waterproof,” Grandma said. I could hardly walk. How did she ever manage
to fly around in it?
I didn’t get very far before I found a
jackrabbit lying in the middle of the arroyo half dead (but half alive,
too), all bit and torn. I’ll bet I’m the one that scared off whatever
it was that did that. That rabbit was a goner if I didn’t rescue it. I
was a little afraid because wounded rabbits bite. Grandma’s cape was
just the right thing to wrap it in so it wouldn’t.
Those jackrabbits weigh a lot. And with the
added weight of the cape….
Well, all I did was sprain my ankle. I mean I
wasn’t really hurt. I always have the knife Grandma gave me. I cut some
strips off the cape and bound myself up good and tight. It isn’t as if
Grandma has a lot of capes. This is her only one. I felt bad about
cutting it. I put the rabbit across my shoulders. It was slow going but
I wasn’t leaving the rabbit for whatever it was to finish eating it. It
began to be twilight. Grandma knows I can’t see well in twilight. The
trouble is, though she used to see like an eagle, Grandma can’t see
very well anymore either.
She tried to fly, as she used to do. She did fly. For my sake. She skimmed along
just barely above the sage and bitter-brush, her feet snagging at the
taller ones. That was all the lift she could get. I could see, by the
way she leaned and flopped like a dolphin, that she was trying to get
higher. She was calling, “Sweetheart. Sweetheart. Where are
yooooowwww?” Her voice was almost as loud as it used to be. It echoed
all across the mountains.
“Grandma, go back. I’ll be all right.” My
voice can be loud, too.
She heard me. Her ears are still as sharp as a
mule’s.
The way she flew was kind of like she rides a
bicycle. All wobbly. Veering off from side to side, up and down, too. I
knew she would crack up. And she looked funny flying around in her
print dress. She only has one costume and I was wearing it.
“Grandma, go back. Please go back.”
She wasn’t at all like she used to be. A
little fall like that from just a few feet up would never have hurt her
a couple of years ago. Or even last year. Even if, as she did, she
landed on her head.
I covered her with sand and brush as best I
could. No doubt whatever was about to eat the rabbit would come gnaw on
her. She wouldn’t mind. She always said she wanted to give herself back
to the land. She used to quote, I don’t know from where, “All to the
soil, nothing to the grave.” Getting eaten is sort
of like going to the soil.
I don’t dare tell people what happened—that
it was all my fault—that I got myself in trouble sort of on purpose,
trying to be like her, trying to rescue something.
But I’m not as sad as you might think. I knew
she would die pretty soon anyway and this is a better way than in bed
looking at the ceiling, maybe in pain. If that had happened, she
wouldn’t have complained. She’d not have said a word, trying not to be
a bother. Nobody would have known about the pain except me. I would
have had to grit my teeth against her pain the whole time.
I haven’t told anybody partly because I’m
waiting to figure things out. I’m here all by myself, but I’m good at
looking after things. There are those who check on us every
weekend—people who are paid to do it. I wave at them. “All okay.” I
mouth it. The president of the Town and Country Bank came out once. I
told him Grandma wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t exactly
a lie. How long can this go on? He’ll be the one who finds out first—if
anybody does. Maybe they won’t.
I’m nursing my jackrabbit. We’re friends now.
He’s getting better fast. Pretty soon I’ll let him go off to be a
rabbit. But he might rather stay here with me.
I’m wearing Grandma’s costume most of the time
now. I sleep in it. It makes me feel safe. I’m doing my own little
rescues as usual. (The vegetable garden is full of happy weeds. I keep
the bird feeder going. I leave scraps out for the skunk.) Those
count—almost as much as Grandma’s rescues did. Anyway, I know the weeds
think so.
Neil Asher
(http://website.lineone.net/~nealasher) lives in Chelmsford, England.
His short fiction has been published for several years in the UK small
press. Books include Mindgames: Fool’s Mate (1993), The Parasite & The Engineer (1997) Africa Zero (2001),
and Runcible Tales (1999). The
aforementioned are all short story collections and novellas. His first
novel, Gridlinked, a kind of James
Bond space opera, was published in the UK in 2001, and his second,
The Skinner, in 2002. Both books are set in the
same future—the “runcible universe,” where matter transmitters called
runcibles link the settled worlds—and are forthcoming in the U.S.
“My aim is to
entertain,” he says, “not blind people with my brilliance. I’m from the
school of Arnold Schwartzenegger SF.”
“Snow in the
Desert,” published in Spectrum SF,
where several of Asher’s stories have appeared, is proof that space
opera in the most traditional sense (related to the western) is still
being written with verve and sincerity. It certainly is hyperbolic. Our
hero, a long-lived albino gunslinger, is hiding out on a frontier
planet because there is a bounty price on his balls. Everyone wants his
genetic code because he may be the only immortal human. It is
interesting to compare this to the Moorcock story on page 458.
A sand shark broke through the top of
the dune, only to be snatched by a crab-bird and shredded in mid-air.
Hirald squatted down, wrapping her cloak around her and pulling up the
hood. The chameleon cloth shaded to match the violet sand, leaving only
her Toshiba goggles and the blunt snout of her singun visible. It was a
small crab bird, but she had quickly learned never to underestimate
them. Should the prey be too large for it to kill, the bird would take
pieces instead. No motile source of protein was too large to attack.
The shame was that all the life-forms on Vatch were based on non-Terran
proteins, so to a crab-bird, human flesh was completely without
nourishment.
The bird stripped the shark of its blade-legs
and armored mandibles and flew off with the bleeding and writhing
torso, probably to feed to its chick. Hirald stood up and reappeared; a
tall woman in a tight-fitting body-suit, webbed with cooling veins and
hung with insulated pockets. On her back she carried a desert survival
pack, to create the right impression. Likewise, the formidable singun
went into a button-down holster that looked as if it might hold only a
simple projectile weapon. She removed her goggles and mask, tucking
them away in one of her many pockets before moving on across the sand.
Her thin features, blue eyes, and long blond hair were exposed to oven
temperatures and skin-flaying ultraviolet. So it had been for many
weeks now. Occasionally she drank some water, just in case someone was
watching.
He was called, inevitably, Snow, but with
his mask and dust robes it was not immediately evident that he was an
albino. The mask, made from the shell of a terrapin, was what
identified him. That, and a tendency to leave corpses behind. The
current reward for his stasis-preserved testicles was twenty thousand
shillings, or the equivalent value in copper or manganese or other
precious metals. Many had tried for that reward, and such was their
epitaph: they tried.
Snow understood that there might be
bounty-hunters waiting at the water station. They would have weapons,
strength, and skill. Balanced against this was the crippling honor code
of the Andronache. Snow had all the former and none of the latter. Born
on Earth so long ago that he doubted his memories, he had long since
dispensed with anything that might impede his survival. Morality, he
often argued, is a purely human invention, only to be indulged in times
of plenty. Another of his little aphorisms ran something along the
lines of: “If you’re up Shit Creek without a paddle, don’t expect the
coastguard.” His contemporaries on Vatch never knew what to make of
that one, unsurprisingly as Vatchians had no use for words like creek, paddle or coast.
The station was a metallic ovoid mounted ten
meters above the ground on a forest of scaffolding. Nailing it to the
ground was the silvery tube of the geothermal energy tap that powered
the transmuter—which made it possible for humans to exist on this
practically waterless planet. The transmuter took complex compounds,
stripped them of their elementary hydrogen, and combined that with the
abundant oxygen given off by the dryform algae that turned all the
sands of Vatch violet. Water was the product, but there were many
interesting by-products: rare metals and strange silica compounds were
among the planet’s main exports.
As he topped the final dune Snow raised his
image-intensifier and scanned ahead. The station was truly a small
city, the center of commerce, the center of life. He frowned under his
mask. Unfortunately, he needed water for the last stage of his journey,
and this was the only place he could get it.
Snow strode down the face of the dune to where
a dusty track snaked toward the station. By the roadside a water-thief
lay dying at the bottom of a condensation jar. His blistered fingers
scratched at the hot glass. Snow passed by, ignoring him. It was a
harsh punishment, but how else to treat someone who regarded his fellow
human beings as no more than walking water-flasks? As he neared the
station, cries from the rookery of hawkers and stall-holders in the
ground city reached out to him, and he could see the buzz of activity
in the scaffold maze. Soon he entered the noisy life of the ground
city; a little after that he passed through the moisture lock of the
Sand House.
A waiter spoke to Snow, “My pardon, master. I
must see your tag. The Androche herself has declared the law
enforceable by a two-month branding. The word is that too many outlaws
now survive on the fringe.” The man could not help staring at Snow’s
pink eyes and bloodless face.
“No problem, friend.” Snow fumbled through his
robes to produce his micro-etched identity tag and handed it over. The
waiter glanced at the briefly revealed leather-clad stump that
terminated Snow’s left arm, and pretended not to notice. He put the tag
through his portable reader and was much relieved when no alarm
sounded. Snow was well aware that not everyone was checked like this,
only the more suspicious-looking customers.
“What would you like, master?”
“A liter of chilled lager.”
The waiter looked at him doubtfully.
“Which I will pay for now,” Snow added,
handing over a ten shilling note. The waiter, obviously alarmed at such
a large sum in cash, hurried off with it as quickly as he could. Many
eyes followed his progress when he returned with a liter of lager in a
thermos stein with combination locked top, for here was an indication
of wealth.
Snow would not have agreed. He had worked it
out. A liter of water would have cost only two shillings less, and the
water lost through sweat evaporation little different. Two shillings,
plus a little, for imbibing fluid in a much more pleasant form.
He had nearly finished his liter and was
relishing the sheer cellular pleasure of rehydration when the three
entered the Sand House. He recognized them as killers immediately, but
before paying the slightest attention to them he drained every last
drop of lager from the frictionless vessel.
“You are Snow, the albino,” the first said,
standing before his table. Snow observed her and felt a leaden
inevitability. Even after all these years he could not shake his
aversion to killing women—or this time, young girls. She could not have
been more than twenty. She stood before him attired in monofilament
coveralls and weapons harness. Her face was elfin under a head of
cropped, black hair spiked out with goldfleck grease.
“No, I’m not,” he said, and turned his
attention elsewhere.
“Don’t fuck with me,” she said with a
tiredness beyond her years. “I know who you are. You are an albino and
your left hand is missing.”
He returned his attention to her. “My name is
Jelda Conley. People call me Whitey. I have often been confused with
this Snow you refer to, and it was on one such occasion that I lost my
hand. Now please leave me alone.”
The girl stepped back, confused. The
Andronache honor code did not allow for creative lying. Snow glanced
past her and noted one of her companions speaking to the owner, who had
sent the nervous waiter over. The lies would not be enough. He watched
while the owner called over the waiter and checked the screen of his
tag reader. The companion approached the girl, whispered in her ear.
“You lied to me,” she said.
“No I didn’t.”
“Yes you did!”
This was getting ridiculous. Snow stared off
into the distance and ignored her.
“I challenge you,” the girl said.
There, it was said. Snow pretended he had not
heard her.
“I said, ‘I challenge you!’.”
By the code she could now kill him. It was
against the law but accepted practice. Snow felt a sinking sensation as
she stepped back.
“Stand and face me, coward.”
With a tiredness that was wholly genuine Snow
rose to his feet. She snatched her slammer. Snow reacted. She hit the
floor on her back, the front of her monofilament coverall punctured and
a smoking hole between her pert little breasts. Snow stepped past the
table, past her, and was almost at the moisture lock before anyone
could react.
It rested on the violet sands at the edge of
a spaceport, which was scattered with huge flying-wing shuttles,
outbuildings and hangars. It stood between the spaceport and the sprawl
of Vatchian buildings linked by moisture-sealed walkways and the glass
domes that covered the incongruous green of the parks. And in no way
did it resemble any of the structures around it. It could be found on a
thousand planets of the human Polity, and it was the reason for the
spread of the human race across the galaxy.
The runcible facility was a mirrored sphere
fifty meters across, seemingly prevented from rolling away by two
L-shaped buffers to either side. All around it, the glass-roofed
embarkation lounges were puddles of light. Within the sphere, the
Skaidon gate performed its miracle every few minutes: bringing in
quince-mitter travelers from all across the polity, and sending them
away again.
Beck stood back from the arrivals’ entrance
and through it watched the twin horns of the runcible on its dais of
black glass. He watched the shimmer of the cusp between those horns and
impatiently checked his watch, not that they could be late—or early.
They would arrive on the nanosecond. The runcible AI would see to that.
Precisely on time a man stepped through the shimmer, a woman, another
man, another woman. They matched the descriptions he had been given,
and his greeting was effusive as they came through to the lounge.
“Your transport awaits outside,” he told them,
hurrying them to exit. Beck’s employer did not want them to stay in the
city. He wanted them out, those were Beck’s instructions; among others.
Once they were in the hover transport, the man he took to be the leader
caught hold of his shoulder.
“The weapons,” he said.
“Not here, not here,” Beck said nervously, and
took the transport out of the city.
Out on the sand Beck brought the transport
down. Once the four climbed out, he joined them at the back of the
vehicle, from which he took a large case. He was sweating, and not just
from the heat.
“Here,” he said, opening the case.
The man reached inside and took out a small,
shiny pistol, snubnosed and deadly-looking.
“The merchant will meet you at the
pre-arranged place, if he manages to obtain the information he seeks,”
Beck said. He did not know where that was, nor what the information
was. The merchant had not taken him that far into his trust. It
surprised him that he had been allowed even the knowledge that hired
killers were on Vatch.
The man nodded as he inspected the pistol,
smiled sadly, then pointed the pistol at Beck.
“Sorry,” he said.
Beck tried to say something just as he became
aware of the arm coming round his face from the man who had moved
behind him. A grip like iron closed around his head, locked, wrenched
and twisted. Beck hit the sand with his head at an angle it had never
achieved in life. He made some choking sounds, shivered a little, died.
Snow halted as two proctors came in through
the lock. They stared past him to the corpse on the floor. The elder of
the two, gray-bearded and running to fat, but with weapons that
appeared well-used and well looked-after, spoke to him.
“You are Snow,” he said.
“Yes,” Snow replied. This man was not
Andronache.
“A challenge?”
“Yes.”
The man nodded, assessed the two Andronache at
the bar, then turned back to the moisture lock. It was not his job to
pick up the corpses. There was an organization for that. The girl would
be in a condensation jar within the hour.
“The Androche would speak with you. Come with
me.” To his companion he said, “Deal with it. Her two friends look like
they ought to spend a little time in detention.”
Snow followed the man outside.
“Why does she want to see me?” he asked as
they strode down the scaffolded street.
“I didn’t ask.”
Conversation ended there.
The Androche, like all in her position, had
apartments in the station she owned. The proctor led Snow to a caged
spiral stair and unlocked the gate. “She is above.”
As Snow climbed the stair the gate clanged
shut behind him.
The stairway ended at a moisture-lock hatch
next to which depended a monitor and screen unit. Snow pressed the call
button and waited. After a few moments a woman with cropped, gray hair
and a face that was all hard angles peered out at him.
“Yes?”
“You sent for me.”
The woman nodded and the lock on the hatch
clunked open. After spinning the handle Snow stepped back as the hatch
rose on its hinge to allow him access. He climbed into a short,
metal-walled corridor that ended at a single panel door of imported
wood. It looked like oak to Snow—very expensive. Pushing the door open,
he entered.
The room was filled with a fortune in
antiques: a huge dining table surrounded by gate-leg chairs; plush
eighteenth-century furniture; oil paintings on the walls; hand-woven
rugs on the floor.
“Don’t be too impressed. They’re all copies.”
The Androche approached from a drinks cabinet
carrying two glasses half filled with an amber drink. Snow studied her.
She was an attractive woman. He estimated her age as somewhere between
thirty-five and a hundred and ninety. She wore a simple toga-type dress
over an athletic figure, and at her hip she carried an antique—or
replica—revolver.
“You know my
name,” Snow observed as he accepted the drink.
“I am Aleen,” she replied.
Snow hardly heard her. He was relishing his
first sip.
“My God, whiskey,” he said, eventually.
“Yes,” Aleen acknowledged, before gesturing
to a nearby sofa. They moved there and sat facing each other.
“Well, I’m here. What do you want?”
“Why is there a reward of twenty-five thousand
shillings for your testicles?”
“Best ask Merchant Baris that question. But I
see it was rhetorical. You already know the answer.”
Aleen nodded.
Snow leaned toward her. “I would be glad to
know that answer too,” he admitted.
Aleen smiled, Snow leaned back, annoyed.
“There is a price,” he said flatly.
“Isn’t there always? There is a man. He is the
Chief Proctor here. His name is David Songrel.”
“You want me to kill him.”
“Of course. Isn’t that what you are best at?”
Snow kept silent as Aleen lay back against the
edge of the sofa, then regarded him over her drink. “That is not all I
want from you.”
He turned and gazed at her and at that moment
she lifted her feet up onto the sofa so that he could see that she wore
nothing under the dress. Does she shave,
Snow wondered, or is she naturally hairless
there? He also wondered what it was that turned her on: his
white body and pink eyes? Other women had said it was almost like being
made love to by an alien. Or was it that he was a killer? Probably a
bit of both.
“Part of the price?”
She nodded and set her glass to one side, then
she slid closer to him on the sofa and hooked one leg over the back of
it.
“Now,” she said, reaching up and opening her
toga to display breasts just like those of the girl he had killed. Snow
searched himself for an adverse reaction to that; finding none, he
stood up and unclipped his dust robes.
“You’re white as paper,” Aleen said in
amazement as he peeled off his undersuit, but when her eyes strayed to
the covered stump terminating his left arm, she made no comment.
“Yes,” Snow agreed as he knelt between her
legs and bowed down to run his tongue round her nipples. “A blank
page,” he went on as he worked his way down. She caught his head.
“Not that,” she said. “I want you inside me,
now.”
Snow obliged her, but was puzzled at something
he had heard in her voice. No love-making then: just the act itself.
Perhaps she wanted white-skinned children.
Hirald called out before approaching the
fire. It had been her observation that the Andronache got rather
twitchy if you walked into one of their camps unannounced. As she
walked in she was surprised to see that these weren’t locals. Hirald
noted two men and two women wearing monofilament survival suits that
looked to be of Martian manufacture. She also pretended not to notice
the weapons that one of the men had hastily covered on her arrival. She
walked to the fire and squatted down. One of the women tossed on
another crabbird carapace and watched her through the flames.
The man who had covered the weapons, a tall
Marsman with caste markings tattooed on his temples, was the first to
speak. “You’ve come a long way?” he asked.
“Not so far as you,” Hirald said. She looked
from him across the flames to the woman. Her face also bore caste
marks. The other couple were a black man with incongruous blue eyes,
and a woman who had caps over the neural plugs behind her ears. She was corporate then—from one of The
Families.
Hirald went on, “But why have you come here, I
wonder?”
“We search,” the black said intently. “Perhaps
you can help us. We search for one who is called Snow. He is an
albino.”
They all stared at Hirald.
“I have heard of him,” Hirald said, “and I
have heard that many people look for him. I do not know where he is
though.”
The woman with the neural plugs looked
suspicious. Hirald quickly asked, “You are after the reward, then?”
The four glanced to each other, then the
Marsman smiled to himself and casually reached for one of the covered
weapons beside him. Hirald glanced at the Corporate woman, who stared
back at her.
“Jharit, no.”
Jharit stopped with his hand by the covering.
“What is it, Canard Meck?”
The woman, now identified as a member of the
Jethro Manx Canard Corporate Family, slowly shook her head, still
staring at Hirald.
“We have no dispute with you,” she said. “But
we would prefer it if you left our camp, please.”
“She might tell him,” Jharit protested.
Canard Meck glanced to him and said, “She is
product.”
Jharit snatched his hand from the weapons and
suddenly looked very frightened. He flinched as Hirald rose to her
feet. Hirald smiled.
“I mean no harm, unless harm is meant.”
She strode out into the darkness without
checking behind. No one moved. No one reached for the weapons.
Snow removed the pistol from its holster in
his dust robes and checked the charge reading. As was usual it was
nearly full. The bright sunlight of Vatch acting on the photo-voltaic
material of his robes kept the weapon constantly powered up through the
socket in the holster. The weapon was a matt black L, five millimeters
thick with only a slight depression where a trigger would normally have
been. It was keyed to Snow. No one else could fire it. Rather than
firing projectiles, as did most weapons on Vatch, this weapon
discharged a beam of field-accelerated protons, but they could still
make large holes in anyone Snow cared to point it at.
David Songrel was a family man. Snow had
observed him lifting a child high in the air while a woman looked on.
Snow wondered why Aleen wanted him dead. As the owner of the water
station she had power here, but little influence over the proctors who
enforced planetary law. Perhaps she had been involved in illegalities
of which Songrel had become aware. No matter, for the present. He
rapped on the door and when Songrel opened it he stuck the pistol in
the man’s face and walked him back into the apartment, closing the door
behind him with his stump.
“Daddy!” the little girl yelled, but the
mother caught hold of her before she rushed forward. Songrel had his
hands in the air, his eyes not leaving the pistol. Shock there,
knowledge.
“Why,” said Snow, “does the Androche want you
dead?”
“You’re…the albino.”
“Answer the question please.”
Songrel glanced at his wife and daughter
before he replied, “She is a collector of antiquities.”
“Why the necessity for your death?”
“She has killed to get what she wants. I have
evidence. We intend to arrest her soon.”
Snow nodded, then holstered his pistol. “I
thought it would be something like that. She had two proctors come for
me, you know.”
Songrel lowered his hands, but kept them well
away from the stun gun hooked on his belt. “As Androche she has the
right to some use of the proctors. It is our duty to guard her and her
property. She does not have the freedom to commit crime. Why didn’t you
kill me? They say you have killed many.”
Snow glanced at Songrel’s wife and child. “My
reputation precedes me,” he said, and stepped past Songrel to drop onto
a comfortable sofa. “But the stories are in error. I have killed no one
who has not first tried to kill me…well, mostly.”
Songrel turned to his wife. “It’s Tamtha’s
bedtime.”
His wife nodded and took the child from the
room. Snow noted the little girl’s fascinated stare. He was used to it.
Songrel sat down in an armchair opposite Snow.
“You have a nice family.”
“Yes…will you testify against the Androche?”
“You can have my testimony recorded under
seal, but I cannot stay for a trial. Were I to stay this place would be
crawling with Andronache killers in no time. I might not survive that.”
Songrel nodded. “Why did you come here if it
was not your intention to kill me?” he asked, a trifle anxiously.
“I want you to play dead while I go back and
see the Androche.”
Songrel’s expression hardened. “You want to
collect your reward.”
“Yes, but my reward is not money, it is
information. The Androche knows why Merchant Baris wants me dead. It is
a subject I am understandably curious about.”
Songrel interlaced his fingers and stared down
at them for a moment. When he looked up he said, “The reward is for
your stasis-preserved testicles. Perhaps he is a collector like Aleen,
but that is beside the point. I will play dead for you, but when you go
to see Aleen I want you to carry a holocorder.”
Snow nodded once. Songrel stood up and walked
to a wall cupboard. He returned with the device, rested it on the table
and turned it on.
“Now, your statement.”
“He is dead,” Aleen said, smiling.
“Yes,” Snow confirmed, dropping Songrel’s
identity tag on the table, “yet I get the impression you knew before I
came here.”
Aleen went to the drinks cabinet, poured Snow
a whiskey and brought it over to him. “I have friends among the
proctors. As soon as his wife called in the killing—she was hysterical
apparently—they informed me.”
“Why did you want him killed?”
“That is none of your concern. Drink your
whiskey and I will get you the promised information.”
Aleen turned away from him and moved to a
computer console elegantly concealed in a Louis XIV table. Snow had the
whiskey to his lips just as his suspicious nature cut in. Why was it
necessary to get the information from the computer? She could just tell
him. Why had she not poured a drink for herself? He set the drink down
on a table, unsampled. Aleen looked up, a dead smile on her face, and
as her hand came up over the console Snow dived to one side. On the
wall behind him a picture blackened, then burst into oily flames. He
came up on one knee and fired once. She slammed back out of her chair
onto the floor, her face burning like the picture.
Snow searched hurriedly. Any time now the
proctors would arrive. In the bathroom he found a device like a chrome
penis with two holes in the end. One hole spurted out some kind of
fluid and the other hole sucked. Some kind of contraceptive device? He
traced tubes back from it to a unit that contained the bottle of fluid
and some very complicated straining and filtering devices. To his
confusion he realized it was for removing the contents of a woman’s
uterus, probably after sex. She collected men’s semen? Shortly after,
he found a single stasis bottle containing that substance. It had to be
his own. He suddenly he had an inkling of an idea—a possible
explanation for his situation of the last five years. He took the
bottle and poured its contents down the sink before turning to leave
the apartment, but the delay had been enough.
Hirald looked at the man in the condensation
bottle, her expression revealing nothing. He was alive beyond his time;
some sadist had dropped a bottle of water in with him to prolong his
suffering. He stared at Hirald with drying eyes, the empty bottle by
his head, his body shrunken and badly sunburned, his black tongue
protruding. Hirald looked around carefully—there were harsh penalties
for what she was about to do—then placed a small chrome cylinder
against the glass near the man’s head. There was a brief flash. The man
convulsed and the bottle was misted with smoke and steam. Hirald
replaced the device in her pocket, stood and walked on. Her masters
would not have been pleased at her risking herself like this, but they
did not have complete control over her actions.
The gray-bearded proctor was crouched behind
the sofa, his short-barreled riot gun resting on the back and sighted
on the bathroom door. Songrel stood by the moisture lock, his own
weapon also trained on Snow.
Songrel glanced across at the Androche’s
corpse. “You will be staying for the trial,” he said, nodding to the
proctor.
The man stood and moved across the room, not
letting Snow out of his sights for a moment. Even as the barrel of the
riot gun was pushed up under Snow’s chin he noted how the man was
careful not to block Songrel’s field of fire. Snow allowed his weapon
to be taken. Maybe he could have dealt with the proctor, but not
Songrel as well. Now the proctor backed off, flicking one puzzled
glance at the weapon he had taken before pocketing it.
Songrel opened the moisture lock and gestured
Snow over. There, maybe, Snow thought. He walked over, stepped through
the lock and glanced behind him. The proctor, staying well back, shook
his head and grinned. Swearing under his breath, Snow shut his plastron
mask and ducked out into the arid day.
They gave him no openings, not on the stairs
nor out on the dusty street. Always, one of them would be covering him
from a distance of two or three paces. Snow was fast; faster than most
people had reason to suspect, but not fast enough to outrun a bullet or
energy charge.
“You know you’re killing me,” he said to
Songrel.
“There’ll be guards during the trial, and
we’ll give you an escort after…if you’re released,” Songrel replied.
Opening his dust robes so both of them could
see clearly what he was doing, he reached to the back of his belt and
removed the holocorder Songrel had given him.
“You’ve got all the evidence you need here,
and I have to wonder how many of your guards might be tempted by the
merchant’s reward.”
Songrel appeared pained at this; he stepped
closer to take the recording device, his weapon directed at Snow’s
mask.
The woman seemed to come out of nowhere: one
moment all movement in the street was warily distant, then she was
there, holding the proctor’s riot gun as he stumbled and went face
down. Songrel’s aim slid aside to track her.
That was enough of an opening for Snow. He
snapped his boot forward, catching the man in the gut, then chopped
down on the back of his neck as he bowed forward. Songrel’s gun thudded
into the dust. Snow dropped, snatched and rolled, coming up to get the
woman in his sights. She wasn’t there.
“I think this is yours,” she said, to one side
of him.
Turning his head only, he observed her. With
one hand she was covering him with the riot gun. In her other hand she
was holding his own weapon. She lowered the riot gun.
“Perhaps now would be a good time to leave?”
By the condensation jar Snow paused for
breath. The woman, he noted, seemed not to need the rest, hardly seemed
to be breathing at all. He shook his head and studied the jar. The man
was now dead, his body giving up the last of its water for the public
good. Snow paused for a moment longer to observe the greasy film on the
inside of the jar before moving on. Someone had finished the poor
bastard off.
“Why did you help me?” he asked the woman.
“Because you needed help.”
Snow contained his annoyance. With a glance
back toward the station he set out again, the woman easily keeping pace
with him. She’d had her opportunity to kill him, so it was not the
reward she was after. Time enough to find out what her angle was when
they had put some distance between themselves and potential pursuit.
Once out of sight of the station they left
the road, setting out across a spill of desert to a distant rock field.
There, Snow felt, they would be able to lose themselves, unless a sand
shark got them first. He drew his pistol as he walked and kept his eyes
open. One sand shark twitched its motion-detecting palps above the
sand, but shortly subsided. It must have fed in the last year; it would
be quiescent for another year to come.
Having reached the rocks and firmer ground
without event Snow slowed his pace while studying his companion. She
was incongruously attractive and clean-looking and he found himself
staring in fascination, reluctant to tell her, after what she had done
for him, that he normally traveled alone. That, he supposed was the
problem—he traveled alone by necessity, not choice. He gave an
open-handed gesture and she walked on a pace ahead of him. Whatever
danger she represented to him, at least he had her in sight.
Now studying her from the side he said, “I
won’t be going much farther. I want to set up camp before the Thira.”
The woman nodded, but made no comment.
Snow made a fire from old carapaces and
removed his mask in the light of evening. He was curious to note that
the woman had not replaced her mask, yet her skin was clear and
unblemished. She sank down next to him by the fire, with a grace that
could only reflect superb physical condition.
“You never answered my question,” he said.
With her head bowed the woman said, “You owe
me, perhaps for your life. For that will you allow me to tell you in my
own time?”
“People have been trying to kill me. I’m not
sure I can afford to be that generous.”
She shrugged. “I could have killed you.”
Snow bit down on frustration: he did owe her
for his life. She could have killed him and, without her help, killers
would have gathered at the water station while slow due process brought
him to court. He took a deep breath and searched for some stillness.
“What do I call you?” he asked eventually.
“Hirald.”
He struggled on, “Where did you come
from…before?”
“Across the Thira.”
Snow had his doubts about that reply. He had
crossed the Thira a couple of times and knew it to be rough going.
Hirald looked like someone fresh from a month’s sojourn in a water
station.
“I see,” he said.
“You are Snow,” she said, turning and fixing
him with blue eyes that appeared violet in the fading red light.
He felt his stomach lurch at that look, and
then he immediately felt self-contempt. After all these years he was
still susceptible to physical attraction…to beauty…“Yes, I am.”
“I would like to travel with you for a while.”
“You know who I am, and I suspect you know why
I am suspicious of your motives.”
She smiled at him and he felt that lurch
again. He turned and spat in the fire.
“I’m crossing the Thira,” he said.
“I have no problem with that.”
Snow lay back and rested his head on one of
the packs. He pulled a thermal sheet across his body and stared up at
the sky. The red-tinted swathe of stars was being encroached on by the
asteroids of the night—all that remained of Vatch’s moon after some
long-ago cataclysm. A single sword of light from an ion drive cut the
sunset.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I’m lonely, and I feel like a
change.”
Snow grunted and closed his eyes. She was not
out to kill him, but her motives remained unrevealed. Whatever, she
could never keep to the pace he set and would soon abandon him, and the
unsettling things he was feeling would soon go away. He slept.
Sunlight on his face, bringing the familiar
tingling prior to burning, had his hand up and closing his mask across
before he was fully awake. He looked at Hirald across the dead ashes of
the fire and got the unsettling notion that she had not changed
position all night. He sat up, then after a muttered good morning, went
behind a rock and urinated into his condenser pack. Following the
ritual of every morning for many years now, he then emptied the
moisture-collectors of his undersuit into it as well. The collector
bottle he emptied into his drinking bottle before dipping his
toothbrush and cleaning his teeth. By the time he had finished his
ablutions and come out from behind the rock, Hirald had opened a
breakfast-soup ration pack and it was bubbling under its lid. Snow
reached for another pack, but she held up her hand.
“This is for you. I have already eaten.”
“Did you sleep at all?”
“A little. Tell me, how do you come to be in
possession of proscribed weaponry?”
“Took it off someone who tried to kill me,” he
lied. He could hardly tell her he had brought it here before the
runcible proscription and modified it himself over many years
thereafter. He sat down to drink his breakfast.
When he had finished they set out across the
Thira. Hirald noted him looking at her after an hour’s walking and
closed her mask. He thought no more of it—lots of people disliked the
masks, and were prepared to pay the price of water-loss not to wear
them so much.
By midmorning the temperature had reached
forty-five degrees and was still rising. A sand shark broke from the
surface of a dune and came scuttling after them for a few meters, then
halted, panting like a dog, tired or too well fed to continue—that, or
it had sampled human flesh before.
When the temperature reached fifty and the
cooling units of Snow’s undersuit were laboring under the load, he
noted that Hirald still easily matched his pace. When a crab-bird
dropped clacking out of the sky at them she brought it down with one
shot before Snow could even think of reaching for his weapon, and
before he saw what weapon she shot the creature with. She was a
remarkable woman.
Shortly after midday Snow called a halt.
“We’ll rest until evening, then continue through the night and tomorrow
morning. The following night should bring us out the other side.”
Hirald nodded in agreement, seemingly
unconcerned.
They slept under the reflective shelter of
Snow’s day tent, then moved on at sunset after Snow had checked their
position. They walked all night and most of the following morning, and
when they finally set up the tent again Snow was exhausted. With a hint
of irritation he told Hirald he wanted privacy in the tent and
suggested she set up her own. Once inside his tent he sealed up and
stripped naked. He then cleaned himself and the inside of his undersuit
with a cycle sponge—a device that made it possible to stay clean with a
quarter liter of water and little spillage. After this he pulled on a
pair of toweling shorts and lay back with his miniature air cooler
humming away at full power. It was luxury of a kind. After half an
hour’s sleep he woke and opened the tent to look outside. Hirald was
sitting in the sand with her mask open. She was watching the horizon
intently, her stillness quite unnatural.
“Don’t you have a day tent?” Snow asked.
She shook her head.
“Come and join me then,” he said, reversing
back into his tent. Hirald stood and walked over, apparently unaffected
by the baking sun. She entered the tent and closed it behind her, then,
after a glance at Snow, she began to remove her survival suit. Snow
turned away for a moment, then thought, what
the hell, and turned back to watch. She had not asked him to
turn his head. Under her suit she wore a single, skin-hugging garment.
The material was like white silk, and almost translucent. Snow
swallowed dryly, then tried to distract himself by wondering about her
sanitary arrangements. As she lifted her legs up to remove her trousers
from her feet he saw then how the matter was arranged and wondered if a
blush was evident on his white skin. The garment was slit from the
lower part of her pale pubic hair round to the top crease of her
buttocks.
As she finally removed her trousers Hirald
looked at him and noted the direction of his attention. He raised his
gaze and met her eye to eye. She smiled at him and, still smiling,
stretched the sleeves of the garment down and off over her hands and
rolled it down below her breasts. Snow cleared his throat and tried to
think of something witty to say. She was a succubus, a lonely desert
man’s fantasy. Still smiling she came across the tent on her hands and
knees, put her hand against his chest and pushed him back, sat astride
him, and with her pale hair falling either side of his head she leaned
down and kissed him on the mouth. Her mouth was sweet and warm. Snow
was thoroughly aware of her hard little nipples sliding from side to
side against his chest. He touched the skin of her shoulders and found
it dry and warm. She sat back then and looked down at him for a moment.
There was something strange about that look—a kind of cold curiosity.
She slid forward onto his stomach, then turned and reached back to pull
his shorts down and off his legs. He was amazed at just how far she
could twist and bend her body. Once his shorts were removed she slid
back until his penis rested between her buttocks, then, after raising
herself a little, she continued to push back, bending it over until it
hurt, then with a swift movement of her pelvis, took it inside her.
Snow groaned, then gritted his teeth as she started to move, still
staring down at him with that strange expression.
In the evening, when it was time to go, Snow
felt a bone-deep lethargy. He had not slept much during the afternoon.
Each time he had tried to relax after a session of sex, Hirald would do
something he could not resist. Her last climax had been so intense that
she had cried out and shuddered uncontrollably, and after it she had
looked down at herself in surprise and shock. Thereafter she had been
eager to repeat the experience. Snow felt sore and drained.
As they walked across the darkened violet
sands they had talked little, but one conversation had raised Snow’s
suspicions.
“Your hand, how did you lose it?”
“Andronache challenge. It was shredded by a
flack shell.”
“How is it now?”
Snow had paused before replying. Did she know?
“What do you mean: how is it? It was
amputated. It is no longer there.”
“Yes,” she had said, and no more.
The sun was crossing the horizon and the
night asteroids fading out of the sky when they reached the rock-field
at the edge of the Thira. With little energy for conversation, Snow set
up his day tent and collapsed inside, instantly asleep. When he woke in
the latter part of the day it was to discover himself undressed under a
blanket, with Hirald lying beside him. She was up on her elbow, her
head propped on her hand, studying his face. As soon as she saw that he
was awake she handed him a carton of mixed juice. He sat up, the
blanket sliding down. She was naked. He drank the juice.
“I’m glad you came along,” he said, and the
rest of the day was spent in pleasant activity.
That night they moved deep into the rock
field. The following day passed much as the one before.
“I think it fair to tell you I have an
implant,” Snow said as he rested after some particularly vigorous
activity. “You won’t get pregnant by me, and my semen is little more
than water and a few free proteins.”
“Why do you feel it necessary to tell me
this?” Hirald asked him.
“As you know, there is a reward out for my
testicles, stasis preserved. This is not because Merchant Baris
particularly wants me dead. I think it is because he is after my
genetic tissue. At the water station the Androche…seduced me.” Snow was
uncomfortable with that. “She did it so she could collect my sperm,
probably to sell.”
“I know,” Hirald said. Snow looked at her and
she went on, “He is after your testicles or other body tissue to
provide him with an endless supply of your genetic material.”
Snow considered that. Of course there had to
be more to Hirald than he had supposed, but the sex had clouded his
thought-processes somewhat.
“It is the next best thing to having your
entire living body. I suspect Baris thought it unlikely he could get
away with that. He’d never get your entire body off-planet. This way he
also corners the market.”
“You know an awful lot about what Baris
wants.”
Hirald gazed at him very directly. “How is
your hand?”
Snow looked down at the stump. He unclipped
the covering and pulled it off. What he exposed was recognizably a
hand, though deformed and almost useless. The covering had been
cleverly made to conceal it, to make it appear as if the hand was
missing.
“It will be no different from its predecessor
in about six months. I intended to walk out of one water station
without a hand, then into another station with a hand and a new
identity.”
“What about your albinism?”
“Skin dye and eye lenses.”
“Of course. You cannot take transplants.”
“No…I think you should explain yourself.”
“The people I work for want the same as Baris:
your genome.”
“You’ve had opportunity…”
“No, they want the best option, which is you,
willingly. I want you to gate back to Earth with me.”
“Why?”
“You are regenerative. It is the source of
your immortality. We know this now. You have known it for more than a
thousand years.”
“Still, why?”
“We have managed to keep your secret for the
last three hundred years, ever since it was discovered. Ten years ago
the knowledge was leaked. Now several organizations know about you, and
what you represent: whoever can decode your genome has access to
immortality, and through that access to unprecedented wealth and power.
That’s why Baris was the first to track you down. There will be
others.”
“You work for Earth Central.”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t it be better just to kill me and
destroy my body?”
“Earth Central does not suppress knowledge.”
Hirald smiled at him. “You should be old enough to understand the
futility of that. It wants the knowledge disseminated so that it
doesn’t put power into the hands of the wrong people. It could do
immense good. The projections are that in ten years a treatment would
become available to make anyone regenerative, within limits.”
“Yet prior to this it kept a lid on things,”
Snow said.
“It guarded your privacy. It did not suppress
knowledge. Not to seek out knowledge is not the same as suppressing
it.”
“Is Earth Central so moral now?” Snow
wondered, then could have kicked himself for his stupidity. Of course
Earth Central was. Only human beings and other low-grade sentients
could become corrupt, and Earth Central was the most powerful AI in the
human Polity. Hirald, noting his discom-fiture, did not answer his
question.
“Will you come?” she asked him.
Snow was gazing at the wall of the tent as if
he could see through it across the rock field. “This requires thought,
not instant decisions. Two days should bring us to my home. I’ll
consider it.”
Draped in chameleon cloth the hover
transport vanished into the surrounding dunes. Inside the transport
Jharit shuffled a pack of cards and played a game men like himself had
played in similar situations for many centuries. His wife, Jharilla,
slept. Trock was cleaning an antique revolver he had picked up at an
auction in the last water station. The bullets he had acquired with it
were arrayed in neat, soldierly rows on the table before him.
Canard Meck was plugged in, trying to pick up
information from the net and the high-speed communications the runcible
AI exchanged with its subminds. The call came as a relief to all of
them but her—she resented dropping out of that world of perfect logic
and pure clarity of thought, back into the sweat-stink of the
transport.
“I am Baris,” said the smiling face from the
screen.
Coming straight to the point Jharit said, “You
have the information?”
“I have,” Baris confirmed, his smile only
slightly less, “and I will be coming to join you for the final chase.”
Jharit and Trock exchanged a look.
“As you wish. You are paying.”
“Yes, I am.” The merchant’s smile was gone
now. “Turn on your beacon and I will join you within the hour.”
“How are you getting out here?” Canard Meck
asked.
“By AGC of course,” Baris said, turning to
look toward her.
“All AGCs are registered. The AI will know
where you are.”
Baris flicked his fingers at this, assuming an
expression of contempt. “No matter. We will continue from your position
to…our destination, in the transport.”
“Very well,” Canard Meck agreed.
Baris waited for something more to be said.
When nothing was he blanked the screen with a disappointed moue.
The merchant arrived in a fancy repro Macrojet
AGC. He climbed out wearing sand fatigues and followed by two women
dressed much the same. One carried a hunting rifle and ammunition
belts; the other carried various unidentifiable packages. Baris struck
a pose before them. He was a handsome man, but none of the four reacted
to this foolish display. They knew that anyone who had reached the
merchant’s position was no fool. Jharit and Jharilla looked at him
glassy-eyed. Trock inspected the rifle. Canard Meck glanced at one of
the women, took in the imbecilic smile, then returned her attention to
the merchant.
“Shall we be on our way then?” she said.
Baris nodded and, still smiling, clicked his
fingers and walked to the transport. The two women followed him,
obedient as dogs. The four came after: hounds of a different breed.
Out of the rock field reared the first of
the stone buttes, carved by wind-blown sand into something resembling a
man-like statue sunk up to its chest in the ground. In the cracks and
divisions of its head, mica and quartz glittered like insectile eyes.
Snow led the way to the base of the butte where slabs of the same stone
lay tilted in the ground.
“Here,” he said, holding his hand out to a
sandwich of slabs. With a grinding noise, the top slab pivoted to one
side to expose a stair dropping a short distance to the floor of a
tunnel. “Welcome to my home.”
“You live in a hole in the ground?” Hirald
asked, with a touch of irony.
“Of course not. Follow me.”
As they climbed down, the slab swung back
across above them and wall lights clicked on. Hirald noted that the
tunnel led under the butte and had already worked things out by the
time they reached the chimney and the elevator car. They climbed inside
the car and sprawled in plush seats as it hauled them up a chimney cut
through the center of the butte.
“This must have taken you some time,” Hirald
observed.
“The chimney was already here. I first found
it about two hundred years ago. Others had lived here before me, but in
rather primitive conditions. I’ve been improving the place ever since.”
The car arrived at its destination and they
walked from it into a complex of moisture-locked rooms at the head of
the butte.
With a drink in her hand Hirald stood at a
polarized panoramic window and gazed out across the rock field for a
moment, then returned her attention to the room and its contents. In a
glass-fronted case along one wall was a display of weapons dating from
the 22nd century, and at the center a sword from some prespace age.
Hirald had to wonder where and when Snow had acquired it. She turned
from the case as Snow returned to the room, dressed now in loose black
trousers and a black, open-necked shirt. The contrast with his white
skin and hair and pink eyes gave him the appearance of someone who
might have a taste for blood.
“There’s some clothing there for you to use if
you like, and the shower. There’s plenty of water here,” he told her.
Hirald nodded, placed her drink on a
glass-topped table, and headed back into the rooms Snow had come from.
Snow watched her go. She would shower and change and be little fresher
than she already was. He had noted with some puzzlement how she never
seemed to smell bad, never seemed dirty.
“Whose clothing is this?” Hirald asked from
the room beyond.
“My last wife’s,” said Snow.
Hirald came to the door with clothing folded
over one arm. She looked at Snow questioningly.
“She killed herself about a century ago,” he
said in a flat voice. “Walked out into the desert and burned a hole
through her head. I found her before the crab-birds and sand sharks.”
“Why?”
“She grew old and I did not. She hated it.”
Hirald didn’t comment. She went to take her
shower, and shortly returned wearing a skin-tight body-suit of
translucent blue material, which she did not expect to be wearing for
long once Snow saw her in it. He was occupied though—sitting in a
swivel chair studying a screen. He was back in his dust robes, terrapin
mask hanging open. She walked up behind him to see what he was looking
at. She saw the hover transport on the sand and the two women pulling a
sheet over it. She recognized Merchant Baris and the four hired
killers.
“It would seem Baris has found me,” Snow said,
his tone cold and flat.
“You know him?”
“Met him once when he was younger. He hasn’t
changed much.” He nodded at the screen. “The four with him look an
interesting bunch.”
“I met them: the Marsman and the Corporate
woman are the leaders—mercenary group,” said Hirald. “What defenses
does this place have?”
“None, I never felt the need for them.”
“Are you sure they are coming here?”
“It seems strange that he has chosen this
particular rock field on the whole planet. I’ll have to go and settle
this.”
“I’ll change,” said Hirald, and hurried back
to get her suit. When she returned Snow was gone; when she tried to
follow she found the elevator car locked at the bottom of the shaft.
“Damn you,” she said flatly, smashing her fist
against a doorjamb, leaving a fist-shaped dent in the steel. Then she
walked back a few paces, turned, ran and leaped into the shaft. The
rails pinned to the edge were six meters away. She reached them easily,
her hands locking on the polished metal with a thump. Laboriously she
began to climb down.
Jharit smiled at his wife and nodded to
Trock, who stood beyond her, strapping on body armor. This was the one.
They would be rich after this. He examined the narrow-beam laser he
held. He would have preferred something with a little more power, but
it was essential that the body not be too badly damaged. He turned to
Baris as the merchant sent his two women back to the transport.
“We’ll go in spread out. He probably has
scanning equipment in the rock field and if there’s an ambush we don’t
want him to get too many of us at once.”
Baris smiled and thumbed bullets into his
rifle, adjusted the scope. Jharit wondered about him, wondered how good
he was. He gave the signal for them to spread out and enter the rock
field.
They were coming to kill him. There were no
rules, no challenges offered. Snow braced the butt of his pistol
against the rock and sighted along it.
“Anything?” Jharit asked over the com.
“Pin cameras,” Jharilla told him. “I burned a
couple out, but there have to be more. He knows we’re here.”
“Remember, narrow-beam, we burn too much and
there’s no money. A clean kill. A head shot would be nice,” Jharit
added.
There was a whooshing sound, a brief scream,
static over the com. Jharit hit the ground and moved behind a rock.
“What the hell was that?”
“He’s got a fucking proton weapon. Fucking
body armor’s useless!”
Jharit felt a sinking sensation in his gut.
They had expected projectile weapons, perhaps a laser.
“Who..?”
There was a pause.
“Trock?”
“Jharilla’s dead.”
Jharit swallowed dryly and edged on into the
rock field.
“Position?”
“Don’t know?”
“Meck?”
“Nothing here.”
“Baris?”
There was no reply from the Merchant.
Snow dropped down off the top of the boulder
and pulled some of the small but deadly grenades from his belt. Lacking
a hand, he used his teeth to twist their tops right around. The
dark-skinned one was over to his left, the Marsman over to his right.
The others were farther over to the right somewhere. He threw the two
spheroids right and left and moved back, then flicked through multiple
views on his wrist screen. A lot of the cameras were out, but he pulled
up a view of the Marsman. Two detonations. As the Marsman hit the
ground he realized he had thrown too far. He flicked through the views
again and caught the other stumbling through dust and wreckage, rock
splinters imbedded in his face. Ah, so.
Snow moved to his left, checking his screen
every few seconds. He halted behind a tilted slab and after checking
his screen once more, squatted down and waited. With little regard for
his surroundings Trock stumbled out of the falling dust. Snow smiled
grimly under his mask and sighted on him, but before he could fire, red
agony cut his shoulder. The smell of burning flesh. Snow rolled to one
side, came up onto his feet, ran. Rock to one side of him smoked,
pinged as it heated. He dived for cover, crawled among broken rock. The
firing ceased. Now I’m dead, he thought. His pistol lay in the dust
back there somewhere.
“He dropped his weapon, Trock. He’s over to
your left. Take him down, I can’t get a sighting on him at the moment.”
Trock spat a broken tooth from his mouth and
walked in the direction indicated, his antique revolver in his left
hand and his laser in his right. This was it. The bastard was dead, or
perhaps not. I’ll cut his arms and legs off,
the beam should cauterize sufficiently. But Trock did not
get time to fire. The figure in dust robes came out of nowhere to
drop-kick him in the chest. The body armor absorbed most of the blow,
but Trock went over. Before he could rise the figure was above him, a
split-fingered blow spearing down. After that Trock saw nothing.
Sprawled back he lifted fingers to the bleeding mess behind his broken
visor. Then the pain hit and he started screaming.
Snow coughed as quietly as he could, opened
his mask and gasped in pain. The burn had started at his shoulder and
ended in the middle of his chest, but luckily his dust robes had
absorbed most of the heat. A second more and he would have been dead.
The pain was crippling. He knew he would not have the energy to
withstand another attack like that, nor would he be likely to take any
of the others by surprise. His adversary had been stunned by the
explosion, angered by injury. Snow edged back through the rock field,
his mobility rapidly decreasing. When a shadow fell across him he
looked up into the inevitable.
“Why didn’t you take his weapon?” Jharit
asked, nodding back toward Trock, who was no longer screaming. He was
curled fetal by a rock, a field dressing across his eyes and his body
pumped full of self-administered pain-killers.
“No time, no strength…could only get him
through his visor,” Snow managed.
Jharit nodded and spoke into his com.
“I have him. Home in on my signal.”
Snow waited for death, but Jharit squatted in
the dust, seemingly disinclined to kill him.
“Jharilla was a hell of a woman,” said Jharit,
removing a stasis bottle from his belt and pushing it into the sand
next to him. “We were married in Viking City twenty years ago.” Jharit
pulled a wicked ceramal knife from his boot and held it up before his
face. “This is for her you understand. After I’ve taken your testicles
and dressed that wound I’ll see to your other injury. I don’t want you
to die yet. I have so much to tell you about her, and there is so much
I want you to experience. You know she—”
Jharit turned at a sound, rose to his feet and
drew his laser again. He stepped away from Snow and gazed around. Snow
looked beyond him but could see nothing.
“If you leave here now, Marsman, I will not
kill you.”
The voice was Hirald’s.
Jharit fired into the rocks and backed toward
Snow.
“I have a singun and I am in chameleonwear. I
can kill you any time I wish. Drop your weapon.”
Jharit paused for a moment of indecision, then
whirled, pointing his laser at Snow. The expression on his face told
all. Before he could press the trigger he collapsed into himself: a
central point the size of a pinhead, a plume of sand standing where he
stood, then all blasted away in a thunder-clap and encore of miniature
lightnings across the ground. Snow slowly shoved himself to his feet as
he stared in awe at the spot Jharit had occupied. He had heard of such
weapons but had not believed they existed. He looked across as Hirald
flickered back into existence only a few meters away. She smiled at
him, just before the first shot ripped the side of her face away.
Snow knew he yelled, he might have screamed.
He watched in impotent horror as the second shot smacked into her back
and knocked her to the ground. Then: Baris and the Corporate woman,
walking out of the rock field. Baris sighted again as he walked, hit
Hirald with another shot that ripped half her side away as he and his
companion moved past her.
Snow felt his legs give way. He went down on
his knees. Baris came before him, a self-satisfied smirk on his face.
Snow gazed up at him, trying to pull the energy together, to throw it
all into one last attempt. He knew it was what Baris was waiting for,
but it was all he could do. He glanced aside at the woman, saw she had
halted some way back. She was staring back past Baris at Hirald, horror
on her face. Snow did not want to look there—he did not want to know.
“O my God! It’s her!”
Snow pulled himself to his feet, dizziness
making him lurch. Baris glanced at the Corporate woman in confusion,
then pointed the rifle at Snow’s face. The merchant relished his moment
for the half a second it lasted. The hand punched through his body from
the back, knocked the rifle aside, lifted him and hurled him against a
rock with such force he stuck for a moment, then fell, leaving a
man-shaped corona of blood. Hirald stood there, revealed. Where the
syntheflesh had been blown away, glittering ceramal was exposed, her
white enamel teeth, one blue eye complete in its socket, the ribbed
column of her spine. She observed Snow for a moment, then turned toward
the woman. Snow fainted before the scream.
He was in his bed and memories slowly
dragged themselves into his mind. He lay there, his throat dry, and
after a moment felt across to his numbed chest and the dressing. It was
a moment before he dared open his eyes. Hirald sat at the side of the
bed and when she saw he was awake she helped him up into a sitting
position against his pillows. Snow observed her face. She had repaired
the damage somehow, but the scars of that repair-work were still there.
She looked just like a human woman who had been disfigured in an
accident. She wore a loose shirt and trousers to hide the other
repairs. As he studied her she reached up and self-consciously touched
her face, before reaching for a glass of water to hand to him. That
touch of vanity confused him for a moment. Gratefully, he drained the
glass.
“You’re a Golem android,” he said in the end,
unsure.
Hirald smiled, and it did not look so bad.
She said, “Canard Meck thought that.” When she
saw his confusion she explained, “The Corporate woman. She called me
product, which is an understandable mistake. I am nearly
indistinguishable from the Golem Twenty-Two.”
“What are you then?” Snow asked as she poured
him another glass of water.
“A cyborg discovering she’s more human than
she thought. No one owns me.”
Snow sipped his drink as he considered that.
He was not sure what he was feeling.
“Will you come to Earth with me?” she asked.
Snow turned and watched her for a long time.
He remembered how it had been in the tent as she, he realized,
discovered that she was still human.
“You know, I will never grow old and die,” she
said.
“I see.”
She tilted her head questioningly and awaited
his answer.
A slow smile spread across his face. “I’ll
come with you,” he told her. He put his drink down and reached out to
take hold of her hand. There was still blood under her fingernails and
the tear duct in her left eye was not working properly. It didn’t
matter.
Greg Egan
(www.netspace.net.au/~gregegan), who lives in Perth, West Australia,
hit his stride in the early 1990s, and became one of the most
interesting new hard SF writers of the decade. He is internationally
famous for his stories and novels. His early fiction was supernatural
horror, and his first novel ( An Unusual Angle —not SF) was published in 1983, but his writing
burst into international prominence in 1990, with several fine SF
stories that focused attention on his writing. His SF novels to date are
Quarantine (1992), Permutation City
(1994), Distress (1995), Diaspora (1997),
Teranesia (1999), and Schild’s
Ladder (2002); his short story collections are
Our Lady of Chernobyl (1995),
Axiomatic (1995), and Luminous (1999). He quit his job as a computer programmer to
write full time in 1992. As of 2000, he had become the flagship hard SF
writer of the younger generation.
“Singleton,” from
Interzone , is a hard SF quantum computer
story. Egan assumes an Everett-Wheeler–type quantum mechanics—usually
referred to as the Many Worlds Interpretation—but meticulously sets up
a mechanism by which an individual AI could subvert the branching. But
it is also a philosophical story on a human scale about making choices
and accepting consequences. A married couple, a physicist and a
mathematician, want to have a child, and they have one never before
imagined in SF. There is enough material for a novel compressed into
this provocative novella.
2003
I was walking north along George Street
toward Town Hall railway station, pondering the ways I might solve the
tricky third question of my linear algebra assignment, when I
encountered a small crowd blocking the footpath. I didn’t give much
thought to the reason they were standing there; I’d just passed a busy
restaurant, and I often saw groups of people gathered outside. But once
I’d started to make my way around them, moving into an alley rather
than stepping out into the traffic, it became apparent that they were
not just diners from a farewell lunch for a retiring colleague, putting
off their return to the office for as long as possible. I could see for
myself exactly what was holding their attention.
Twenty meters down the alley, a man was lying
on his back on the ground, shielding his bloodied face with his hands,
while two men stood over him, relentlessly swinging narrow sticks of
some kind. At first I thought the sticks were pool cues, but then I
noticed the metal hooks on the ends. I’d only ever seen these obscure
weapons before in one other place: my primary school, where an
appointed window monitor would use them at the start and end of each
day. They were meant for opening and closing an old-fashioned kind of
hinged pane when it was too high to reach with your hands.
I turned to the other spectators. “Has anyone
called the police?” A woman nodded without looking at me, and said,
“Someone used their mobile, a couple of minutes ago.”
The assailants must have realized that the
police were on their way, but it seemed they were too committed to
their task to abandon it until that was absolutely necessary. They were
facing away from the crowd, so perhaps they weren’t entirely reckless
not to fear identification. The man on the ground was dressed like a
kitchen hand. He was still moving, trying to protect himself, but he
was making less noise than his attackers; the need, or the ability, to
cry out in pain had been beaten right out of him.
As for calling for help, he could have saved
his breath.
A chill passed through my body, a sick cold
churning sensation that came a moment before the conscious realization:
I’m going to watch someone murdered, and I’m
going to do nothing. But this wasn’t a drunken brawl, where
a few bystanders could step in and separate the combatants; the two
assailants had to be serious criminals, settling a score. Keeping your
distance from something like that was just common sense. I’d go to
court, I’d be a witness, but no one could expect anything more of me.
Not when 30 other people had behaved in exactly the same way.
The men in the alley did not have guns. If
they’d had guns, they would have used them by now. They weren’t going
to mow down anyone who got in their way. It was one thing not to make a
martyr of yourself, but how many people could these two grunting slobs
fend off with sticks?
I unstrapped my backpack and put it on the
ground. Absurdly, that made me feel more vulnerable; I was always
worried about losing my textbooks. Think about
this. You don’t know what you’re doing. I hadn’t been in so
much as a fist fight since I was 13. I glanced at the strangers around
me, wondering if anyone would join in if I implored them to rush
forward together. But that wasn’t going to happen. I was a willowy,
unimposing 18-year-old, wearing a T-shirt adorned with Maxwell’s
Equations. I had no presence, no authority. No one would follow me into
the fray.
Alone, I’d be as helpless as the guy on the
ground. These men would crack my skull open in an instant. There were
half a dozen solid-looking office workers in their 20s in the crowd; if
these weekend rugby players hadn’t felt competent to intervene, what
chance did I have?
I reached down for my backpack. If I wasn’t
going to help, there was no point being here at all. I’d find out what
had happened on the evening news.
I started to retrace my steps, sick with
self-loathing. This wasn’t kristallnacht.
There’d be no embarrassing questions from my grandchildren. No one
would ever reproach me.
As if that were the measure of everything.
“Fuck it.” I dropped my backpack and ran down
the alley.
I was close enough to smell the three sweating
bodies over the stench of rotting garbage before I was even noticed.
The nearest of the attackers glanced over his shoulder, affronted, then
amused. He didn’t bother redeploying his weapon in mid-stroke; as I
hooked an arm around his neck in the hope of overbalancing him, he
thrust his elbow into my chest, winding me. I clung on desperately,
maintaining the hold even though I couldn’t tighten it. As he tried to
prize himself loose, I managed to kick his feet out from under him. We
both went down onto the asphalt; I ended up beneath him.
The man untangled himself and clambered to his
feet. As I struggled to right myself, picturing a metal hook swinging
into my face, someone whistled. I looked up to see the second man
gesturing to his companion, and I followed his gaze. A dozen men and
women were coming down the alley, advancing together at a brisk walk.
It was not a particularly menacing sight—I’d seen angrier crowds with
peace signs painted on their faces—but the sheer numbers were enough to
guarantee some inconvenience. The first man hung back long enough to
kick me in the ribs. Then the two of them fled.
I brought my knees up, then raised my head and
got into a crouch. I was still winded, but for some reason it seemed
vital not to remain flat on my back. One of the office workers grinned
down at me. “You fuckwit. You could have got killed.”
The kitchen hand shuddered, and snorted bloody
mucus. His eyes were swollen shut, and when he laid his hands down
beside him, I could see the bones of his knuckles through the torn
skin. My own skin turned icy, at this vision of the fate I’d courted
for myself. But if it was a shock to realize how I might have ended up,
it was just as sobering to think that I’d almost walked away and let
them finish him off, when the intervention had actually cost me
nothing.
I rose to my feet. People milled around the
kitchen hand, asking each other about first aid. I remembered the
basics from a course I’d done in high school, but the man was still
breathing, and he wasn’t losing vast amounts of blood, so I couldn’t
think of anything helpful that an amateur could do in the
circumstances. I squeezed my way out of the gathering and walked back
to the street. My backpack was exactly where I’d left it; no one had
stolen my books. I heard sirens approaching; the police and the
ambulance would be there soon.
My ribs were tender, but I wasn’t in agony.
I’d cracked a rib falling off a trail bike on the farm when I was
twelve, and I was fairly sure that this was just bruising. For a while
I walked bent over, but by the time I reached the station I found I
could adopt a normal gait. I had some grazed skin on my arms, but I
couldn’t have appeared too battered, because no one on the train looked
at me twice.
That night, I watched the news. The kitchen
hand was described as being in a stable condition. I pictured him
stepping out into the alley to empty a bucket of fishheads into the
garbage, to find the two of them waiting for him. I’d probably never
learn what the attack had been about unless the case went to trial, and
as yet the police hadn’t even named any suspects. If the man had been
in a fit state to talk in the alley, I might have asked him then, but
any sense that I was entitled to an explanation was rapidly fading.
The reporter mentioned a student “leading the
charge of angry citizens” who’d rescued the kitchen hand, and then she
spoke to an eye witness, who described this young man as “a New Ager,
wearing some kind of astrological symbols on his shirt.” I snorted,
then looked around nervously in case one of my housemates had made the
improbable connection, but no one else was even in earshot.
Then the story was over.
I felt flat for a moment, cheated of the minor
rush that 15 seconds’ fame might have delivered; it was like reaching
into a biscuit tin when you thought there was one more chocolate chip
left, to find that there actually wasn’t. I considered phoning my
parents in Orange, just to talk to them from within the strange
afterglow, but I’d established a routine and it was not the right day.
If I called unexpectedly, they’d think something was wrong.
So, that was it. In a week’s time, when the
bruises had faded, I’d look back and doubt that the incident had ever
happened.
I went upstairs to finish my assignment.
Francine said, “There’s a nicer way to think
about this. If you do a change of variables, from x
and y to z
and z-conjugate, the Cauchy-Riemann
equations correspond to the condition that the partial derivative of
the function with respect to z-conjugate
is equal to zero.”
We were sitting in the coffee shop, discussing
the complex analysis lecture we’d had half an hour before. Half a dozen
of us from the same course had got into the habit of meeting at this
time every week, but today the others had failed to turn up. Maybe
there was a movie being screened, or a speaker appearing on campus that
I hadn’t heard about.
I worked through the transformation she’d
described. “You’re right,” I said. “That’s really elegant!”
Francine nodded slightly in assent, while
retaining her characteristic jaded look. She had an undisguisable
passion for mathematics, but she was probably bored out of her skull in
class, waiting for the lecturers to catch up and teach her something
she didn’t already know.
I was nowhere near her level. In fact, I’d
started the year poorly, distracted by my new surroundings: nothing so
glamorous as the temptations of the night life, just the different
sights and sounds and scale of the place, along with the bureaucratic
demands of all the organizations that now impinged upon my life, from
the university itself down to the shared house groceries subcommittee.
In the last few weeks, though, I’d finally started hitting my stride.
I’d got a part-time job, stacking shelves in a supermarket; the pay was
lousy, but it was enough to take the edge off my financial anxieties,
and the hours weren’t so long that they left me with no time for
anything but study.
I doodled harmonic contours on the notepaper
in front of me. “So what do you do for fun?” I said. “Apart from
complex analysis?”
Francine didn’t reply immediately. This wasn’t
the first time we’d been alone together, but I’d never felt confident
that I had the right words to make the most of the situation. At some
point, though, I’d stopped fooling myself that there was ever going to
be a perfect moment, with the perfect phrase falling from my lips:
something subtle but intriguing slipped deftly into the conversation,
without disrupting the flow. So now I’d made my interest plain, with no
attempt at artfulness or eloquence. She could judge me as she knew me
from the last three months, and if she felt no desire to know me
better, I would not be crushed.
“I write a lot of Perl scripts,” she said.
“Nothing complicated; just odds and ends that I give away as freeware.
It’s very relaxing.”
I nodded understandingly. I didn’t think she
was being deliberately discouraging; she just expected me to be
slightly more direct.
“Do you like Deborah Conway?” I’d only heard a
couple of her songs on the radio myself, but a few days before I’d seen
a poster in the city announcing a tour.
“Yeah. She’s great.”
I started thickening the conjugation bars over
the variables I’d scrawled. “She’s playing at a club in Surrey Hills,”
I said. “On Friday. Would you like to go?”
Francine smiled, making no effort now to
appear world-weary. “Sure. That would be nice.”
I smiled back. I wasn’t giddy, I wasn’t
moonstruck, but I felt as if I was standing on the shore of an ocean,
contemplating its breadth. I felt the way I felt when I opened a
sophisticated monograph in the library, and was reduced to savoring the
scent of the print and the crisp symmetry of the notation,
understanding only a fraction of what I read. Knowing there was
something glorious ahead, but knowing too what a daunting task it would
be to come to terms with it.
I said, “I’ll get the tickets on my way home.”
To celebrate the end of exams for the year,
the household threw a party. It was a sultry November night, but the
back yard wasn’t much bigger than the largest room in the house, so we
ended up opening all the doors and windows and distributing food and
furniture throughout the ground floor and the exterior, front and back.
Once the faint humid breeze off the river penetrated the depths of the
house, it was equally sweltering and mosquito-ridden everywhere,
indoors and out.
Francine and I stayed close for an hour or so,
obeying the distinctive dynamics of a couple, until by some unspoken
mutual understanding it became clear that we could wander apart for a
while, and that neither of us was so insecure that we’d resent it.
I ended up in a corner of the crowded
backyard, talking to Will, a biochemistry student who’d lived in the
house for the last four years. On some level, he probably couldn’t help
feeling that his opinions about the way things were run should carry
more weight than anyone else’s, which had annoyed me greatly when I’d
first moved in. We’d since become friends, though, and I was glad to
have a chance to talk to him before he left to take up a scholarship in
Germany.
In the middle of a conversation about the work
he’d be doing, I caught sight of Francine, and he followed my gaze.
Will said, “It took me a while to figure out
what finally cured you of your homesickness.”
“I was never homesick.”
“Yeah, right.” He took a swig of his drink.
“She’s changed you, though. You have to admit that.”
“I do. Happily. Everything’s clicked, since we
got together.” Relationships were meant to screw up your studies, but
my marks were soaring. Francine didn’t tutor me; she just drew me into
a state of mind where everything was clearer.
“The amazing thing is that you got together at
all.” I scowled, and Will raised a hand placatingly. “I just meant,
when you first moved in, you were pretty reserved. And down on
yourself. When we interviewed you for the room, you practically begged
us to give it to someone more deserving.”
“Now you’re taking the piss.”
He shook his head. “Ask any of the others.”
I fell silent. The truth was, if I took a step
back and contemplated my situation, I was as astonished as he was. By
the time I’d left my home town, it had become clear to me that good
fortune had nothing much to do with luck. Some people were born with
wealth, or talent, or charisma. They started with an edge, and the
benefits snowballed. I’d always believed that I had, at best, just
enough intelligence and persistence to stay afloat in my chosen field;
I’d topped every class in high school, but in a town the size of Orange
that meant nothing, and I’d had no illusions about my fate in Sydney.
I owed it to Francine that my visions of
mediocrity had not been fulfilled; being with her had transformed my
life. But where had I found the nerve to imagine that I had anything to
offer her in return?
“Something happened,” I admitted. “Before I
asked her out.”
“Yeah?”
I almost clammed up; I hadn’t told anyone
about the events in the alley, not even Francine. The incident had come
to seem too personal, as if to recount it at all would be to lay my
conscience bare. But Will was off to Munich in less than a week, and it
was easier to confide in someone I didn’t expect to see again.
When I finished, Will bore a satisfied grin,
as if I’d explained everything. “Pure karma,” he announced. “I should
have guessed.”
“Oh, very scientific.”
“I’m serious. Forget the Buddhist mystobabble;
I’m talking about the real thing. If you stick to your principles, of
course things go better for you—assuming you don’t get killed in the
process. That’s elementary psychology. People have a highly developed
sense of reciprocity, of the appropriateness of the treatment they
receive from each other. If things work out too well for them, they
can’t help asking, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ If you don’t have a
good answer, you’ll sabotage yourself. Not all the time, but often
enough. So if you do something that improves your self-esteem—”
“Self-esteem is for the weak,” I quipped. Will
rolled his eyes. “I don’t think like that,” I protested.
“No? Why did you even bring it up, then?”
I shrugged. “Maybe it just made me less
pessimistic. I could have had the crap beaten out of me, but I didn’t.
That makes asking someone to a concert seem a lot less dangerous.” I
was beginning to cringe at all this unwanted analysis, and I had
nothing to counter Will’s pop psychology except an equally folksy
version of my own.
He could see I was embarrassed, so he let the
matter drop. As I watched Francine moving through the crowd, though, I
couldn’t shake off an unsettling sense of the tenuousness of the
circumstances that had brought us together. There was no denying that
if I’d walked away from the alley, and the kitchen hand had died, I
would have felt like shit for a long time afterward. I would not have
felt entitled to much out of my own life.
I hadn’t walked away, though. And even if the
decision had come down to the wire, why shouldn’t I be proud that I’d
made the right choice? That didn’t mean everything that followed was
tainted, like a reward from some sleazy, palm-greasing deity. I hadn’t
won Francine’s affection in a medieval test of bravery; we’d chosen
each other, and persisted with that choice, for a thousand complicated
reasons.
We were together now; that was what mattered.
I wasn’t going to dwell on the path that had brought me to her, just to
dredge up all the doubts and insecurities that had almost kept us
apart.
2012
As we drove the last kilometer along the
road south from Ar Rafidiyah, I could see the Wall of Foam glistening
ahead of us in the morning sunlight. Insubstantial as a pile of soap
bubbles, but still intact, after six weeks.
“I can’t believe it’s lasted this long,” I
told Sadiq.
“You didn’t trust the models?”
“Fuck, no. Every week, I thought we’d come
over the hill and there’d be nothing but a shriveled-up cobweb.”
Sadiq smiled. “So you had no faith in my
calculations?”
“Don’t take it personally. There were a lot of
things we could have both got wrong.”
Sadiq pulled off the road. His students,
Hassan and Rashid, had climbed off the back of the truck and started
toward the Wall before I’d even got my face mask on. Sadiq called them
back, and made them put on plastic boots and paper suits over their
clothes, while the two of us did the same. We didn’t usually bother
with this much protection, but today was different.
Close up, the Wall almost vanished: all you
noticed were isolated, rainbow-fringed reflections, drifting at a
leisurely pace across the otherwise invisible film as water
redistributed itself, following waves induced in the membrane by the
interplay of air pressure, thermal gradients, and surface tension.
These images might easily have been separate objects, scraps of
translucent plastic blowing around above the desert, held aloft by a
breeze too faint to detect at ground level.
The further away you looked, though, the more
crowded the hints of light became, and the less plausible any
alternative hypothesis that denied the Wall its integrity. It stretched
for a kilometer along the edge of the desert, and rose an uneven 15 to
20 meters into the air. But it was merely the first, and smallest, of
its kind, and the time had come to put it on the back of the truck and
drive it all the way back to Basra.
Sadiq took a spray can of reagent from the
cabin, and shook it as he walked down the embankment. I followed him,
my heart in my mouth. The Wall had not dried out; it had not been torn
apart or blown away, but there was still plenty of room for failure.
Sadiq reached up and sprayed what appeared
from my vantage to be thin air, but I could see the fine mist of
droplets strike the membrane. A breathy susurration rose up, like the
sound from a steam iron, and I felt a faint warm dampness before the
first silken threads appeared, crisscrossing the region where the
polymer from which the Wall was built had begun to shift conformations.
In one state, the polymer was soluble, exposing hydrophilic groups of
atoms that bound water into narrow sheets of feather-light gel. Now,
triggered by the reagent and powered by sunlight, it was tucking these
groups into slick, oily cages, and expelling every molecule of water,
transforming the gel into a desiccated web.
I just hoped it wasn’t expelling anything
else.
As the lacy net began to fall in folds at his
feet, Hassan said something in Arabic, disgusted and amused. My grasp
of the language remained patchy; Sadiq translated for me, his voice
muffled by his face mask: “He says probably most of the weight of the
thing will be dead insects.” He shooed the youths back toward the truck
before following himself, as the wind blew a glistening curtain over
our heads. It descended far too slowly to trap us, but I hastened up
the slope.
We watched from the truck as the Wall came
down, the wave of dehydration propagating along its length. If the gel
had been an elusive sight close up, the residue was entirely invisible
in the distance; there was less substance to it than a very long
pantyhose—albeit, pantyhose clogged with gnats.
The smart polymer was the invention of Sonja
Helvig, a Norwegian chemist; I’d tweaked her original design for this
application. Sadiq and his students were civil engineers, responsible
for scaling everything up to the point where it could have a practical
benefit. On those terms, this experiment was still nothing but a minor
field trial.
I turned to Sadiq. “You did some mine
clearance once, didn’t you?”
“Years ago.” Before I could say anything more,
he’d caught my drift. “You’re thinking that might have been more
satisfying? Bang, and it’s gone, the proof is there in front of you?”
“One less mine, one less bomblet,” I said.
“However many thousands there were to deal with, at least you could
tick each one off as a definite achievement.”
“That’s true. It was a good feeling.” He
shrugged. “But what should we do? Give up on this, because it’s
harder?”
He took the truck down the slope, then
supervised the students as they attached the wisps of polymer to the
specialized winch they’d built. Hassan and Rashid were in their 20s,
but they could easily have passed for adolescents. After the war, the
dictator and his former backers in the west had found it mutually
expedient to have a generation of Iraqi children grow up malnourished
and without medical care, if they grew up at all. More than a million
people had died under the sanctions. My own sick joke of a nation had
sent part of its navy to join the blockade, while the rest stayed home
to fend off boatloads of refugees from this, and other, atrocities.
General Mustache was long dead, but his comrades-ingenocide with more
salubrious addresses were all still at large: doing lecture tours,
running think tanks, lobbying for the Nobel peace prize.
As the strands of polymer wound around a core
inside the winch’s protective barrel, the alpha count rose steadily. It
was a good sign: the fine particles of uranium oxide trapped by the
Wall had remained bound to the polymer during dehydration, and the
reeling in of the net. The radiation from the few grams of U-238 we’d
collected was far too low to be a hazard in itself; the thing to avoid
was ingesting the dust, and even then the unpleasant effects were as
much chemical as radiological. Hopefully, the polymer had also bound
its other targets: the organic carcinogens that had been strewn across
Kuwait and southern Iraq by the apocalyptic oil well fires. There was
no way to determine that until we did a full chemical analysis.
We were all in high spirits on the ride back.
What we’d plucked from the wind in the last six weeks wouldn’t spare a
single person from leukemia, but it now seemed possible that over the
years, over the decades, the technology would make a real difference.
I missed the connection in Singapore for a
direct flight home to Sydney, so I had to go via Perth. There was a
four-hour wait in Perth; I paced the transit lounge, restless and
impatient. I hadn’t set eyes on Francine since she’d left Basra three
months earlier; she didn’t approve of clogging up the limited bandwidth
into Iraq with decadent video. When I’d called her from Singapore she’d
been busy, and now I couldn’t decide whether or not to try again.
Just when I’d resolved to call her, an email
came through on my notepad, saying that she’d received my message and
would meet me at the airport.
In Sydney, I stood by the baggage carousel,
searching the crowd. When I finally saw Francine approaching, she was
looking straight at me, smiling. I left the carousel and walked toward
her; she stopped and let me close the gap, keeping her eyes fixed on
mine. There was a mischievousness to her expression, as if she’d
arranged some kind of prank, but I couldn’t guess what it might be.
When I was almost in front of her, she turned
slightly, and spread her arms. “Ta-da!”
I froze, speechless. Why
hadn’t she told me?
I walked up to her and embraced her, but she’d
read my expression. “Don’t be angry, Ben. I was afraid you’d come home
early if you knew.”
“You’re right, I would have.” My thoughts were
piling up on top of each other; I had three months’ worth of reactions
to get through in 15 seconds. We hadn’t
planned this. We couldn’t afford it. I wasn’t ready.
Suddenly I started weeping, too shocked to be
self-conscious in the crowd. The knot of panic and confusion inside me
dissolved. I held her more tightly, and felt the swelling in her body
against my hip.
“Are you happy?” Francine asked.
I laughed and nodded, choking out the words:
“This is wonderful!”
I meant it. I was still afraid, but it was an
exuberant fear. Another ocean had opened up before us. We would find
our bearings. We would cross it together.
It took me several days to come down to
Earth. We didn’t have a real chance to talk until the weekend; Francine
had a teaching position at UNSW, and though she could have set her own
research aside for a couple of days, marking could wait for no one.
There were a thousand things to plan; the six-month UNESCO fellowship
that had paid for me to take part in the project in Basra had expired,
and I’d need to start earning money again soon, but the fact that I’d
made no commitments yet gave me some welcome flexibility.
On Monday, alone in the flat again, I started
catching up on all the journals I’d neglected. In Iraq I’d been
obsessively single-minded, instructing my knowledge miner to keep me
informed of work relevant to the Wall, to the exclusion of everything
else.
Skimming through a summary of six months’worth
of papers, a report in Science
caught my eye: “An Experimental Model for Decoherence in the
Many-Worlds Cosmology.” A group at Delft University in the Netherlands
had arranged for a simple quantum computer to carry out a sequence of
arithmetic operations on a register which had been prepared to contain
an equal superposition of binary representations of two different
numbers. This in itself was nothing new; superpositions representing up
to 128 numbers were now manipulated daily, albeit only under laboratory
conditions, at close to absolute zero.
Unusually, though, at each stage of the
calculation the qubits containing the numbers in question had been
deliberately entangled with other, spare qubits in the computer. The
effect of this was that the section performing the calculation had
ceased to be in a pure quantum state: it behaved, not as if it
contained two numbers simultaneously, but as if there were merely an
equal chance of it containing either one. This had undermined the
quantum nature of the calculation, just as surely as if the whole
machine had been imperfectly shielded and become entangled with objects
in the environment.
There was one crucial difference, though: in
this case, the experimenters had still had access to the spare qubits
that had made the calculation behave classically. When they performed
an appropriate measurement on the state of the computer as a whole, it was shown to have
remained in a superposition all along. A single observation couldn’t
prove this, but the experiment had been repeated thousands of times,
and within the margins of error, their prediction was confirmed:
although the superposition had become undetectable when they ignored
the spare qubits, it had never really gone away. Both
classical calculations had always taken place simultaneously, even
though they’d lost the ability to interact in a quantum-mechanical
fashion.
I sat at my desk, pondering the result. On one
level, it was just a scaling-up of the quantum eraser experiments of
the ’90s, but the image of a tiny computer program running through its
paces, appearing “to itself” to be unique and alone, while in fact a
second, equally oblivious version had been executing beside it all
along, carried a lot more resonance than an interference experiment
with photons. I’d become used to the idea of quantum computers
performing several calculations at once, but that conjuring trick had
always seemed abstract and ethereal, precisely because the parts
continued to act as a complicated whole right to the end. What struck
home here was the stark
demonstration of the way each calculation could come to appear as a
distinct classical history, as solid and mundane as the shuffling of
beads on an abacus.
When Francine arrived home I was cooking
dinner, but I grabbed my notepad and showed her the paper.
“Yeah, I’ve seen it,” she said.
“What do you think?”
She raised her hands and recoiled in mock
alarm.
“I’m serious.”
“What do you want me to say? Does this prove
the Many Worlds interpretation? No. Does it make it easier to
understand, to have a toy model like this? Yes.”
“But does it sway you at all?” I persisted.
“Do you believe the results would still hold, if they could be scaled
up indefinitely?” From a toy universe, a handful of qubits, to the real
one.
She shrugged. “I don’t really need to be
swayed. I always thought the MWI was the most plausible interpretation
anyway.”
I left it at that, and went back to the
kitchen while she pulled out a stack of assignments.
That night, as we lay in bed together, I
couldn’t get the Delft experiment out of my mind.
“Do you believe there are other versions of
us?” I asked Francine.
“I suppose there must be.” She conceded the
point as if it was something abstract and metaphysical, and I was being
pedantic even to raise it. People who professed belief in the MWI never
seemed to want to take it seriously, let alone personally.
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“No,” she said blithely. “Since I’m powerless
to change the situation, what’s the use in being upset about it?”
“That’s very pragmatic,” I said. Francine
reached over and thumped me on the shoulder. “That was a compliment!” I
protested. “I envy you for having come to terms with it so easily.”
“I haven’t, really,” she admitted. “I’ve just
resolved not to let it worry me, which isn’t quite the same thing.”
I turned to face her, though in the
near-darkness we could barely see each other. I said, “What gives you
the most satisfaction in life?”
“I take it you’re not in the mood to be fobbed
off with a soppy romantic answer?” She sighed. “I don’t know. Solving
problems. Getting things right.”
“What if for every problem you solve, there’s
someone just like you who fails, instead?”
“I cope with my failures,” she said. “Let them
cope with theirs.”
“You know it doesn’t work like that. Some of
them simply don’t cope. Whatever
you find the strength to do, there’ll be someone else who won’t.”
Francine had no reply.
I said, “A couple of weeks ago, I asked Sadiq
about the time he was doing mine clearance. He said it was more
satisfying than mopping up DU ; one little explosion, right before your
eyes, and you know you’ve done something worthwhile. We all get moments
in our lives like that, with that pure, unambiguous sense of
achievement: whatever else we might screw up, at least there’s one
thing that we’ve done right.” I laughed uneasily. “I think I’d go mad,
if I couldn’t rely on that.”
Francine said, “You can. Nothing you’ve done
will ever disappear from under your feet. No one’s going to march up
and take it away from you.”
“I know.” My skin crawled, at the image of
some less favored alter ego turning up on our doorstep, demanding his
dues. “That seems so fucking selfish, though. I don’t want everything
that makes me happy to be at the expense of someone else. I don’t want
every choice to be like…fighting other versions of myself for the prize
in some zero-sum game.”
“No.” Francine hesitated. “But if the reality
is like that, what can you do about it?”
Her words hung in the darkness. What could I
do about it? Nothing. So did I really want to dwell on it, corroding
the foundations of my own happiness, when there was absolutely nothing
to be gained, for anyone?
“You’re right. This is crazy.” I leaned over
and kissed her. “I’d better let you get to sleep.”
“It’s not crazy,” she said. “But I don’t have
any answers.”
The next morning, after Francine had left
for work, I picked up my notepad and saw that she’d mailed me an
e-book: an anthology of cheesy “alternate (sic) history” stories from
the ’90s, entitled My God, It’s Full of Tsars!
“What if Gandhi had been a ruthless soldier of fortune? What if
Theodore Roosevelt had faced a Martian invasion? What if the Nazis had
had Janet Jackson’s choreographer?”
I skimmed through the introduction,
alternately cackling and groaning, then filed the book away and got
down to work. I had a dozen minor administrative tasks to complete for
UNESCO, before I could start searching in earnest for my next position.
By mid-afternoon, I was almost done, but the
growing sense of achievement I felt at having buckled down and cleared
away these tedious obligations brought with it the corollary: someone
infinitesimally different from me—someone who had shared my entire
history up until that morning—had procrastinated instead. The
triviality of this observation only made it more unsettling; the Delft
experiment was seeping into my daily life on the most mundane level.
I dug out the book Francine had sent and tried
reading a few of the stories, but the authors’ relentlessly camp take
on the premise hardly amounted to a reductio
ad absurdum, or even a comical existential balm. I didn’t
really care how hilarious it would have been if Marilyn Monroe had been
involved in a bedroom farce with Richard Feynman and Richard Nixon. I
just wanted to lose the suffocating conviction that everything I had
become was a mirage; that my life had been nothing but a blinkered view
of a kind of torture chamber, where every glorious reprieve I’d ever
celebrated had in fact been an unwitting betrayal.
If fiction had no comfort to offer, what about
fact? Even if the Many Worlds cosmology was correct, no one knew for
certain what the consequences were. It was a fallacy that literally
everything that was physically possible had to occur; most cosmologists
I’d read believed that the universe as a whole possessed a single,
definite quantum state, and while that state would appear from within
as a multitude of distinct classical histories, there was no reason to
assume that these histories amounted to some kind of exhaustive
catalog. The same thing held true on a smaller scale: every time two
people sat down to a game of chess, there was no reason to believe that
they played every possible game.
And if I’d stood in
an alley, nine years before, struggling with my conscience?
My subjective sense of indecision proved nothing, but even if I’d
suffered no qualms and acted without hesitation, to find a human being
in a quantum state of pure, unshakable resolve would have been
freakishly unlikely at best, and in fact was probably physically
impossible.
“Fuck this.” I didn’t know when I’d set myself
up for this bout of paranoia, but I wasn’t going to indulge it for
another second. I banged my head against the desk a few times, then
picked up my notepad and went straight to an employment site.
The thoughts didn’t vanish entirely; it was
too much like trying not to think of a pink elephant. Each time they
recurred, though, I found I could shout them down with threats of
taking myself straight to a psychiatrist. The prospect of having to
explain such a bizarre mental problem was enough to give me access to
hitherto untapped reserves of self-discipline.
By the time I started cooking dinner, I was
feeling merely foolish. If Francine mentioned the subject again, I’d
make a joke of it. I didn’t need a psychiatrist. I was a little
insecure about my good fortune, and still somewhat rattled by the news
of impending fatherhood, but it would hardly have been healthier to
take everything for granted.
My notepad chimed. Francine had blocked the
video again, as if bandwidth, even here, was as precious as water.
“Hello?”
“Ben? I’ve had some bleeding. I’m in a taxi.
Can you meet me at St. Vincent’s?”
Her voice was steady, but my own mouth went
dry. “Sure. I’ll be there in 15 minutes.” I couldn’t add anything: I love you, it will be all right, hold on.
She didn’t need that, it would have jinxed everything.
Half an hour later, I was still caught in
traffic, white-knuckled with rage and helplessness. I stared down at
the dashboard, at the real-time map with every other gridlocked vehicle
marked, and finally stopped deluding myself that at any moment I would
turn into a magically deserted side-street and weave my way across the
city in just a few more minutes.
In the ward, behind the curtains drawn around
her bed, Francine lay curled and rigid, her back turned, refusing to
look at me. All I could do was stand beside her. The gynecologist was
yet to explain everything properly, but the miscarriage had been
accompanied by complications, and she’d had to perform surgery.
Before I’d applied for the UNESCO fellowship,
we’d discussed the risks. For two prudent, well-informed, short-term
visitors, the danger had seemed microscopic. Francine had never
traveled out into the desert with me, and even for the locals in Basra
the rates of birth defects and miscarriages had fallen a long way from
their peaks. We were both taking contraceptives; condoms had seemed
like overkill. Had I brought it back to her,
from the desert? A speck of dust, trapped beneath my foreskin? Had I
poisoned her while we were making love?
Francine turned toward me. The skin around her
eyes was gray and swollen, and I could see how much effort it took for
her to meet my gaze. She drew her hands out from under the bedclothes,
and let me hold them; they were freezing.
After a while, she started sobbing, but she
wouldn’t release my hands. I stroked the back of her thumb with my own
thumb, a tiny, gentle movement.
2020
“How do you feel now?” Olivia Maslin didn’t
quite make eye contact as she addressed me; the image of my brain
activity painted on her retinas was clearly holding her attention.
“Fine,” I said. “Exactly the same as I did
before you started the infusion.”
I was reclining on something like a dentist’s
couch, halfway between sitting and lying, wearing a tight-fitting cap
studded with magnetic sensors and inducers. It was impossible to ignore
the slight coolness of the liquid flowing into the vein in my forearm,
but that sensation was no different than it had been on the previous
occasion, a fortnight before.
“Could you count to ten for me, please.”
I obliged.
“Now close your eyes and picture the same
familiar face as the last time.”
She’d told me I could choose anyone; I’d
picked Francine. I brought back the image, then suddenly recalled that,
the first time, after contemplating the detailed picture in my head for
a few seconds—as if I was preparing to give a description to the
police—I’d started thinking about Francine herself. On cue, the same
transition occurred again: the frozen, forensic likeness became flesh
and blood.
I was led through the whole sequence of
activities once more: reading the same short story (“Two Old-Timers” by
F. Scott Fitzgerald), listening to the same piece of music (from
Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie),
recounting the same childhood memory (my first day at school). At some
point, I lost any trace of anxiety about repeating my earlier mental
states with sufficient fidelity; after all, the experiment had been
designed to cope with the inevitable variation between the two
sessions. I was just one volunteer out of dozens, and half the subjects
would be receiving nothing but saline on both occasions. For all I
knew, I was one of them: a control, merely setting the baseline against
which any real effect would be judged.
If I was receiving the coherence disruptors,
though, then as far as I could tell they’d had no effect on me. My
inner life hadn’t evaporated as the molecules bound to the microtubules
in my neurons, guaranteeing that any kind of quantum coherence those
structures might otherwise have maintained would be lost to the
environment in a fraction of a picosecond.
Personally, I’d never subscribed to Penrose’s
theory that quantum effects might play a role in consciousness;
calculations dating back to a seminal paper by Max Tegmark, 20 years
before, had already made sustained coherence in any neural structure
extremely unlikely. Nevertheless, it had taken considerable ingenuity
on the part of Olivia and her team to rule out the idea definitively,
in a series of clear-cut experiments. Over the past two years, they’d
chased the ghost away from each of the various structures that
different factions of Penrose’s disciples had anointed as the essential
quantum components of the brain. The earliest proposal—the
microtubules, huge polymeric molecules that formed a kind of skeleton
inside every cell—had turned out to be the hardest to target for
disruption. But now it was entirely possible that the cytoskeletons of
my very own neurons were dotted with molecules that coupled them
strongly to a noisy microwave field in which my skull was, definitely,
bathed. In which case, my microtubules had about as much chance of
exploiting quantum effects as I had of playing a game of squash with a
version of myself from a parallel universe.
When the experiment was over, Olivia thanked
me, then became even more distant as she reviewed the data. Raj, one of
her graduate students, slid out the needle and stuck a plaster over the
tiny puncture wound, then helped me out of the cap.
“I know you don’t know yet if I was a control
or not,” I said, “but have you noticed significant differences, with
anyone?” I was almost the last subject in the microtubule trials; any
effect should have shown up by now.
Olivia smiled enigmatically. “You’ll just have
to wait for publication.” Raj leaned down and whispered, “No, never.”
I climbed off the couch. “The zombie walks!”
Raj declaimed. I lunged hungrily for his brain; he ducked away,
laughing, while Olivia watched us with an expression of pained
indulgence. Die-hard members of the Penrose camp claimed that Olivia’s
experiments proved nothing, because even if people behaved
identically while all quantum effects were ruled out, they could be
doing this as mere automata, totally devoid of consciousness. When
Olivia had offered to let her chief detractor experience coherence
disruption for himself, he’d replied that this would be no more
persuasive, because memories laid down while you were a zombie would be
indistinguishable from ordinary memories, so that looking back on the
experience, you’d notice nothing unusual.
This was sheer desperation; you might as well
assert that everyone in the world but yourself was a zombie, and you
were one, too, every second Tuesday. As the experiments were repeated
by other groups around the world, those people who’d backed the Penrose
theory as scientific hypothesis, rather than adopting it as a kind of
mystical dogma, would gradually accept that it had been refuted.
I left the neuroscience building and walked
across the campus, back toward my office in the physics department. It
was a mild, clear spring morning, with students out lying on the grass,
dozing off with books balanced over their faces like tents. There were
still some advantages to reading from old-fashioned sheaves of e-paper.
I’d only had my own eyes chipped the year before, and though I’d
adapted to the technology easily enough, I still found it disconcerting
to wake on a Sunday morning to find Francine reading the Herald beside me with her eyes shut.
Olivia’s results didn’t surprise me, but it
was satisfying to have the matter resolved once and for all:
consciousness was a purely classical phenomenon. Among other things,
this meant that there was no compelling reason to believe that software
running on a classical computer could not be conscious. Of course,
everything in the universe obeyed quantum mechanics at some level, but
Paul Benioff, one of the pioneers of quantum computing, had shown back
in the ’80s that you could build a classical Turing machine from
quantum mechanical parts, and over the last few years, in my spare
time, I’d studied the branch of quantum computing theory that concerned
itself with avoiding quantum
effects.
Back in my office, I summoned up a schematic
of the device I called the Qusp: the quantum singleton processor. The
Qusp would employ all the techniques designed to shield the latest
generation of quantum computers from entanglement with their
environment, but it would use them to a very different end. A quantum
computer was shielded so it could perform a multitude of parallel
calculations, without each one spawning a separate history of its own,
in which only one answer was accessible. The Qusp would perform just a
single calculation at a time, but on its way to the unique result it
would be able to pass safely through superpositions that included any
number of alternatives, without those alternatives being made real. Cut
off from the outside world during each computational step, it would
keep its temporary quantum ambivalence as private and inconsequential
as a daydream, never being forced to act out every possibility it dared
to entertain.
The Qusp would still need to interact with its
environment whenever it gathered data about the world, and that
interaction would inevitably split it into different versions. If you
attached a camera to the Qusp and pointed it at an ordinary object—a
rock, a plant, a bird—that object could hardly be expected to possess a
single classical history, and so neither would the combined system of
Qusp plus rock, Qusp plus plant, Qusp plus bird.
The Qusp itself,
though, would never initiate the split. In a given set of
circumstances, it would only ever produce a single response. An AI
running on the Qusp could make its decisions as whimsically, or with as
much weighty deliberation as it liked, but for each distinct scenario
it confronted, in the end it would only make one choice, only follow
one course of action.
I closed the file, and the image vanished from
my retinas. For all the work I’d put into the design, I’d made no
effort to build the thing. I’d been using it as little more than a
talisman: whenever I found myself picturing my life as a tranquil
dwelling built over a slaughter house, I’d summon up the Qusp as a
symbol of hope. It was proof of a possibility, and a possibility was
all it took. Nothing in the laws of physics could prevent a small
portion of humanity’s descendants from escaping their ancestors’
dissipation.
Yet I’d shied away from any attempt to see
that promise fulfilled, firsthand. In part, I’d been afraid of delving
too deeply and uncovering a flaw in the Qusp’s design, robbing myself
of the one crutch that kept me standing when the horror swept over me.
It had also been a matter of guilt: I’d been the one granted happiness,
so many times, that it had seemed unconscionable to aspire to that
state yet again. I’d knocked so many of my hapless cousins out of the
ring, it was time I threw a fight and let the prize go to my opponent
instead.
That last excuse was idiotic. The stronger my
determination to build the Qusp, the more branches there would be in
which it was real. Weakening my resolve was not
an act of charity, surrendering the benefits to someone else; it merely
impoverished every future version of me, and everyone they touched.
I did have a third excuse. It was time I dealt
with that one, too.
I called Francine.
“Are you free for lunch?” I asked. She
hesitated; there was always work she could be doing. “To discuss the
Cauchy-Riemann equations?” I suggested.
She smiled. It was our code, when the request
was a special one. “All right. One o’clock?”
I nodded. “I’ll see you then.”
Francine was 20 minutes late, but that was
less of a wait than I was used to. She’d been appointed deputy head of
the mathematics department 18 months before, and she still had some
teaching duties as well as all the new administrative work. Over the
last eight years, I’d had a dozen short-term contracts with various
bodies—government departments, corporations, NGOs—before finally ending
up as a very lowly member of the physics department at our alma mater. I did envy her the prestige
and security of her job, but I’d been happy with most of the work I’d
done, even if it had been too scattered between disciplines to
contribute to anything like a traditional career path.
I’d bought Francine a plate of
cheese-and-salad sandwiches, and she attacked them hungrily as soon as
she sat down. I said, “I’ve got ten minutes at the most, haven’t I?”
She covered her mouth with her hand and
replied defensively, “It could have waited until tonight, couldn’t it?”
“Sometimes I can’t put things off. I have to
act while I still have the courage.”
At this ominous prelude she chewed more
slowly. “You did the second stage of Olivia’s experiment this morning,
didn’t you?”
“Yeah.” I’d discussed the whole procedure with
her before I volunteered.
“So I take it you didn’t lose consciousness,
when your neurons became marginally more classical than usual?” She
sipped chocolate milk through a straw.
“No. Apparently no one ever loses anything.
That’s not official yet, but—”
Francine nodded, unsurprised. We shared the
same position on the Penrose theory; there was no need to discuss it
again now.
I said, “I want to know if you’re going to
have the operation.”
She continued drinking for a few more seconds,
then released the straw and wiped her upper lip with her thumb,
unnecessarily. “You want me to make up my mind about that, here and
now?”
“No.” The damage to her uterus from the
miscarriage could be repaired; we’d been discussing the possibility for
almost five years. We’d both had comprehensive chelation therapy to
remove any trace of U-238. We could have children in the usual way with
a reasonable degree of safety, if that was what we wanted. “But if
you’ve already decided, I want you to tell me now.”
Francine looked wounded. “That’s unfair.”
“What is? Implying that you might not have
told me, the instant you decided?”
“No. Implying that it’s all in my hands.”
I said, “I’m not washing my hands of the
decision. You know how I feel. But you know I’d back you all the way,
if you said you wanted to carry a child.” I believed I would have.
Maybe it was a form of doublethink, but I couldn’t treat the birth of
one more ordinary child as some kind of atrocity, and refuse to be a
part of it.
“Fine. But what will you do if I don’t?” She
examined my face calmly. I think she already knew, but she wanted me to
spell it out.
“We could always adopt,” I observed casually.
“Yes, we could do that.” She smiled slightly;
she knew that made me lose my ability to bluff, even faster than when
she stared me down.
I stopped pretending that there was any
mystery left; she’d seen right through me from the start. I said, “I
just don’t want to do this, then discover that it makes you feel that
you’ve been cheated out of what you really wanted.”
“It wouldn’t,” she insisted. “It wouldn’t rule
out anything. We could still have a natural child as well.”
“Not as easily.” This would not be like merely
having workaholic parents, or an ordinary brother or sister to compete
with for attention.
“You only want to do this if I can promise you
that it’s the only child we’d ever have?” Francine shook her head. “I’m
not going to promise that. I don’t intend having the operation any time
soon, but I’m not going to swear that I won’t change my mind. Nor am I
going to swear that if we do this it will make no difference to what
happens later. It will be a factor. How could it not be? But it won’t
be enough to rule anything in or out.”
I looked away, across the rows of tables, at
all the students wrapped up in their own concerns. She was right; I was
being unreasonable. I’d wanted this to be a choice with no possible
downside, a way of making the best of our situation, but no one could
guarantee that. It would be a gamble, like everything else.
I turned back to Francine.
“All right; I’ll stop trying to pin you down.
What I want to do right now is go ahead and build the Qusp. And when
it’s finished, if we’re certain we can trust it…I want us to raise a
child with it. I want us to raise an AI.”
2029
I met Francine at the airport, and we drove
across Sao Paulo through curtains of wild, lashing rain. I was amazed
that her plane hadn’t been diverted; a tropical storm had just hit the
coast, halfway between us and Rio.
“So much for giving you a tour of the city,” I
lamented. Through the windscreen, our actual surroundings were all but
invisible; the bright overlay we both perceived, surreally colored and
detailed, made the experience rather like perusing a 3D map while
trapped in a car wash.
Francine was pensive, or tired from the
flight. I found it hard to think of San Francisco as remote when the
time difference was so small, and even when I’d made the journey north
to visit her, it had been nothing compared to all the ocean-spanning
marathons I’d sat through in the past.
We both had an early night. The next morning,
Francine accompanied me to my cluttered workroom in the basement of the
university’s engineering department. I’d been chasing grants and
collaborators around the world, like a child on a treasure hunt, slowly
piecing together a device that few of my colleagues believed was worth
creating for its own sake. Fortunately, I’d managed to find pretexts—or
even genuine spin-offs—for almost every stage of the work. Quantum
computing, per se, had become
bogged down in recent years, stymied by both a shortage of practical
algorithms and a limit to the complexity of superpositions that could
be sustained. The Qusp had nudged the technological envelope in some
promising directions, without making any truly exorbitant demands; the
states it juggled were relatively simple, and they only needed to be
kept isolated for milliseconds at a time.
I introduced Carlos, Maria and Jun, but then
they made themselves scarce as I showed Francine around. We still had a
demonstration of the “balanced decoupling” principle set up on a bench,
for the tour by one of our corporate donors the week before. What
caused an imperfectly shielded quantum computer to decohere was the
fact that each possible state of the device affected its environment
slightly differently. The shielding itself could always be improved,
but Carlos’s group had perfected a way to buy a little more protection
by sheer deviousness. In the demonstration rig, the flow of energy
through the device remained absolutely constant whatever state it was
in, because any drop in power consumption by the main set of quantum
gates was compensated for by a rise in a set of balancing gates, and vice versa. This gave the environment one
less clue by which to discern internal differences in the processor,
and to tear any superposition apart into mutually disconnected
branches.
Francine knew all the theory backward, but
she’d never seen this hardware in action. When I invited her to twiddle
the controls, she took to the rig like a child with a game console.
“You really should have joined the team,” I
said.
“Maybe I did,” she countered. “In another
branch.”
She’d moved from UNSW to Berkeley two years
before, not long after I’d moved from Delft to Sao Paulo; it was the
closest suitable position she could find. At the time, I’d resented the
fact that she’d refused to compromise and work remotely; with only five
hours’ difference, teaching at Berkeley from Sao Paulo would not have
been impossible. In the end, though, I’d accepted the fact that she’d
wanted to keep on testing me, testing both of us. If we weren’t strong
enough to stay together through the trials of a prolonged physical
separation—or if I was not sufficiently committed to the project to
endure whatever sacrifices it entailed—she did not want us proceeding
to the next stage.
I led her to the corner bench, where a
nondescript gray box half a meter across sat, apparently inert. I
gestured to it, and our retinal overlays transformed its appearance,
“revealing” a maze with a transparent lid embedded in the top of the
device. In one chamber of the maze, a slightly cartoonish mouse sat
motionless. Not quite dead, not quite sleeping.
“This is the famous Zelda?” Francine asked.
“Yes.” Zelda was a neural network, a
stripped-down, stylized mouse brain. There were newer, fancier versions
available, much closer to the real thing, but the ten-year-old, public
domain Zelda had been good enough for our purposes.
Three other chambers held cheese. “Right now,
she has no experience of the maze,” I explained. “So let’s start her up
and watch her explore.” I gestured, and Zelda began scampering around,
trying out different passages, deftly reversing each time she hit a
cul-de-sac. “Her brain is running on a Qusp, but the maze is
implemented on an ordinary classical computer, so in terms of coherence
issues, it’s really no different from a physical maze.”
“Which means that each time she takes in
information, she gets entangled with the outside world,” Francine
suggested.
“Absolutely. But she always holds off doing
that until the Qusp has completed its current computational step, and
every qubit contains a definite zero or a definite one. She’s never in
two minds when she lets the world in, so the entanglement process
doesn’t split her into separate branches.”
Francine continued to watch, in silence. Zelda
finally found one of the chambers containing a reward; when she’d eaten
it, a hand scooped her up and returned her to her starting point, then
replaced the cheese.
“Here are 10,000 previous trials,
superimposed.” I replayed the data. It looked as if a single mouse was
running through the maze, moving just as we’d seen her move when I’d
begun the latest experiment. Restored each time to exactly the same
starting condition, and confronted with exactly the same environment,
Zelda—like any computer program with no truly random influences—had
simply repeated herself. All 10,000 trials had yielded identical
results.
To a casual observer, unaware of the context,
this would have been a singularly unimpressive performance. Faced with
exactly one situation, Zelda the virtual mouse did exactly one thing.
So what? If you’d been able to wind back a flesh-and-blood mouse’s
memory with the same degree of precision, wouldn’t it have repeated
itself too?
Francine said, “Can you cut off the shielding?
And the balanced decoupling?”
“Yep.” I obliged her, and initiated a new
trial.
Zelda took a different path this time,
exploring the maze by a different route. Though the initial condition
of the neural net was identical, the switching processes taking place
within the Qusp were now opened up to the environment constantly, and
superpositions of several different eigenstates—states in which the
Qusp’s qubits possessed definite binary values, which in turn led to
Zelda making definite choices—were becoming entangled with the outside
world. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics,
this interaction was randomly “collapsing” the superpositions into
single eigenstates; Zelda was still doing just one thing at a time, but
her behavior had ceased to be deterministic. According to the MWI, the
interaction was transforming the environment—Francine and me
included—into a superposition with components that were coupled to each
eigenstate; Zelda was actually running the maze in many different ways
simultaneously, and other versions of us were seeing her take all those
other routes.
Which scenario was correct?
I said, “I’ll reconfigure everything now, to
wrap the whole setup in a Delft cage.” A “Delft cage” was jargon for
the situation I’d first read about 17 years before: instead of opening
up the Qusp to the environment, I’d connect it to a second quantum
computer, and let that play the
role of the outside world.
We could no longer watch Zelda moving about in
real time, but after the trial was completed, it was possible to test
the combined system of both computers against the hypothesis that it
was in a pure quantum state in which Zelda had run the maze along
hundreds of different routes, all at once. I displayed a representation
of the conjectured state, built up by superimposing all the paths she’d
taken in 10,000 unshielded trials.
The test result flashed up: CONSISTENT .
“One measurement proves nothing,” Francine
pointed out.
“No.” I repeated the trial. Again, the
hypothesis was not refuted. If Zelda had actually run the maze along
just one path, the probability of the computers’ joint state passing
this imperfect test was about one percent. For passing it twice, the
odds were about one in 10,000.
I repeated it a third time, then a fourth.
Francine said, “That’s enough.” She actually
looked queasy. The image of the hundreds of blurred mouse trails on the
display was not a literal photograph of anything, but if the old Delft
experiment had been enough to give me a visceral sense of the reality
of the multiverse, perhaps this demonstration had finally done the same
for her.
“Can I show you one more thing?” I asked.
“Keep the Delft cage, but restore the Qusp’s
shielding?”
“Right.”
I did it. The Qusp was now fully protected
once more whenever it was not in an eigenstate, but this time, it was
the second quantum computer, not the outside world, to which it was
intermittently exposed. If Zelda split into multiple branches again,
then she’d only take that fake environment with her, and we’d still
have our hands on all the evidence.
Tested against the hypothesis that no split
had occurred, the verdict was: CONSISTENT . CONSISTENT . CONSISTENT .
We went out to dinner with the whole of the
team, but Francine pleaded a headache and left early. She insisted that
I stay and finish the meal, and I didn’t argue; she was not the kind of
person who expected you to assume that she was being politely selfless,
while secretly hoping to be contradicted.
After Francine had left, Maria turned to me.
“So you two are really going ahead with the Frankenchild?” She’d been
teasing me about this for as long as I’d known her, but apparently she
hadn’t been game to raise the subject in Francine’s presence.
“We still have to talk about it.” I felt
uncomfortable myself, now, discussing the topic the moment Francine was
absent. Confessing my ambition when I applied to join the team was one
thing; it would have been dishonest to keep my collaborators in the
dark about my ultimate intentions. Now that the enabling technology was
more or less completed, though, the issue seemed far more personal.
Carlos said breezily, “Why not? There are so
many others now. Sophie. Linus. Theo. Probably a hundred we don’t even
know about. It’s not as if Ben’s child won’t have playmates.”
Adai—Autonomously Developing Artificial Intelligences—had been
appearing in a blaze of controversy every few months for the last four
years. A Swiss researcher, Isabelle Schib, had taken the old models of
morphogenesis that had led to software like Zelda, refined the
technique by several orders of magnitude, and applied it to human
genetic data. Wedded to sophisticated prosthetic bodies, Isabelle’s
creations inhabited the physical world and learned from their
experience, just like any other child.
Jun shook his head reprovingly. “I wouldn’t
raise a child with no legal rights. What happens when you die? For all
you know, it could end up as someone’s property.”
I’d been over this with Francine. “I can’t
believe that in ten or 20 years’ time there won’t be citizenship laws,
somewhere in the world.”
Jun snorted. “Twenty years! How long did it
take the U.S. to emancipate their slaves?”
Carlos interjected, “Who’s going to create an
adai just to use it as a slave? If you want something biddable, write
ordinary software. If you need consciousness, humans are cheaper.”
Maria said, “It won’t come down to economics.
It’s the nature of the things that will determine how they’re treated.”
“You mean the xenophobia they’ll face?” I
suggested.
Maria shrugged. “You make it sound like
racism, but we aren’t talking about human beings. Once you have
software with goals of its own, free to do whatever it likes, where
will it end? The first generation makes the next one better, faster,
smarter; the second generation even more so. Before we know it, we’re
like ants to them.”
Carlos groaned. “Not that hoary old fallacy!
If you really believe that stating the analogy ‘ants are to humans, as
humans are to x’ is proof that it’s
possible to solve for x, then I’ll
meet you where the south pole is like the equator.”
I said, “The Qusp runs no faster than an
organic brain; we need to keep the switching rate low, because that
makes the shielding requirements less stringent. It might be possible
to nudge those parameters, eventually, but there’s no reason in the
world why an adai would be better equipped to do that than you or I
would. As for making their own offspring smarter…even if Schib’s group
has been perfectly successful, they will have merely translated human
neural development from one substrate to another. They won’t have
‘improved’ on the process at all—whatever that might mean. So if the
adai have any advantage over us, it will be no more than the advantage
shared by flesh-and-blood children: cultural transmission of one more
generation’s worth of experience.”
Maria frowned, but she had no immediate
comeback.
Jun said dryly, “Plus immortality.”
“Well, yes, there is that.” I conceded.
Francine was awake when I arrived home.
“Have you still got a headache?” I whispered.
“No.”
I undressed and climbed into bed beside her.
She said, “You know what I miss the most? When
we’re fucking on-line?”
“This had better not be complicated; I’m out
of practice.”
“Kissing.”
I kissed her, slowly and tenderly, and she
melted beneath me. “Three more months,” I promised, “and I’ll move up
to Berkeley.”
“To be my kept man.”
“I prefer the term ‘unpaid but highly valued
caregiver.’ ” Francine stiffened. I said, “We can talk about that
later.” I started kissing her again, but she turned her face away.
“I’m afraid,” she said.
“So am I,” I assured her. “That’s a good sign.
Everything worth doing is terrifying.”
“But not everything terrifying is good.”
I rolled over and lay beside her. She said,
“On one level, it’s easy. What greater gift could you give a child than
the power to make real decisions? What worse fate could you spare her
from than being forced to act against her better judgment, over and
over? When you put it like that, it’s simple.
“But every fiber in my body still rebels
against it. How will she feel, knowing what she is? How will she make
friends? How will she belong? How will she not despise us for making
her a freak? And what if we’re robbing her of something she’d value:
living a billion lives, never being forced to choose between them? What
if she sees the gift as a kind of impoverishment?”
“She can always drop the shielding on the
Qusp,” I said. “Once she understands the issues, she can choose for
herself.”
“That’s true.” Francine did not sound
mollified at all; she would have thought of that long before I’d
mentioned it, but she wasn’t looking for concrete answers. Every
ordinary human instinct screamed at us that we were embarking on
something dangerous, unnatural, hubristic—but
those instincts were more about safeguarding our own reputations than
protecting our child-to-be. No parent, save the most willfully
negligent, would be pilloried if their flesh-and-blood child turned out
to be ungrateful for life; if I’d railed against my own mother and
father because I’d found fault in the existential conditions with which
I’d been lumbered, it wasn’t hard to guess which side would attract the
most sympathy from the world at large. Anything that went wrong with our child would be grounds for
lynching—however much love, sweat, and soul-searching had gone into her
creation—because we’d had the temerity to be dissatisfied with the kind
of fate that everyone else happily inflicted on their own.
I said, “You saw Zelda today, spread across
the branches. You know, deep down now, that the same thing happens to
all of us.”
“Yes.” Something tore inside me as Francine
uttered that admission. I’d never really wanted her to feel it, the way
I did.
I persisted. “Would you willingly sentence
your own child to that condition? And your grandchildren? And your
great-grandchildren?”
“No,” Francine replied. A part of her hated me
now; I could hear it in her voice. It was my
curse, my obsession; before she met
me, she’d managed to believe and not believe, taking her acceptance of
the multiverse lightly.
I said, “I can’t do this without you.”
“You can, actually. More easily than any of
the alternatives. You wouldn’t even need a stranger to donate an egg.”
“I can’t do it unless you’re behind me. If you
say the word, I’ll stop here. We’ve built the Qusp. We’ve shown that it
can work. Even if we don’t do this last part ourselves, someone else
will, in a decade or two.”
“If we
don’t do this,” Francine observed acerbically, “we’ll simply do it in
another branch.”
I said, “That’s true, but it’s no use thinking
that way. In the end, I can’t function unless I pretend that my choices
are real. I doubt that anyone can.”
Francine was silent for a long time. I stared
up into the darkness of the room, trying hard not to contemplate the
near certainty that her decision would go both ways.
Finally, she spoke.
“Then let’s make a child who doesn’t need to
pretend.”
2031
Isabelle Schib welcomed us into her office.
In person, she was slightly less intimidating than she was on-line; it
wasn’t anything different in her appearance or manner, just the
ordinariness of her surroundings. I’d envisaged her ensconced in some
vast, pristine, high-tech building, not a couple of pokey rooms on a
back-street in Basel.
Once the pleasantries were out of the way,
Isabelle got straight to the point. “You’ve been accepted,” she
announced. “I’ll send you the contract later today.”
My throat constricted with panic; I should
have been elated, but I just felt unprepared. Isabelle’s group licensed
only three new adai a year. The short-list had come down to about a
hundred couples, winnowed from tens of thousands of applicants. We’d
traveled to Switzerland for the final selection process, carried out by
an agency that ordinarily handled adoptions. Through all the interviews
and questionnaires, all the personality tests and scenario challenges,
I’d managed to half-convince myself that our dedication would win
through in the end, but that had been nothing but a prop to keep my
spirits up.
Francine said calmly, “Thank you.”
I coughed. “You’re happy with everything we’ve
proposed?” If there was going to be a proviso thrown in that rendered
this miracle worthless, better to hear it now, before the shock had
worn off and I’d started taking things for granted.
Isabelle nodded. “I don’t pretend to be an
expert in the relevant fields, but I’ve had the Qusp’s design assessed
by several colleagues, and I see no reason why it wouldn’t be an
appropriate form of hardware for an adai. I’m entirely agnostic about
the MWI , so I don’t share your view that the Qusp is a necessity, but
if you were worried that I might write you off as cranks because of
it,” she smiled slightly, “you should meet some of the other people
I’ve had to deal with.
“I believe you have the adai’s welfare at
heart, and you’re not suffering from any of the
superstitions—technophobic or
technophilic—that would distort the relationship. And as you’ll recall,
I’ll be entitled to visits and inspections throughout your period of
guardianship. If you’re found to be violating any of the terms of the
contract, your license will be revoked, and I’ll take charge of the
adai.”
Francine said, “What do you think the
prospects are for a happier end to our guardianship?”
“I’m lobbying the European parliament
constantly,” Isabelle replied. “Of course, in a few years’ time several
adai will reach the stage where their personal testimony begins
contributing to the debate, but none of us should wait until then. The
ground has to be prepared.”
We spoke for almost an hour, on this and other
issues. Isabelle had become quite an expert at fending off the
attentions of the media; she promised to send us a handbook on this,
along with the contract.
“Did you want to meet Sophie?” Isabelle asked,
almost as an afterthought.
Francine said, “That would be wonderful.”
Francine and I had seen a video of Sophie at age four, undergoing a
battery of psychological tests, but we’d never had a chance to converse
with her, let alone meet her face to face.
The three of us left the office together, and
Isabelle drove us to her home on the outskirts of the town.
In the car, the reality began sinking in anew.
I felt the same mixture of exhilaration and claustrophobia that I’d
experienced 21 years before, when Francine had met me at the airport
with news of her pregnancy. No digital conception had yet taken place,
but if sex had ever felt half as loaded with risks and responsibilities
as this, I would have remained celibate for life.
“No badgering, no interrogation,” Isabelle
warned us as she pulled into the driveway.
I said, “Of course not.”
Isabelle called out, “Marco! Sophie!” as we
followed her through the door. At the end of the hall, I heard childish
giggling, and an adult male voice whispering in French. Then Isabelle’s
husband stepped out from behind the corner, a smiling, dark-haired
young man, with Sophie riding on his shoulders. At first I couldn’t
look at her; I just smiled politely back at Marco, while noting glumly
that he was at least 15 years younger than I was. How
could I even think of doing this, at 46? Then I glanced up,
and caught Sophie’s eye. She gazed straight back at me for a moment,
appearing curious and composed, but then a fit of shyness struck her,
and she buried her face in Marco’s hair.
Isabelle introduced us, in English; Sophie was
being raised to speak four languages, though in Switzerland that was
hardly phenomenal. Sophie said, “Hello” but kept her eyes lowered.
Isabelle said, “Come into the living room. Would you like something to
drink?”
The five of us sipped lemonade, and the adults
made polite, superficial conversation. Sophie sat on Marco’s knees,
squirming restlessly, sneaking glances at us. She looked exactly like
an ordinary, slightly gawky, six-year-old girl. She had Isabelle’s
straw-colored hair, and Marco’s brown eyes; whether by fiat or rigorous
genetic simulation, she could have passed for their biological
daughter. I’d read technical specifications describing her body, and
seen an earlier version in action on the video, but the fact that it
looked so plausible was the least of its designers’ achievements.
Watching her drinking, wriggling and fidgeting, I had no doubt that she
felt herself inhabiting this skin, as much as I did my own. She was not
a puppeteer posing as a child, pulling electronic strings from some
dark cavern in her skull.
“Do you like lemonade?” I asked her.
She stared at me for a moment, as if wondering
whether she should be affronted by the presumptuousness of this
question, then replied, “It tickles.”
In the taxi to the hotel, Francine held my
hand tightly.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“Yes, of course.”
In the elevator, she started crying. I wrapped
my arms around her.
“She would have been 20 this year.”
“I know.”
“Do you think she’s alive, somewhere?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s a good
way to think about it.”
Francine wiped her eyes. “No. This will be
her. That’s the way to see it. This will be my girl. Just a few years
late.”
Before flying home, we visited a small
pathology lab, and left samples of our blood.
Our daughter’s first five bodies reached us
a month before her birth. I unpacked all five, and laid them out in a
row on the living room floor. With their muscles slack and their eyes
rolled up, they looked more like tragic mummies than sleeping infants.
I dismissed that grisly image; better to think of them as suits of
clothes. The only difference was that we hadn’t bought pajamas quite so
far ahead.
From wrinkled pink newborn to chubby
18-month-old, the progression made an eerie sight—even if an organic
child’s development, short of serious disease or malnourishment, would
have been scarcely less predictable. A colleague of Francine’s had
lectured me a few weeks before about the terrible “mechanical
determinism” we’d be imposing on our child, and though his arguments
had been philosophically naïve, this sequence of immutable
snapshots from the future still gave me goose bumps.
The truth was, reality as a whole was
deterministic, whether you had a Qusp for a brain or not; the quantum
state of the multiverse at any moment determined the entire future.
Personal experience—confined to one branch at a time—certainly appeared probabilistic, because there was
no way to predict which local future you’d experience when a branch
split, but the reason it was impossible to know that in advance was
because the real answer was “all of them.”
For a singleton, the only difference was that
branches never split on the basis of your personal decisions. The world
at large would continue to look probabilistic, but every choice you
made was entirely determined by who you were
and the situation you faced.
What more could anyone hope for? It was not as
if who you were could be boiled
down to some crude genetic or sociological profile; every shadow you’d
seen on the ceiling at night, every cloud you’d watched drift across
the sky, would have left some small imprint on the shape of your mind.
Those events were fully determined too, when viewed across the
multiverse—with different versions of you witnessing every
possibility—but in practical terms, the bottom line was that no private
investigator armed with your genome and a potted biography could plot
your every move in advance.
Our daughter’s choices—like everything
else—had been written in stone at the birth of the universe, but that
information could only be decoded by becoming
her along the way. Her actions would flow from her
temperament, her principles, her desires, and the fact that all of
these qualities would themselves have prior causes did nothing to
diminish their value. Free will was
a slippery notion, but to me it simply meant that your choices were
more or less consistent with your nature—which in turn was a
provisional, constantly-evolving consensus between a thousand different
influences. Our daughter would not be robbed of the chance to act
capriciously, or even perversely, but at least it would not be
impossible for her ever to act wholly in accordance with her ideals.
I packed the bodies away before Francine got
home. I wasn’t sure if the sight would unsettle her, but I didn’t want
her measuring them up for more clothes.
The delivery began in the early hours of the
morning of Sunday, December 14, and was expected to last about four
hours, depending on traffic. I sat in the nursery while Francine paced
the hallway outside, both of us watching the data coming through over
the fiber from Basel.
Isabelle had used our genetic information as
the starting point for a simulation of the development in utero of a complete embryo, employing
an “adaptive hierarchy” model, with the highest resolution reserved for
the central nervous system. The Qusp would take over this task, not
only for the newborn child’s brain, but also for the thousands of
biochemical processes occurring outside the skull that the artificial
bodies were not designed to perform. Apart from their sophisticated
sensory and motor functions, the bodies could take in food and excrete
wastes—for psychological and social reasons, as well as for the
chemical energy this provided—and they breathed air, both in order to
oxidize this fuel, and for vocalization, but they had no blood, no
endocrine system, no immune response.
The Qusp I’d built in Berkeley was smaller
than the Sao Paulo version, but it was still six times as wide as an
infant’s skull. Until it was further miniaturized, our daughter’s mind
would sit in a box in a corner of the nursery, joined to the rest of
her by a wireless data link. Bandwidth and time lag would not be an
issue within the Bay Area, and if we needed to take her further afield
before everything was combined, the Qusp wasn’t too large or delicate
to move.
As the progress bar I was overlaying on the
side of the Qusp nudged 98 percent, Francine came into the nursery,
looking agitated.
“We have to put it off, Ben. Just for a day. I
need more time to prepare myself.”
I shook my head. “You made me promise to say
no, if you asked me to do that.” She’d even refused to let me tell her
how to halt the Qusp herself.
“Just a few hours,” she pleaded.
Francine seemed genuinely distressed, but I
hardened my heart by telling myself that she was acting: testing me,
seeing if I’d keep my word. “No. No slowing down or speeding up, no
pauses, no tinkering at all. This child has to hit us like a freight
train, just like any other child would.”
“You want me to go into labor now?” she said
sarcastically. When I’d raised the possibility, half-jokingly, of
putting her on a course of hormones that would have mimicked some of
the effects of pregnancy in order to make bonding with the child
easier—for myself as well, indirectly—she’d almost bit my head off. I
hadn’t been serious, because I knew it wasn’t necessary. Adoption was
the ultimate proof of that, but what we were doing was closer to
claiming a child of our own from a surrogate.
“No. Just pick her up.”
Francine peered down at the inert form in the
cot.
“I can’t do it!” she wailed. “When I hold her,
she should feel as if she’s the most precious thing in the world to me.
How can I make her believe that, when I know I could bounce her off the
walls without harming her?”
We had two minutes left. I felt my breathing
grow ragged. I could send the Qusp a halt code, but what if that set
the pattern? If one of us had had too little sleep, if Francine was
late for work, if we talked ourselves into believing that our special
child was so unique that we deserved a short holiday from her needs,
what would stop us from doing the same thing again?
I opened my mouth to threaten her: Either you pick her up now, or I do it. I
stopped myself, and said, “You know how much it would harm her
psychologically, if you dropped her. The very fact that you’re afraid
that you won’t convey as much protectiveness as you need to will be
just as strong a signal to her as anything else. You
care about her. She’ll sense that.”
Francine stared back at me dubiously.
I said, “She’ll know. I’m sure she will.”
Francine reached into the cot and lifted the
slack body into her arms. Seeing her cradle the lifeless form, I felt
an anxious twisting in my gut; I’d experienced nothing like this when
I’d laid the five plastic shells out for inspection.
I banished the progress bar and let myself
free-fall through the final seconds: watching my daughter, willing her
to move.
Her thumb twitched, then her legs scissored
weakly. I couldn’t see her face, so I watched Francine’s expression.
For an instant, I thought I could detect a horri-fied tightening at the
corners of her mouth, as if she was about to recoil from this golem.
Then the child began to bawl and kick, and Francine started weeping
with undisguised joy.
As she raised the child to her face and
planted a kiss on its wrinkled forehead, I suffered my own moment of
disquiet. How easily that tender response had been summoned, when the
body could as well have been brought to life by the kind of software
used to animate the characters in games and films.
It hadn’t, though. There’d been nothing false
or easy about the road that had brought us to this moment—let alone the
one that Isabelle had followed—and we hadn’t even tried to fashion life
from clay, from nothing. We’d merely diverted one small trickle from a
river already four billion years old.
Francine held our daughter against her
shoulder, and rocked back and forth. “Have you got the bottle? Ben?” I
walked to the kitchen in a daze; the microwave had anticipated the
happy event, and the formula was ready.
I returned to the nursery and offered Francine
the bottle. “Can I hold her, before you start feeding?”
“Of course.” She leaned forward to kiss me,
then held out the child, and I took her the way I’d learned to accept
the babies of relatives and friends, cradling the back of her head with
my hand. The distribution of weight, the heavy head, the play of the
neck, felt the same as it did for any other infant. Her eyes were still
screwed shut, as she screamed and swung her arms.
“What’s your name, my beautiful girl?” We’d
narrowed the list down to about a dozen possibilities, but Francine had
refused to settle on one until she’d seen her daughter take her first
breath. “Have you decided?”
“I want to call her Helen.”
Gazing down at her, that sounded too old to
me. Old-fashioned, at least. Great-Aunt Helen. Helena Bonham-Carter. I
laughed inanely, and she opened her eyes.
Hairs rose on my arms. The dark eyes couldn’t
quite search my face, but she was not oblivious to me. Love and fear
coursed through my veins. How could I hope to
give her what she needed? Even if my judgment had been
faultless, my power to act upon it was crude beyond measure.
We were all she had, though. We would make
mistakes, we would lose our way, but I had to believe that something
would hold fast. Some portion of the overwhelming love and resolve that
I felt right now would have to remain with every version of me who
could trace his ancestry to this moment.
I said, “I name you Helen.”
2041
“Sophie! Sophie!”
Helen ran ahead of us toward the arrivals gate, where Isabelle and
Sophie were emerging. Sophie, almost 16 now, was much less
demonstrative, but she smiled and waved.
Francine said, “Do you ever think of moving?”
“Maybe if the laws change first in Europe,” I
replied.
“I saw a job in Zürich I could apply
for.”
“I don’t think we should bend over backward to
bring them together. They probably get on better with just occasional
visits, and the net. It’s not as if they don’t have other friends.”
Isabelle approached, and greeted us both with
kisses on the cheek. I’d dreaded her arrival the first few times, but
by now she seemed more like a slightly overbearing cousin than a child
protection officer whose very presence implied misdeeds.
Sophie and Helen caught up with us. Helen
tugged at Francine’s sleeve. “Sophie’s got a boyfriend! Daniel. She
showed me his picture.” She swooned mockingly, one hand on her
forehead.
I glanced at Isabelle, who said, “He goes to
her school. He’s really very sweet.”
Sophie grimaced with embarrassment.
“Three-year-old boys are sweet.” She turned to me and said,
“Daniel is charming, and sophisticated, and very
mature.”
I felt as if an anvil had been dropped on my
chest. As we crossed the car park, Francine whispered, “Don’t have a
heart attack yet. You’ve got a while to get used to the idea.”
The waters of the bay sparkled in the sunlight
as we drove across the bridge to Oakland. Isabelle described the latest
session of the European parliamentary committee into adai rights. A
draft proposal granting personhood to any system containing and acting
upon a significant amount of the information content of human DNA had
been gaining support; it was a tricky concept to define rigorously, but
most of the objections were Pythonesque rather than practical. “Is the
Human Proteomic Database a person? Is the Harvard Reference
Physiological Simulation a person?” The HRPS modeled the brain solely
in terms of what it removed from, and released into, the bloodstream;
there was nobody home inside the simulation, quietly going mad.
Late in the evening, when the girls were
upstairs, Isabelle began gently grilling us. I tried not to grit my
teeth too much. I certainly didn’t blame her for taking her
responsibilities seriously; if, in spite of the selection process, we
had turned out to be monsters, criminal law would have offered no
remedies. Our obligations under the licensing contract were Helen’s
sole guarantee of humane treatment.
“She’s getting good marks this year,” Isabelle
noted. “She must be settling in.”
“She is,” Francine replied. Helen was not
entitled to a government-funded education, and most private schools had
either been openly hostile, or had come up with such excuses as
insurance policies that would have classified her as hazardous
machinery. (Isabelle had reached a compromise with the airlines: Sophie
had to be powered down, appearing to sleep during flights, but was not
required to be shackled or stowed in the cargo hold.) The first
community school we’d tried had not worked out, but we’d eventually
found one close to the Berkeley campus where every parent involved was
happy with the idea of Helen’s presence. This had saved her from the
prospect of joining a net-based school; they weren’t so bad, but they
were intended for children isolated by geography or illness,
circumstances that could not be overcome by other means.
Isabelle bid us good night with no complaints
or advice; Francine and I sat by the fire for a while, just smiling at
each other. It was nice to have a blemish-free report for once.
The next morning, my alarm went off an hour
early. I lay motionless for a while, waiting for my head to clear,
before asking my knowledge miner why it had woken me.
It seemed Isabelle’s visit had been beaten up
into a major story in some east coast news bulletins. A number of vocal
members of Congress had been following the debate in Europe, and they
didn’t like the way it was heading. Isabelle, they declared, had
sneaked into the country as an agitator. In fact, she’d offered to
testify to Congress any time they wanted to hear about her work, but
they’d never taken her up on it.
It wasn’t clear whether it was reporters or
anti-adai activists who’d obtained her itinerary and done some digging,
but all the details had now been splashed around the country, and
protesters were already gathering outside Helen’s school. We’d faced
media packs, cranks, and activists before, but the images the knowledge
miner showed me were disturbing; it was five a.m. and the crowd had
already encircled the school. I had a flashback to some news footage
I’d seen in my teens, of young schoolgirls in Northern Ireland running
the gauntlet of a protest by the opposing political faction; I could no
longer remember who had been Catholic and who had been Protestant.
I woke Francine and explained the situation.
“We could just keep her home,” I suggested.
Francine looked torn, but she finally agreed.
“It will probably all blow over when Isabelle flies out on Sunday. One
day off school isn’t exactly capitulating to the mob.”
At breakfast, I broke the news to Helen.
“I’m not staying home,” she said.
“Why not? Don’t you want to hang out with
Sophie?”
Helen was amused. “ ‘Hang out’? Is that what
the hippies used to say?” In her personal chronology of San Francisco,
anything from before her birth belonged to the world portrayed in the
tourist museums of Haight-Ashbury.
“Gossip. Listen to music. Interact socially in
whatever manner you find agreeable.”
She contemplated this last, open-ended
definition. “Shop?”
“I don’t see why not.” There was no crowd
outside the house, and though we were probably being watched, the
protest was too large to be a moveable feast. Perhaps all the other
parents would keep their children home, leaving the various placard
wavers to fight among themselves.
Helen reconsidered. “No. We’re doing that on
Saturday. I want to go to school.”
I glanced at Francine. Helen added, “It’s not
as if they can hurt me. I’m backed up.”
Francine said, “It’s not pleasant being
shouted at. Insulted. Pushed around.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be pleasant,” Helen replied scornfully. “But
I’m not going to let them tell me what to do.”
To date, a handful of strangers had got close
enough to yell abuse at her, and some of the children at her first
school had been about as violent as (ordinary, drug-free,
non-psychotic) nine-year-old bullies could be, but she’d never faced
anything like this. I showed her the live news feed. She was not
swayed. Francine and I retreated to the living room to confer.
I said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.” On
top of everything else, I was beginning to suffer from a paranoid fear
that Isabelle would blame us for the whole situation. Less fancifully,
she could easily disapprove of us exposing Helen to the protesters.
Even if that was not enough for her to terminate the license
immediately, eroding her confidence in us could lead to that fate,
eventually.
Francine thought for a while. “If we both go
with her, both walk beside her, what are they going to do? If they lay
a finger on us, it’s assault. If they try to drag her away from us,
it’s theft.”
“Yes, but whatever they do, she gets to hear
all the poison they spew out.”
“She watches the news, Ben. She’s heard it all
before.”
“Oh, shit.” Isabelle and Sophie had come down
to breakfast; I could hear Helen calmly filling them in about her
plans.
Francine said, “Forget about pleasing
Isabelle. If Helen wants to do this, knowing what it entails, and we
can keep her safe, then we should respect her decision.”
I felt a sting of anger at the unspoken
implication: having gone to such lengths to enable her to make
meaningful choices, I’d be a hypocrite to stand in her way. Knowing what it entails? She was
nine-and-a-half years old.
I admired her courage, though, and I did
believe that we could protect her.
I said, “All right. You call the other
parents. I’ll inform the police.”
The moment we left the car, we were spotted.
Shouts rang out, and a tide of angry people flowed toward us.
I glanced down at Helen and tightened my grip
on her. “Don’t let go of our hands.”
She smiled at me indulgently, as if I was
warning her about something trivial, like broken glass on the beach.
“I’ll be all right, Dad.” She flinched as the crowd closed in, and then
there were bodies pushing against us from every side, people jabbering
in our faces, spittle flying. Francine and I turned to face each other,
making something of a protective cage and a wedge through the adult
legs. Frightening as it was to be submerged, I was glad my daughter
wasn’t at eye level with these people.
“Satan moves her! Satan is inside her! Out,
Jezebel spirit!” A young woman in a high-collared lilac dress pressed
her body against me and started praying in tongues.
“Gödel’s theorem proves that the
non-computible, nonlinear world behind the quantum collapse is a
manifest expression of Buddha-nature,” a neatly dressed youth intoned
earnestly, establishing with admirable economy that he had no idea what
any of these terms meant. “Ergo, there can be no soul in the machine.”
“Cyber nano quantum. Cyber nano quantum. Cyber
nano quantum.” That chant came from one of our would-be “supporters,” a
middle-aged man in Lycra cycling shorts who was forcefully groping down
between us, trying to lay his hand on Helen’s head and leave a few
flakes of dead skin behind; according to cult doctrine, this would
enable her to resurrect him when she got around to establishing the
Omega Point. I blocked his way as firmly as I could without actually
assaulting him, and he wailed like a pilgrim denied admission to
Lourdes.
“Think you’re going to live forever,
Tinkerbell?” A leering old man with a matted beard poked his head out
in front of us, and spat straight into Helen’s face.
“Asshole!” Francine shouted. She pulled out a
handkerchief and started mopping the phlegm away. I crouched down and
stretched my free arm around them. Helen was grimacing with disgust as
Francine dabbed at her, but she wasn’t crying.
I said, “Do you want to go back to the car?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Helen screwed up her face in an expression of
irritation. “Why do you always ask me that? Am
I sure? Am I sure? You’re the one who sounds like a
computer.”
“I’m sorry.” I squeezed her hand.
We plowed on through the crowd. The core of
the protesters turned out to be both saner and more civilized than the
lunatics who’d got to us first; as we neared the school gates, people
struggled to make room to let us through uninjured, at the same time as
they shouted slogans for the cameras. “Healthcare for all, not just the
rich!” I couldn’t argue with that sentiment, though adai were just one
of a thousand ways the wealthy could spare their children from disease,
and in fact they were among the cheapest: the total cost in prosthetic
bodies up to adult size came to less than the median lifetime
expenditure on healthcare in the U.S. Banning adai wouldn’t end the
disparity between rich and poor, but I could understand why some people
considered it the ultimate act of selfishness to create a child who
could live forever. They probably never wondered about the fertility
rates and resource use of their own descendants over the next few
thousand years.
We passed through the gates, into a world of
space and silence; any protester who trespassed here could be arrested
immediately, and apparently none of them were sufficiently dedicated to
Gandhian principles to seek out that fate.
Inside the entrance hall, I squatted down and
put my arms around Helen. “Are you OK?”
“Yes.”
“I’m really proud of you.”
“You’re shaking.” She was right; my whole body
was trembling slightly. It was more than the crush and the
confrontation, and the sense of relief that we’d come through
unscathed. Relief was never absolute for me; I could never quite erase
the images of other possibilities at the back of my mind.
One of the teachers, Carmela Peña,
approached us, looking stoical; when they’d agreed to take Helen, all
the staff and parents had known that a day like this would come.
Helen said, “I’ll be OK now.” She kissed me on
the cheek, then did the same to Francine. “I’m all right,” she
insisted. “You can go.”
Carmela said, “We’ve got 60 percent of the
kids coming. Not bad, considering.”
Helen walked down the corridor, turning once
to wave at us impatiently.
I said, “No, not bad.”
A group of journalists cornered the five of
us during the girls’ shopping trip the next day, but media
organizations had grown wary of lawsuits, and after Isabelle reminded
them that she was presently enjoying “the ordinary liberties of every
private citizen”—a quote from a recent eight-figure judgment against Celebrity Stalker—they left us in peace.
The night after Isabelle and Sophie flew out,
I went in to Helen’s room to kiss her good night. As I turned to leave,
she said, “What’s a Qusp?”
“It’s a kind of computer. Where did you hear
about that?”
“On the net. It said I had a Qusp, but Sophie
didn’t.”
Francine and I had made no firm decision as to
what we’d tell her, and when. I said, “That’s right, but it’s nothing
to worry about. It just means you’re a little bit different from her.”
Helen scowled. “I don’t want to be different
from Sophie.”
“Everyone’s different from everyone else,” I
said glibly. “Having a Qusp is just like…a car having a different kind
of engine. It can still go to all the same places.” Just not all of them at once. “You can
both still do whatever you like. You can be as much like Sophie as you
want.” That wasn’t entirely dishonest; the crucial difference could
always be erased, simply by disabling the Qusp’s shielding.
“I want to be the same,” Helen insisted. “Next
time I grow, why can’t you give me what Sophie’s got, instead?”
“What you have is newer. It’s better.”
“No one else has got it. Not just Sophie; none
of the others.” Helen knew she’d nailed me: if it was newer and better,
why didn’t the younger adai have it too?
I said, “It’s complicated. You’d better go to
sleep now; we’ll talk about it later.” I fussed with the blankets, and
she stared at me resentfully.
I went downstairs and recounted the
conversation to Francine. “What do you think?” I asked her. “Is it
time?”
“Maybe it is,” she said.
“I wanted to wait until she was old enough to
understand the MWI .”
Francine considered this. “Understand it how
well, though? She’s not going to be juggling density matrices any time
soon. And if we make it a big secret, she’s just going to get
half-baked versions from other sources.”
I flopped onto the couch. “This is going to be
hard.” I’d rehearsed the moment a thousand times, but in my imagination
Helen had always been older, and there’d been hundreds of other adai
with Qusps. In reality, no one had followed the trail we’d blazed. The
evidence for the MWI had grown steadily stronger, but for most people
it was still easy to ignore. Ever more sophisticated versions of rats
running mazes just looked like elaborate computer games. You couldn’t
travel from branch to branch yourself, you couldn’t spy on your
parallel alter egos—and such feats would probably never be possible.
“How do you tell a nine-year-old girl that she’s the only sentient
being on the planet who can make a decision, and stick to it?”
Francine smiled. “Not in those words, for a
start.”
“No.” I put my arm around her. We were about
to enter a minefield—and we couldn’t help diffusing out across the
perilous ground—but at least we had each other’s judgment to keep us in
check, to rein us in a little.
I said, “We’ll work it out. We’ll find the
right way.”
2050
Around four in the morning, I gave in to the
cravings and lit my first cigarette in a month.
As I drew the warm smoke into my lungs, my
teeth started chattering, as if the contrast had forced me to notice
how cold the rest of my body had become. The red glow of the tip was
the brightest thing in sight, but if there was a camera trained on me
it would be infrared, so I’d been blazing away like a bonfire, anyway.
As the smoke came back up I spluttered like a cat choking on a fur
ball; the first one was always like that. I’d taken up the habit at the
surreal age of 60, and even after five years on and off, my respiratory
tract couldn’t quite believe its bad luck.
For five hours, I’d been crouched in the mud
at the edge of Lake Pontchartrain, a couple of kilometers west of the
soggy ruins of New Orleans. Watching the barge, waiting for someone to
come home. I’d been tempted to swim out and take a look around, but my
aide sketched a bright red moat of domestic radar on the surface of the
water, and offered no guarantee that I’d remain undetected even if I
stayed outside the perimeter.
I’d called Francine the night before. It had
been a short, tense conversation.
“I’m in Louisiana. I think I’ve got a lead.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll let you know how it turns out.”
“You do that.”
I hadn’t seen her in the flesh for almost two
years. After facing too many dead ends together, we’d split up to cover
more ground: Francine had searched from New York to Seattle; I’d taken
the south. As the months had slipped away, her determination to put
every emotional reaction aside for the sake of the task had gradually
eroded. One night, I was sure, grief had overtaken her, alone in some
soulless motel room—and it made no difference that the same thing had
happened to me, a month later or a week before. Because we had not
experienced it together, it was not a shared pain, a burden made
lighter. After 47 years, though we now had a single purpose as never
before, we were starting to come adrift.
I’d learned about Jake Holder in Baton Rouge,
triangulating on rumors and fifth-hand reports of barroom boasts. The
boasts were usually empty; a prosthetic body equipped with software
dumber than a microwave could make an infinitely pliable slave, but if
the only way to salvage any trace of dignity when your buddies
discovered that you owned the high-tech equivalent of a blowup doll was
to imply that there was somebody home inside, apparently a lot of men
leaped at the chance.
Holder looked like something worse. I’d bought
his lifetime purchasing records, and there’d been a steady stream of
cyber-fetish porn over a period of two decades. Hardcore and
pretentious; half the titles contained the word “manifesto.” But the
flow had stopped, about three months ago. The rumors were, he’d found
something better.
I finished the cigarette, and slapped my arms
to get the circulation going. She would not be
on the barge. For all I knew, she’d heard the news from
Brussels and was already halfway to Europe. That would be a difficult
journey to make on her own, but there was no reason to believe that she
didn’t have loyal, trustworthy friends to assist her. I had too many
out-of-date memories burned into my skull: all the blazing, pointless
rows, all the petty crimes, all the self-mutilation. Whatever had
happened, whatever she’d been through, she was no longer the angry
15-year-old who’d left for school one Friday and never come back.
By the time she’d hit 13, we were arguing
about everything. Her body had no need for the hormonal flood of
puberty, but the software had ground on relentlessly, simulating all
the neuroendocrine effects. Sometimes it had seemed like an act of
torture to put her through that—instead of hunting for some magic
shortcut to maturity—but the cardinal rule had been never to tinker,
never to intervene, just to aim for the most faithful simulation
possible of ordinary human development.
Whatever we’d fought about, she’d always known
how to shut me up. “I’m just a thing to you! An instrument! Daddy’s
little silver bullet!” I didn’t care who she was, or what she wanted;
I’d fashioned her solely to slay my own fears. (I’d lie awake
afterward, rehearsing lame counterarguments. Other children were born
for infinitely baser motives: to work the fields, to sit in boardrooms,
to banish ennui, to save failing marriages.) In her eyes, the Qusp
itself wasn’t good or bad—and she turned down all my offers to disable
the shielding; that would have let me off the hook too easily. But I’d
made her a freak for my own selfish reasons; I’d set her apart even
from the other adai, purely to grant myself a certain kind of comfort.
“You wanted to give birth to a singleton? Why didn’t you just shoot
yourself in the head every time you made a bad decision?”
When she went missing, we were afraid she’d
been snatched from the street. But in her room, we’d found an envelope
with the locator beacon she’d dug out of her body, and a note that
read: Don’t look for me. I’m never coming back.
I heard the tires of a heavy vehicle
squelching along the muddy track to my left. I hunkered lower, making
sure I was hidden in the undergrowth. As the truck came to a halt with
a faint metallic shudder, the barge disgorged an unmanned motorboat. My
aide had captured the data streams exchanged, one specific challenge
and response, but it had no clue how to crack the general case and
mimic the barge’s owner.
Two men climbed out of the truck. One was Jake
Holder; I couldn’t make out his face in the starlight, but I’d sat
within a few meters of him in diners and bars in Baton Rouge, and my
aide knew his somatic signature: the electromagnetic radiation from his
nervous system and implants; his body’s capacitative and inductive
responses to small shifts in the ambient fields; the faint gamma-ray
spectrum of his unavoidable, idiosyncratic load of radioisotopes,
natural and Chernobylesque.
I did not know who his companion was, but I
soon got the general idea.
“One thousand now,” Holder said. “One thousand
when you get back.” His silhouette gestured at the waiting motor-boat.
The other man was suspicious. “How do I know
it will be what you say it is?”
“Don’t call her ‘it’,” Holder complained.
“She’s not an object. She’s my Lilith, my Lo-li-ta, my luscious
clockwork succubus.” For one hopeful moment, I pictured the customer
snickering at this overheated sales pitch and coming to his senses;
brothels in Baton Rouge openly advertised machine sex, with skilled
human puppeteers, for a fraction of the price. Whatever he imagined the
special thrill of a genuine adai to be, he had no way of knowing that
Holder didn’t have an accomplice controlling the body on the barge in
exactly the same fashion. He might even be paying 2,000 dollars for a
puppet job from Holder himself.
“OK. But if she’s not genuine…”
My aide overheard money changing hands, and it
had modeled the situation well enough to know how I’d wish, always, to
respond. “Move now,” it whispered in my ear. I complied without
hesitation; 18 months before, I’d pavloved myself into swift obedience,
with all the pain and nausea modern chemistry could induce. The aide
couldn’t puppet my limbs—I couldn’t afford the elaborate surgery—but it
overlaid movement cues on my vision, a system I’d adapted from
off-the-shelf choreography software, and I strode out of the bushes,
right up to the motorboat.
The customer was outraged. “What is this?”
I turned to Holder. “You want to fuck him
first, Jake? I’ll hold him down.” There were things I didn’t trust the
aide to control; it set the boundaries, but it was better to let me
improvise a little, and then treat my actions as one more part of the
environment.
After a moment of stunned silence, Holder said
icily, “I’ve never seen this prick before in my life.” He’d been
speechless for a little too long, though, to inspire any loyalty from a
stranger; as he reached for his weapon, the customer backed away, then
turned and fled.
Holder walked toward me slowly, gun
outstretched. “What’s your game? Are you after her? Is that it?” His
implants were mapping my body—actively, since there was no need for
stealth—but I’d tailed him for hours in Baton Rouge, and my aide knew
him like an architectural plan. Over the starlit gray of his form, it
overlaid a schematic, flaying him down to brain, nerves, and implants.
A swarm of blue fireflies flickered into life in his motor cortex,
prefiguring a peculiar shrug of the shoulders with no obvious
connection to his trigger finger; before they’d reached the intensity
that would signal his implants to radio the gun, my aide said “Duck.”
The shot was silent, but as I straightened up
again I could smell the propellant. I gave up thinking and followed the
dance steps. As Holder strode forward and swung the gun toward me, I
turned sideways, grabbed his right hand, then punched him hard,
repeatedly, in the implant on the side of his neck. He was a fetishist,
so he’d chosen bulky packages, intentionally visible through the skin.
They were not hard-edged, and they were not inflexible—he wasn’t that
masochistic—but once you sufficiently compressed even the softest
biocompatible foam, it might as well have been a lump of wood. While I
hammered the wood into the muscles of his neck, I twisted his forearm
upward. He dropped the gun; I put my foot on it and slid it back toward
the bushes.
In ultrasound, I saw blood pooling around his
implant. I paused while the pressure built up, then I hit him again and
the swelling burst like a giant blister. He sagged to his knees,
bellowing with pain. I took the knife from my back pocket and held it
to his throat.
I made Holder take off his belt, and I used it
to bind his hands behind his back. I led him to the motorboat, and when
the two of us were on board, I suggested that he give it the necessary
instructions. He was sullen but cooperative. I didn’t feel anything;
part of me still insisted that the transaction I’d caught him in was a
hoax, and that there’d be nothing on the barge that couldn’t be found
in Baton Rouge.
The barge was old, wooden, smelling of
preservatives and unvanquished rot. There were dirty plastic panes in
the cabin windows, but all I could see in them was a reflected sheen.
As we crossed the deck, I kept Holder intimately close, hoping that if
there was an armed security system it wouldn’t risk putting the bullet
through both of us.
At the cabin door, he said resignedly, “Don’t
treat her badly.” My blood went cold, and I pressed my forearm to my
mouth to stifle an involuntary sob.
I kicked open the door, and saw nothing but
shadows. I called out “Lights!” and two responded, in the ceiling and
by the bed. Helen was naked, chained by the wrists and ankles. She
looked up and saw me, then began to emit a horri-fied keening noise.
I pressed the blade against Holder’s throat.
“Open those things!”
“The shackles?”
“Yes!”
“I can’t. They’re not smart; they’re just
welded shut.”
“Where are your tools?”
He hesitated. “I’ve got some wrenches in the
truck. All the rest is back in town.”
I looked around the cabin, then I led him into
a corner and told him to stand there, facing the wall. I knelt by the
bed.
“Ssh. We’ll get you out of here.” Helen fell
silent. I touched her cheek with the back of my hand; she didn’t
flinch, but she stared back at me, disbelieving. “We’ll get you out.”
The timber bedposts were thicker than my arms, the links of the chains
wide as my thumb. I wasn’t going to snap any part of this with my bare
hands.
Helen’s expression changed: I was real, she
was not hallucinating. She said dully, “I thought you’d given up on me.
Woke one of the backups. Started again.”
I said, “I’d never give up on you.”
“Are you sure?” She searched my face. “Is this
the edge of what’s possible? Is this the worst it can get?”
I didn’t have an answer to that.
I said, “You remember how to go numb, for a
shedding?”
She gave me a faint, triumphant smile.
“Absolutely.” She’d had to endure imprisonment and humiliation, but
she’d always had the power to cut herself off from her body’s senses.
“Do you want to do it now? Leave all this
behind.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be safe soon. I promise you.”
“I believe you.” Her eyes rolled up.
I cut open her chest and took out the Qusp.
Francine and I had both carried spare
bodies, and clothes, in the trunks of our cars. Adai were banned from
domestic flights, so Helen and I drove along the interstate, up toward
Washington, D.C., where Francine would meet us. We could claim asylum
at the Swiss embassy; Isabelle had already set the machinery in motion.
Helen was quiet at first, almost shy with me
as if with a stranger, but on the second day, as we crossed from
Alabama into Georgia, she began to open up. She told me a little of how
she’d hitchhiked from state to state, finding casual jobs that paid
e-cash and needed no social security number, let alone biometric ID.
“Fruit picking was the best.”
She’d made friends along the way, and confided
her nature to those she thought she could trust. She still wasn’t sure
whether or not she’d been betrayed. Holder had found her in a
transient’s camp under a bridge, and someone must have told him exactly
where to look, but it was always possible that she’d been recognized by
a casual acquaintance who’d seen her face in the media years before.
Francine and I had never publicized her disappearance, never put up
flyers or web pages, out of fear that it would only make the danger
worse.
On the third day, as we crossed the Carolinas,
we drove in near silence again. The landscape was stunning, the fields
strewn with flowers, and Helen seemed calm. Maybe this was what she
needed the most: just safety, and peace.
As dusk approached, though, I felt I had to
speak.
“There’s something I’ve never told you,” I
said. “Some-thing that happened to me when I was young.”
Helen smiled. “Don’t tell me you ran away from
the farm? Got tired of milking, and joined the circus?”
I shook my head. “I was never adventurous. It
was just a little thing.” I told her about the kitchen hand.
She pondered the story for a while. “And
that’s why you built the Qusp? That’s why you made me? In the end, it
all comes down to that man in the alley?” She sounded more bewildered
than angry.
I bowed my head. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” she demanded. “Are you sorry that
I was ever born?”
“No, but—”
“You didn’t put me on that boat. Holder did
that.”
I said, “I brought you into a world with
people like him. What I made you, made you a target.”
“And if I’d been flesh and blood?” she said.
“Do you think there aren’t people like him, for flesh and blood? Or do
you honestly believe that if you’d had an organic child, there would
have been no chance at all that
she’d have run away?”
I started weeping. “I don’t know. I’m just
sorry I hurt you.”
Helen said, “I don’t blame you for what you
did. And I understand it better now. You saw a spark of good in
yourself, and you wanted to cup your hands around it, protect it, make
it stronger. I understand that. I’m not that spark, but that doesn’t
matter. I know who I am, I know what my choices are, and I’m glad of
that. I’m glad you gave me that.” She reached over and squeezed my
hand. “Do you think I’d feel better
, here and now, just because some other version of me handled the same
situations better?” She smiled. “Knowing that other people are having a
good time isn’t much of a consolation to anyone.”
I composed myself. The car beeped to bring my
attention to a booking it had made in a motel a few kilometers ahead.
Helen said, “I’ve had time to think about a
lot of things. Whatever the laws say, whatever the bigots say, all adai
are part of the human race. And what I
have is something almost every person who’s ever lived thought they
possessed. Human psychology, human culture, human morality, all evolved
with the illusion that we lived in a single history. But we don’t—so in
the long run, something has to give. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d
rather we tinker with our physical nature than abandon our whole
identities.”
I was silent for a while. “So what are your
plans, now?”
“I need an education.”
“What do you want to study?”
“I’m not sure yet. A million different things.
But in the long run, I know what I want to do.”
“Yeah?” The car turned off the highway,
heading for the motel.
“You made a start,” she said, “but it’s not
enough. There are people in billions of other branches where the Qusp
hasn’t been invented yet—and the way things stand, there’ll always be
branches without it. What’s the point in us having this thing, if we
don’t share it? All those people deserve to have the power to make
their own choices.”
“Travel between the branches isn’t a simple
problem,” I explained gently. “That would be orders of magnitude harder
than the Qusp.”
Helen smiled, conceding this, but the corners
of her mouth took on the stubborn set I recognized as the precursor to
a thousand smaller victories.
She said, “Give me time, Dad. Give me time.”
Robert Onopa
(departmental website http://maven.english. hawaii.edu/cw/pagel2.html)
is associate professor of creative writing and literary theory at the
University of Hawaii. He has been a Fulbright lecturer in West Africa
and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Fiction Writing. In
1980, he co-edited (with David G. Hartwell) TriQuarterly 49, the special science fiction issue of that
distinguished literary quarterly, which included stories by Gene Wolfe,
Thomas M. Disch, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and a first story
by Michael Swanwick. The issue also set a record at the time for
generating subscription cancellations. His SF novel, The
Pleasure Tube, was published in 1979, and he
has since published a number of well-written stories in
F&SF over the last twenty years.
“Geropods,” from
F&SF, is an amusing variant on the gestalt
personality trope common in SF since the days of Theodore Sturgeon’s
More Than Human. It is also an interesting
contrast to Eleanor Arnason’s story appearing earlier in this book. In
the near future, a geropod is a legal entity that constitutes a full
human being: “any group of infirm old people whose combined physical
and mental capacities constitutes the powers of a single, competent
individual is collectively entitled to act as an individual.” So old
Kaplan, in need of a posse to right a wrong done to his daughter, forms
a geropod.
Like me, my two elderly companions had
outlived their wives, but I was new to Arcadia. You know the sort of
place I’m talking about, somewhere between a nursing home and a morgue:
pastel walls with prints of rolling hills in “quality” antiqued frames,
sturdy plastic furniture, a tiled, low-maintenance floor. That
afternoon, the digital holo in the corner of the sunroom was tuned to The Young and the Old, a trendy soap
starring the ancient Macaulay Culkin, his already pale colors so washed
out by the late afternoon glare he looked transparent. The air was
laced with the odors of antiseptic and urine. Distant rattling and the
indistinct conversations of the old echoed through the chip-array
hearing aid I wore like a baseball cap.
I’d come out of a long stay in the hospital—my
total deafness aside, a Parkinson’s-like movement disorder was getting
the best of me. Pinkie and I hadn’t had any kids. After my long career
as a shrink, it looked like I’d moved into my final home.
“Bored?”
Kaplan said from his wheelchair. “Are you kidding? I used to be a
Hollywood agent. Bored? It’s so boring here it must be a new medical
condition, right?”
“That evidence is accepted by this court,”
Judge Ortiz said from the couch, waving his red-and-white striped cane.
The dot from its laser guidance flew around the room like a bug.
“I had depressives who literally put me to
sleep,” I recalled from my practice. “But, okay, maybe we do break new
ground here. The question is, what’s the alternative? We’re disabled
and technically incompetent. The law says we can’t leave.”
“Not quite right,” Kaplan said. “Judge, tell
him about Geropods.”
“Geropods?”
The judge shushed me in a conspiratorial way
as an orderly cruised in behind a trolley rattling with glass and
plastic. I already knew him as Dennis, his hair the color of straw, his
neck wider than his ears. He passed me my dopamine agonists in a little
plastic cup and ticked his stylus on his palm chart. “DIDN’T SEE YOU AT
THE LUAU LAST NIGHT, DOC,” Dennis shouted, as if my hat was out of
order.
“That’s because I lived
in Hawaii during the Aussie war,” I muttered, watching my hand shake
and water splash out of the cup. “Luau Night here is pathetic. Hawaii
without the beach.”
“Exactly,”
Judge Ortiz agreed.
Kaplan swung his wheelchair around, just
missing Dennis’s shin. “Casino Night without the money,” he chimed in.
“Casting without the couch.”
Dennis, who’d gone a bit pink, tucked the palm
chart into the trolley. “Valentine’s Day coming up,” he said
ingenuously. “Let’s see. That would be sex without the….”
Kaplan pumped his arms and nailed him with a
quick reverse sweep of his chair.
“Re…strictions…,” Dennis hissed when he could
speak. “Going to talk to…Nurse Tucker…Re…strict…you all
from…recreation…room….”
When we were alone again, Kaplan wheeled over
to the judge. “All right, tell him
about Geropods. The Doc’s been in the hospital.”
“Okay,” said Judge Ortiz. “Supreme Court
decision last month. Civil rights case brought by the AARP. You’re
correct; the law says we can’t leave as individuals—danger to
ourselves, incompetent, all that crap. But the Court ruled that any group of infirm old people whose combined physical and mental capacities
constitute the powers of a single, competent individual, is
collectively entitled to act as an
individual, as a single, legally defined human being.”
“A Geropod,” Kaplan chimed in. “Free as a blue
jay.”
“Justice Kirkpatrick’s term,” Ortiz said. “I’m
blind, but Kaplan here can see. Kaplan’s in a wheelchair, but you’re
ambulatory. As a matter of fact, you’re the one who’s going to move us
around.”
“Me?”
“We’ve been looking for a guy like you. Of
course, you’re stone deaf without your hat, and you goddamned vibrate
all the time….”
“Parkinson’s….”
“So you need help yourself. But among us
we’ve got all the parts.”
“And where would we go?”
“Mr. Kaplan has a burning
mission,” the judge told me, his face swinging from side to
side.
“My daughter Monica,” Kaplan explained, “is in
her late forties. Five years ago she marries a client of mine, ‘Boots’
Bacci. From that talk show on the Moon? Remember him? Always wore
silver boots? I get admitted into Cedars with a stroke, the snake talks
me into signing over the house in Brentwood. I get released from
Cedars, and instead of taking me home, he gets behind my wheelchair,
crams me into his sports car, then pushes me in here.”
“Time for a little payback,” Judge Ortiz said,
pushing on his cane and rising from the couch. “Are you with us?”
A sharp animal sound, a yapping, came from the
direction of the lobby. I adjusted my cap, feeling a bit frail. My
companions didn’t strike me as completely stable, but. …“Is that a
dog?”
“No, it’s a Yorkshire terrier. Animal therapy
day.”
I like animals, but I recalled how the
previous week a potbellied pig had fouled the library floor. “I’m with
you, gents. Let’s roll.”
And so I stood there the next morning,
shaking on my walker, leaning on the gurney, fresh air just ten feet
away. Dennis was scanning our forms into the web station with a frown,
Nurse Tucker looking over his shoulder. Partly because we were dressed
in street clothes, my two partners in old suits, myself in cords and a
cardigan, we’d attracted a bit of a crowd. There was Agnes Dorchester
with her humped back and blue nightgown, Ted Makelena with his robe
pockets filled with sweets, Marjorie Walters in her ridiculous
tracksuit.
Nurse Tucker grimaced over the terminal. “What
about him?” she asked, pointing to the gurney that Kaplan had
instructed me to push.
“He’s with us. Tiger Montelban,” Judge Ortiz
said. Even I remembered him as a screen playboy. He’d been Kaplan’s
most productive client.
“Medical data’s in order, but what’s he do for
your ’pod? He’s been comatose for a year.”
“He can pee, which I can’t,” Kaplan said.
“Wanna see my catheter?”
Tucker rolled her eyes. Actually, so did I.
“Look here,” the judge snapped. “It doesn’t
matter if he can do anything. The law says that the sum of our powers
merely has to replicate those of a normal adult.”
Tucker sighed, puzzled over the terminal, then
it beeped. “Admin says you guys can go,” she said with quiet surprise.
“What name?” As a new single legal entity, we had to provide a separate
name.
“Story Musgrave,” the judge answered. Musgrave
had been my idea. The bald ex-marine, one of the first astronauts, had
been active into his nineties, had six graduate degrees including one
in medicine, and at ninety-seven was with the crew that went to Mars.
The sliding doors opened and we took our first
step through.
It was surprisingly easy going at first. We
weren’t fast, exactly, but the gurney I was pushing stabilized my
tremor and provided a platform for Judge Ortiz to walk along as he
tapped his way. Kaplan was out in front, leading us to the parking lot.
He’d been savvy enough to hire a van, a big one, into whose capacious
back the driver helped us slide Tiger Montelban’s gurney.
I took a deep breath and smelled the hot
pavement, the wet grass under the sprinklers. I heard noise from
traffic on Wilshire, and, yes, birds!, so loud I had to turn down my
hat. The sunlight was amazing, the sky huge. I knew Pinkie would have
been proud of me. I swung closed the rear door. “Why are we taking this guy along?” I
wondered.
“Kaplan said he owed him one last ride,” Ortiz
shrugged. “Now help me in.”
At the judge’s suggestion, Miguel, our driver,
first drove us toward the Pacific at Venice, then through the park in
Santa Monica and up along the beach in Malibu. Ortiz had his head out
the window like a Lab, his thin hair streaming in the wind. What a
pleasure it was to be along the blue ocean, the wide stretches of sand,
to see the girls on their maglev boards weaving down pedestrian tracks.
Trees! Dogs! People whose hair wasn’t white! At a crosswalk, an infant
in a stroller made me realize how much I’d missed seeing children. When
we turned back toward the city, I rolled down my own window and caught
a scent on the breeze and remembered something else: Mexican food!
But before we could eat, Kaplan insisted, we
had an assignment at his house in Brentwood.
“What’s the plan?” I asked, not for the first
time. The night before, Kaplan had prattled about “degrading assets,”
but he hadn’t been entirely clear. I had him diagnosed as manic, the
judge as suffering from cerebral arteriosclerosis, a side effect of
which is senile dementia. I suppose I had a touch of that myself.
“First step, we shake him up. Ground zero, the
garage,” Kaplan said. “That sports car of his? He’s got one of the
first fuel cell Lamborghinis. The model that looks like a shuttle?”
I sucked in air between my teeth. “We’d stoop
to petty vandalism?”
“No no no no. He loves that car more than he
loves Monica. It’s his financial security, see? His first two wives got
all his money, and it’s the only asset he has. Aside from my daughter.”
From a pocket of his wheelchair, Kaplan extracted a small black case.
“I’ve still got a remote for the garage,” he whispered.
“And?”
From another pocket, he pulled a spray can
with an ugly, mustard-colored top. “Think you can handle this, Doc?” he
said with gloe. “The idea is, I open the door, then we…well,
you…decorate the Lamborghini.”
I raised a shaking hand. So vandalism it was.
My first impulse was to refuse, but then I took a deep breath…and
imagined Pinkie laughing. So what if we got caught? And maybe we could
get it over with quick, like a prostate exam. We could have a wonderful
day. “And then?” I asked.
Kaplan hesitated, his eyes glazed with
confusion.
“And then the rest of the plan develops,”
Ortiz said gamely. He was still half out his open window, the breeze on
his face, a self-absorbed smile on his lips. “We take it one step at a
time.”
From a block away, Kaplan’s house looked to
be an impressive small mansion in the Tudor style. It had a gabled
portico, two stories with a large east wing, a sizable pool and a
cabana in the side yard, and a four-car garage.
“Somebody’s there!” Kaplan choked. Miguel
pulled along the curb, and I watched a heavyset man heave himself out
of the pool. I saw him slip on silver sandals and with a shock
recognized that it was Boots Bacci himself. He had put on a lot of
weight since he’d returned to Earth’s gravity, and the way he scratched
his ample belly, he was not expected at the studio anytime soon. He
pushed his wet black hair back, and it seemed to lift from his scalp.
“Say, how old’s that guy?”
“Sixty-two,” Kaplan muttered. “You’d think
he’d have more consideration, right?”
Boots bent toward his towel and sunglasses,
picked up a script, threw the towel around his shoulders, looked toward
the street. He cast a quick, hostile glance at our van, and walked into
the house.
We could follow his progress through a side
window, see him step half naked into a small room, ease his dripping
body into a leather chair, hoist his feet up….
“My teak desk,” Kaplan said in a small,
unhappy voice.
Then Boots pointed a remote toward the window
and closed the blinds.
Kaplan had Miguel move up the block, putting a
stand of bright pink oleander between us and his house.
Kaplan and Ortiz started bickering. Under the
pretext of a battery problem, I took off my hat and fiddled with it as
they talked. That’s the one thing, the only thing, about my deafness
for which I am grateful: I don’t have to hear anything I don’t want to
hear. You can imagine what that did to my psychiatric practice toward
the end. Now, though I’d lost confidence in Kaplan, I was still glad to
be away from Arcadia. My jiggling foot tapped a rhythm on the van’s
floorboards.
After a while I realized that Kaplan was
shouting at me.
“I can hear you now,” I said, adjusting my
hat.
Kaplan ordered Ortiz and me out, got out
himself, and dispatched Miguel back to the house. His mission was to
ring the doorbell and ascertain if Monica was at home. Kaplan’s idea
was that if she was home, we could discreetly enter through a side door
and occupy the screening room, where we could lock ourselves in. The
plan sounded lame.
Turned out she
was at work, at her desk at the William Morris Agency in Studio City.
And Boots Bacci made it clear to Miguel that if “that van” didn’t
“evaporate” from the neighborhood, he was calling the cops.
“Do you think he made us?” the judge asked as
Miguel put the van in gear.
“I tol’ him we was gardeners. You know, mow
and blow?”
“Where now?” the judge asked.
“Weapons,” Kaplan said. “Tasers. Pipe bomb.”
“Dios,” Miguel muttered under his breath.
“You’re obsessing, Marv,” I told Kaplan in my
best professional voice. “You’re going to give yourself another stroke.
I prescribe lunch.”
“All right, Miguel,” Kaplan said with dismay.
“Head for Casa Escobar. On Alvarado Street.”
The new “old” Mexican part of town, for all
its advertised ethnic uniqueness, looked a lot like the Beverly Hills
Mall. Half the buildings were sand-colored stucco, with heavy black
timbers, Mission-style arches, and red-tiled roofs. Many of the arches
opened onto recessed mini-malls disguised as blocks of market stalls.
Miguel maneuvered us into a disabled parking space, and we formed our
pod again, Ortiz and Montelban and I in a wedge behind Kaplan’s
wheelchair.
We moved through the crowd fronting Pescado
Mojado like a tanker in heavy seas, past Selena World, past Hologames
’R’ Us, past Alberto’s Secret. I had forgotten the theme park
domesticity of the new old part of town, the fountains, the fishponds,
the forests of cacti and rented ficus, the tidy upscale families with
their matching body studs. Interiors were uniformly dense with
epiphytes and those sheet-water walls that have become so big. Really,
I hate it when I accidentally lean against one.
“Whoa,” I heard Kaplan shout.
“Señoritas at eleven o’clock!”
I looked ahead. Three elderly women were
pushing along a narrow white table high with what I took to be catered
food.
“What’s he talking about?” Ortiz asked.
“Señoritas,”
Kaplan said. “Babes.”
“Good grief,” I said. “They’re pushing a
gurney.”
“Tell me what they look like,” Ortiz said.
“They look as old as we are. Except the one in
front—Kaplan’s right—she’s some…babe. Big blue hair, leopard skin
outfit, wide black belt, gold high heels. Great legs. Behind her,
alongside the gurney, there’s a woman who looks like…I guess you’d say
a giant robin. Big bosom, big behind. Grandmotherly. She’s got a
red-and-white striped cane. Laser guidance.”
“Come to Papito,” I heard Ortiz say, to my
surprise.
“The thin one on the other side reminds me of
Pinkie. My late wife. She’s using one of those electric canes. That
woman up front, though. She’s got to be somebody’s daughter.”
“Faster, Doc,” Kaplan urged, leaning forward
into his wheelchair and pushing hard. “Let’s cut them off at Orange
Julio’s.”
“An all-woman Geropod?” Judge Ortiz
marveled. “I’m absolutely charmed.”
“Such a gentleman,” the blind woman replied,
feeling around the table discreetly for her venison burrito with one
hand, fingering the straw in her fluorescent green margarita with the
other.
We were clustered at the rear of Casa Escobar.
There’d been some trouble about the gurneys, but we arranged to park
them just outside, in a quiet alcove with a little birdbath. To my
great relief, the woman who reminded me of Pinkie turned out to be a
retired intensive care nurse. Between us we checked vital signs on
Tiger and started a new IV line on her temporary patient, a
one-hundred-and-twelve-year-old woman whose hair was so white, whose
still smile was so beatific, she looked like a porcelain angel.
Kaplan had settled deep into the red booth
alongside the woman with the blue hair. Her name was Bette. Her makeup
was very thick, but expertly applied. She was as old as the rest of us,
it turned out, and a marvel. Her artificial lungs gave her a breathy
voice and she’d somehow managed to keep her figure, or at least had
tucked and squeezed it into the leopard skin suit in a way that belied
her age. Unless you looked closely, you might have easily mistaken her
for a woman in her early fifties.
“Were you in the industry?” Kaplan asked.
“Films? Holos?”
“I was on a poster once,” she said coyly.
“If you’d had the right representation…”
Kaplan speculated, flattering her in the easy way of an experienced
professional.
Bette’s false eyelashes fluttered so
vigorously I thought I felt a breeze.
And so we ate and talked. By the time it came
to coffee and flan, the restaurant was almost empty. Ostensibly to try
one another’s laser canes, Ortiz and the blind woman groped their way
into a separate booth for dessert.
The ex-nurse and I went out to the alcove to
check on our charges again. Her name was Barbara.
“So how do you like being old?” I asked,
adjusting my hat.
“Today is fun,” she said. “But it’s hard to do
things.”
I nodded. “I suppose I had some training. In
med school they had us put on scratched-up goggles—like we had
cataracts. Plugged our ears with wax, gave us heavy rubber gloves….”
“Like arthritis….”
“Put marshmallows in our mouths….”
“Mmmm. Post-stroke paralysis.”
“…corn kernels in our shoes, braces around our
necks. The worst thing was the padded diapers.”
She laughed and blushed. “Let me guess. They
had you try to read prescription labels with the goggles on, count out
pills with fat fingers, eat around the marshmallows.”
“Exactly.”
“In nursing school, we had to spend a morning
in a hospital bed, got applesauce shoved into our mouths every half
hour. Isn’t it great to be out here?”
“Want to walk down Alvarado?” I asked.
It took us forever, but not since Pinkie died
have I spent such a pleasant hour with a woman. We lingered in Casa
DIY, admiring the lawn furniture and the barbecue grills. Outside
Burrito Loco her electric cane got confused by a passing maglev
scooter. She started to stumble, and I reached out to hold her arm to
steady her.
When she regained her balance, she slipped her
warm fingers into mine, and we made our way back down the sidewalk
holding hands.
“I’d give you my heart,” she said as we
approached the restaurant, “but it’s plastic and I think it needs a new
battery.”
I laughed. “Like my kidney,” I said. “But how
about if I ask you for a date sometime?”
Back at the big red booth in Casa Escobar,
Kaplan announced that he had a plan.
“I hope you don’t have too much for me to do,”
I admitted. “I’m bushed.”
“Not necessary,” Kaplan said. “Bette here’s
going in.”
Kaplan explained that he’d sent Miguel over to
the office supply store next door and was faxing over some forged NASA
stationery from an FX vault he used to work with. The idea was to mock
up a letter from Story Musgrave Junior to Boots Bacci—as Kaplan
recalled, Junior had been a guest on Boots’s talk show some years
earlier during a tribute to his dad. The letter would personally
introduce Bette as a talented performer whose career just wanted the
kind of help Bacci could provide through his extensive contacts. “Let’s
see,” Kaplan muttered as he scribbled notes. “We’ll put in something
about using Boots to host an old astronaut special. ‘Please give this
warm lady your special attention, the Boots Bacci boost we all know
about, that big, stiff rocket….’”
Bette was going to take a cab and present
herself at the front door of the Brentwood house with the letter in
hand.
Kaplan set down his notes. “Then we let Nature
take its course.”
“What was—uh, is—your career?” I asked Bette.
“She was an exotic dancer.” Barbara giggled.
“Use what you’ve got, honey,” Bette said.
“Just get me to Casa Charo on the way so’s I can get a blond wig and
some sunglasses. And I’d like another Margarita.”
Kaplan was radiant. “She’s gonna be a star.”
We all wanted to be there in Brentwood, if
only down the block, to see if she’d get into the house. But we were
stumped about the gurneys.
“We could get arrested for harassment,” the
judge said. “I’d hate to see them in a cell.”
Barbara pointed out that our charges had been
in comas for months. Kaplan said he didn’t see anything wrong with
leaving the gurneys side by side in the alcove, and giving the busboy a
hundred dollars to page us if there was any noticeable change in their
condition.
The busboy was not only willing, but even
trained in CPR. Though it was a little irresponsible, Barbara and I
went along. Kaplan hacked away at the letter, and when it was finished,
Miguel moved the van around and helped us in.
I really was tired. There in the back of the
van, I settled in for a bit of a nap. I woke up with the mid-afternoon
sun in my eyes and realized that we’d stopped. My companions were
hushed. When I looked down the street, I saw a blonde in a leopard skin
outfit at the front door of the Brentwood house—the blonde was
Bette—falling into a big hug from Boots Bacci and being ushered in.
“I still don’t get it,” I admitted.
From the front of the van, Kaplan placed a
call to Studio City, telling Monica that Boots had had a seizure and
was unable to get out of bed and that she needed to rush right home.
What really frosted Monica, she told us
later, was the way Boots hadn’t even folded back the family quilt (an
heirloom in colorful interlocking circles, the classic “wedding ring”
pattern). When she burst in, distraught, limping on a shoe whose high
heel she’d broken during her breathless climb up the stairs, he was
sitting right on it, back against the teak headboard, stark naked
except for the silk bathrobe Monica had only recently given him for
Christmas (strike two). From behind a hand-held holocorder, he was
apparently directing Bette in some sort of “audition” (strike three).
The holodisc, of course, left as little doubt about his guilt as the
famous bin Laden tape from before the Aussie War. In a somewhat empty
tribute to virtue, leggy Bette had never in fact had to get out of her
leopard skin outfit, which was probably just as well, even though she’d
closed the drapes and dimmed the lights. Monica confessed that the
affair confirmed growing suspicions she’d had about her husband, who
had been taking uncommon interest in a series of female trainers though
he never seemed to exercise, and had started locking himself in the
screening room.
From the street, the sequence was elegant in
its economy—Monica running in the front door, Boots ejected from the
rear, hopping past the pool and cabana, struggling to pull on his
clothes. He nearly lost it all together when Kaplan punched the garage
door’s remote.
There were repercussions, of course. Bacci
maintained that he had been harassed, entrapped, and defrauded. Before
the day was out, we actually had to answer some questions posed to us
by an investigator at the L.A. prosecutor’s office.
Bacci himself was there, his eyes puffy, his
silver boots scuffed, his anger palpable. He’d inflicted a long scrape
on the side of the silver Lamborghini as he’d peeled out of the garage.
“Okay,” the investigator, an anorexic
attorney, began, “Who’s Story Musgrave?”
“I am,” the judge said.
“I am,” Kaplan added, then he pointed to me.
I waved. “Did you say Story Musgrave?” I
asked, adjusting my cap. “That’s me.”
She sighed. “Mr. Bacci maintains that earlier
today, February 7th, you gentlemen, particularly Mr. Kaplan and Judge
Ortiz, colluded to defraud him. Now, Mr. Kaplan, I want you to tell me
your precise whereabouts from the hours of….”
“Excuse me,” he interrupted. “Let’s cut to the
chase. The medical record will show that I have suffered a massive,
debilitating stroke, and the legal record will show that specialists
under Mr. Bacci’s own supervision had me declared incompetent as an
individual not six months ago. Any testimony I might give can’t have
standing in the State of California.”
“Mmm,” she mused, consulting her softscreen
for a long moment. Then she turned to me. “Doctor, did you hear any
conversation between Mr. Kaplan and Judge Ortiz that would suggest such
a conspiracy?”
I fiddled with my cap. “Would you please put
your question in writing?” I asked.
When she did so, I read the sentence, fiddled
with my hat again, and replied. “I’m so sorry for the trouble,
counselor. I was trained to be a good listener, but, you see, I’ve
become stone deaf, and my hat’s not entirely reliable. So I could
hardly….”
“Judge Ortiz,” she said, looking down at her
softscreen again, sucking her upper lip. “Did you see anything today to
call into question the legal standing of the woman known as Bette
Waters as a legitimate entertainer seeking professional advice from Mr.
Bacci?”
Ortiz twirled his red and white cane, and a
bright red dot flew around the room. The dot finally got her attention.
“Justice is blind,” he said, setting his cane on the floor and rising.
“Now can we go?”
That hour at the prosecutor’s office, however,
wasn’t the strangest thing that happened toward the end of that day.
Miguel, who said he’d never had a better time in his life, and who
still is with us as our driver, ran us back to Casa Escobar to retrieve
the gurneys.
They were there in the alcove, all right. But
Tiger Montelban wasn’t, and neither was the
one-hundred-and-twelve-year-old lady.
The busboy was distraught. He’d checked every
quarter hour, he told us. He’d been a bit late just after five because
he’d had to help set up for dinner. When he’d finally looked in the
alcove, they were gone—the tops of the gurneys empty landscapes of
rumpled sheets and dented pillows punctuated by a trailing IV line. The
restaurant staff had searched the neighborhood. People on the street
spoke of an elderly couple in white who looked to be romantically
involved, but it was just impossible. There was no report back at the
nursing home, nothing from the nearby hospitals, nothing from the
police or the morgue. To this day, we don’t have a clue as to what
happened to them, except for a series of charges that appeared on
Montelban’s credit chip at a resort in Cabo San Lucas. The chip had
been embedded in his wrist.
These days we count on Arcadia for our medical
care three days out of every seven, but otherwise we spend extended
weekends at the house in Brentwood, sitting in leather furniture,
watching sports in the den, taking in old movies with Barbara and Bette
and Ramona in the screening room—that’s really a treat, as Marv has
remastered digital holos of all the great ones from the past hundred
and fifty years, from Birth of a Nation
to the ten Lucas Star Wars sequels.
Monica’s a regular angel, kind and considerate and a world-class
caterer, though we do our best to look after ourselves as much as we
can.
Barbara and I have taken to light exercise in
the pool and lounging beside the cabana. Every once in a while, lying
on my back, relaxed and at peace—a third try with stem cells has
reduced my tremor—I look up and think of them, Tiger Montelban and his
angel. Occasionally I see them in the shapes of clouds rolling in the
sky, soft and free as floating gauze or down, white as bright moonlight
on a snow-covered mountain, drifting in the heavens together, arm in
arm.
Jack Williamson
lives in Portales, New Mexico, near the Jack Williamson Library and SF
collection at the University of New Mexico, which sponsors an annual
Jack Williamson lecture on SF. The first age of SF genre heroes is not
over as long as Jack Williamson is alive and writing. Williamson’s
first SF story was published in the 1920s, and he has been a leading
figure in the field in every decade since, all eight of them. He is a
legendary pioneer of SF now in his nineties, who has never ceased
learning his craft and producing fiction of high quality.
Published in
F&SF , which had a particularly strong
year in 2002, “Afterlife” is a good old-fashioned SF moral tale about
believing in reason and science, and being rewarded by a better, longer
life. Not an easy life, nor one with immediate rewards, but a deeper,
richer one. This is one of the core messages of science fiction as a
genre. There is also a level of satire in the subtext about con men who
promise immediate salvation through science, a message just as relevant
today as it has always been.
“We live on faith,” my father used to
say. “The afterlife is all we have.”
I wasn’t sure of any afterlife. My questions
troubled my father, who was pastor of our little church. He made me
kneel with him to pray and listen to long chapters from the Bible on
the altar. That sacred book, he said, had come from the holy Mother
Earth. It looked old enough, the brittle yellow pages breaking loose
from the cracked leather binding, but if its miracles had ever really
happened, that had been a hundred light-years away and long millennia
ago.
“If there is a God,” I told him, “and if he
heard our prayers, we’d all be dead before we ever got his answer.”
With an air of tragic sorrow, he warned me
that such reckless words could put my immortal soul in danger.
“We ourselves are miracles,” he told me,
“happening every day. Our whole planet was the Lord’s miraculous answer
to the prayers of the first Earthmen to land here. They found it rich
in everything, and spoiled it with their own greed and folly.”
I heard the history of that from our
one-legged schoolmaster. Our first dozen centuries had been a golden
age. We settled both great continents, harvested the great forests,
loaded fleets of space freighters with precious hardwoods and rare
metals. All that wealth was gone two thousand years ago.
Sadly, he showed us a few precious relics he
kept in the dusty cupboard he called a museum. There was a little glass
tube that he said had shone with the light of a hundred candles when
there was power to make it burn, and a dusty telephone that once had
talked around the world.
We were born poor, in a poor little village.
On the Sabbaths, my father preached in the adobe-walled church. On
weekdays, he got into his dusty work clothes and ground corn on a
little grist mill turned by a high waterwheel. His pay was a share of
the meal.
Wheat grew on the flat land down in the valley
below us, but the soil in our hill country had eroded too badly for
wheat. Through most of the week we ate cornmeal mush for breakfast and
corn pones for bread. Sometimes my mother made white bread or even
honey cakes, when church members from the valley gave us wheat flour.
On the Sabbaths she played a wheezy old organ
to accompany the hymns. I used to love the music and the promise of a
paradise where the just and good would live happily forever, but now I
saw no reason to believe it. With no life here at home, I longed to get
away into the wider universe, but I saw no chance of that.
It’s seven light-years to the nearest settled
star system. The trade ships quit coming long ago, because we had
nothing left to trade. There’s only the mail ship, once every Earth
year. It arrives nearly empty and leaves with every sling filled with
those lucky people who find money for the fare.
It lands at the old capitol, far across the
continent. I’d never been there, nor seen any kind of starship till the
year I turned twelve. That quiet Sabbath morning, the rest of the
family was gone in the wagon with my father to a revival meeting in
another village down the river. Expecting no miracle there or anywhere,
I’d been happy to stay home and do the chores.
Awakened by a rooster crowing, I was walking
out to the barn to milk our three cows. I heard something thundering
across the sky. In a moment I found it, a flash of silver when it
caught the sun. I dropped the milk bucket, staring while it wheeled low
over the crumbled ruins of something that had stood on the hill west of
us.
It turned and dived straight at me.
With no time to run, I stood frozen while it
sank over the west pasture and the apple orchard. It struck the
cornfield and plowed on through a cloud of dust and flying rocks till
it stopped at the edge of my mother’s kitchen. Its thunder ceased. It
lay still, a smoking mass of broken metal.
I stood there watching, waiting for something
more to happen. Nothing did. I caught my breath at last, and walked
uneasily toward it. Nothing about it made any kind of sense until I
looked into the long furrow it had dug and found a torn and bleeding
human arm. A leg farther on, most of the skin torn off. Another naked
leg, still attached to the mangled body. Finally a hairless skull
grinning from the bottom of the ditch.
Dazed by the sudden strangeness of it, I
thought I ought to call my father or the constable or the schoolmaster,
but they were all away at the revival. I was still there, wondering
what to do, when I saw a carrion bird hovering over the body. I shouted
and threw stones to keep it away till some of the neighbors came from
up the river. We gathered up what we could, the smallest red scraps in
my milk bucket, and carried them into the church.
The sheriff came on horseback, the doctor with
him. They frowned over the body parts, laid out on a long table made of
planks laid across the benches. The doctor fitted them closer together
to see if anything was missing. The sheriff picked up pieces of broken
metal, scowled at them uneasily, threw them back in the ditch.
They all left at last, for their dinners or
whatever they had to do. I think they were afraid of too much they
didn’t understand. So was I, but I didn’t like the flies buzzing around
the body. I went home for a sheet to cover it. After a cold corn pone
and a bowl of clabbered milk for lunch, I came back to look at the
wreck again, and watch the empty sky. Nothing else came down.
Evening came. I milked the cows again, fed the
pig, found a dozen eggs in the nests. I heard dogs barking and went
back to the church to be certain the door was closed. Night fell as I
was walking home. Our planet has no moon. In the sudden darkness, the
stars were a blaze of diamonds.
I stopped to look up at them, wondering about
the stranger. Where was his home? Why had he come here? What could have
gone so terribly wrong when he tried to land? The answers were beyond
me, but I stood there a long time, wishing I’d been born somewhere
else, with a chance to see worlds more exciting than our own.
In the empty house, I lit a candle, ate
another corn pone and a piece of fried chicken my mother had left for
me, went to bed. Trying to forget the vulture circling over that
skinned skull in the ditch, I lay listening to the tick of the old
clock in the hall till I heard the rattle of my father’s wagon.
My mother and my sister came in the house
while he drove on to stable the team. News of the dead stranger stopped
their chatter about the meeting. My father lit a candle lantern when he
heard about it, and we all walked across the road to the church. My
mother lifted the sheet to look at the body.
She screamed and my father dropped the
lantern.
“Alive! It’s alive!”
The candle had gone out. I shivered when I
heard some small creature scurry away in the dark. My father’s hands
must have been shaking; it took him a long time to find a match to
light the candle again. The long naked body was a man’s, black with
dried blood and horribly scarred, but somehow whole again.
The bald skull had hair again, a short pale
fuzz. The eyes were open, staring blindly up into the dark. The body
seemed stiff and hard, but I saw the blood-caked chest rise and slowly
fall. My mother reached to touch it, and said she felt a heartbeat.
My father made me saddle my pony and go for
the doctor. I had to hammer at the door a long time before he came out
in his underwear to call me crazy for waking him in the middle of the
night with such a cock-and-bull story. If we had a live man there at
the church, it had to be some drunk who had crept inside to sober up.
Still angry, he finally dressed and saddled a
horse to come back with me. My mother had lit candles at the altar. My
father was on his knees before it, praying. The doctor threw the sheet
off the man, felt his wrist, and said he’d be damned.
“The hand of God!” my father whispered,
backing away and dropping back to his knees. “A holy miracle! We prayed
at the meeting for a sign to help us persuade the unbelievers. And the
good Lord has answered!”
“Maybe.” The doctor squinted at me. “Or is it
some trick of Satan?”
My mother brought a basin of warm water and
helped him wash off the clots of blood and mud. His eyes closed, the
man seemed to be sleeping. He woke when day came, and sat up to stare
blankly at the empty benches around him. His blond hair and beard had
grown longer. The scars had disappeared.
My mother asked how he felt.
He blinked at her and shivered, wrapping the
sheet around himself.
“Are you the Son of God?” My father knelt
before him. “Have you come to save the world?”
He shook his head in a puzzled way.
My mother asked if he was hungry. He nodded,
and rose unsteadily when she asked if he could. She took his hand and
led him out of the church and down the street to our house. He limped
slowly beside her, peering around him as if everything was strange.
“Sir?” The doctor came up beside him. “Can you
tell us who you are?”
He made a strange animal grunt and shook his
head again.
At our house, my mother brought him a glass
and a pitcher of apple juice. He gulped it thirstily and sat watching
her fix breakfast. My father brought clothing for him, and a pair of
shoes. He sat frowning at them and finally stood up to dress himself,
slow and clumsy about it, and let me tie the shoes.
“Sir?” The doctor stood watching. “Where are
you from?”
“Earth.” He spoke at last, his voice deep and
slow. “I am here from Mother Earth.”
My mother set a plate for him. He studied the
knife and fork as if they were new to him, but plied them ravenously
when she brought a platter of ham and scrambled eggs. She had set
plates for the doctor and my father, but they forgot to eat.
“You were dead.” My father was hoarse with
awe. “How can you live again?”
“I was never dead.” He reached to stab another
slice of ham. “I am eternal.”
“Eternal?” The doctor blinked and squinted at
him. “Do you mean immortal?”
“I—” He paused as if he had to search for
words. “I do not die.”
“I saw you dead.” The doctor swallowed hard
and watched him slice the ham. “What brought you back?”
“The power.” Smiling as though glad to find
what to say, he wiped his lips with a slice of white bread. “The
immortal power that moves the mortal body.”
“I see,” the doctor muttered, as if he really
did. “Why are you here?”
“If immortality interests you, that is what I
bring.”
The doctor blinked, startled into silence. My
father muttered something under his breath and moved to a chair across
the room. My mother had made a pot of tea. The man drained a tall glass
of it, sweetened with honey. Seeming to grow stronger and brighter, he
began asking questions. He wanted to know about our history, cities,
industries, governments, ways of travel. Did ships from Earth ever land
here? I thought he looked pleased that the mail skipper was not due
soon. Our neighbors had crowded the kitchen by then, and we all moved
into the front room. Somebody asked his name.
“Who cares?” He shrugged, standing tall in the
middle of the room. “Your world is new to me. I come to you as a new
man, an agent of eternity. I bring you the gift of eternal life.”
“Eternal?” The doctor had recovered his voice.
“Just what do you mean?”
“My secrets are my own.” He was suddenly
smiling, his voice resonant and strong. “But if you wish to live
forever, follow me.”
Too many people had pushed into our house by
then, and the blacksmith wanted to take him to speak at the church.
Stubbornly, my father shook his head.
“I don’t know what he is, but he claims no
power from God. He could be a son of Satan, scheming to trap our souls
for hell. I don’t want him in my church. Get him out of my house!”
“He’s slick as a barrel of eels,” the doctor
agreed. “I wouldn’t believe him if he swore the sun came up this
morning. But I don’t—” He shrugged uneasily toward the wreckage in the
cornfield. “I want to know more about him.”
The sheriff escorted him to a vacant lot. My
father stayed away, but I followed with my sister. The sheriff helped
him to the top of an old stone slab that must have supported some
public monument when our world was great. We all crowded around. He
stood silent while the blacksmith spoke to tell how he had risen from
the dead. The murmur of voices died into breathless expectation as we
waited for him to speak. I heard a dog barking somewhere, and a rooster
crowing. I thought he looked handsome, even in the mis-fit garments.
“He can’t be the demon Dad says he is.” I saw
a glow of awed admiration on my sister’s face. “I believe he’s an angel
sent from Heaven to save us.”
He spread his arms to beckon us closer.
“I see that your world has suffered
misfortune.”
His voice rang loud and clear, but he paused
to gesture at the muddy ruts we called a street and our straggle of
mudwalled, straw-roofed homes. He turned to nod at the rubble mounds of
what had been a city on the hill behind him.
“I knew poverty like yours back on the mother
world. It is ruled by the rich. They live in great mansions, with
swarms of servants and every luxury. Skipping time on space flights to
their estates on other planets, they stretch their lives almost
forever. The very richest can pay for microbots.”
“Microbots?” the doctor shouted. “What are
they?”
“Tiny robots.” He slowed his voice to help us
understand. “They circulate like cells in the blood, repairing all the
damage of illness and age. Their owners are immortal, gathering wealth
and knowledge and power as they live through century after century.
They have everything.
“We mortals were poor as you are.”
He shrugged at the shabby streets with a
grimace of remembered pain.
“Poorer, because they have kept us down,
generation after generation born to toil and die in ignorance of all
that might have helped us. To keep us humble, they have allowed us to
learn no more than our tasks required. Most have no escape except to
breed another generation to suffer and die as we have always done.
“I was lucky. My mother’s husband worked as a
janitor in a university that taught the children of the rich. He stole
books and holo cubes to let me learn at home. She was a housemaid for
an immortal scientist. They had an affair they never confessed, but my
mother told me I am his son. He made me his lab assistant when I was
old enough, finally made me his subject for the experiment that made me
eternal.”
I heard a buzz of excitement in the crowd, and
then a volley of breathless questions.
“If you don’t believe, ask those who saw me
arrive.” He paused to let his eyes search out the doctor, the sheriff,
me. “They saw my body heal from what they thought was death.”
“I saw a dead man,” the doctor muttered
uneasily. “But I don’t know how—”
His voice trailed off.
“I’ll tell you how.” The stranger smiled, and
his voice pealed louder. “I bring you my father’s secret gift to me,
something simpler than the microbots and a better way to immortality.
It has alarmed the old immortals, who have made laws and broken laws to
keep the microbots for themselves forever.
“They raided and wrecked my father’s lab, left
me for dead. I recovered. My mother brought me the keys to his private
skipship. I am not a pilot, but I had watched him drive the ship. The
robotic controls got me here, though I botched the landing and injured
myself.”
Wryly, he gestured toward the twisted metal in
the cornfield.
“You have seen how I recovered.”
He spread his arms again and posed to display
his body. Splendid now, it showed no scars. I saw a flash of gold from
his hair, now grown almost to his shoulders, and heard a soft cry from
my sister. Awe had hushed the crowd. Far off, I heard the rooster crow
again.
“A child of God!” my sister whispered. “Here
to save us!”
People stood frozen for a moment, then pushed
anxiously closer. I heard a babble of questions.
“Can you make me whole again?” That was the
black-smith’s crippled son, caked with smoke and sweat from the forge.
“How can we repay you?”
“Just follow me,” he said. “Do as I say.”
He had brought his gift for all mankind, he
said. He wanted to carry it on to the capitol. The blacksmith passed a
hat for money to buy him a horse. The tailor gave him a jacket. The
sheriff deputized the schoolmaster to be his bodyguard and show him the
way. He slept that night at the doctor’s house. When he left next
morning, the doctor, the blacksmith, and the schoolmaster rode away
with him. My sister came out with me to watch them go by. She broke
into tears as they passed.
“An angel!” she whispered. “I’d die to be with
him.”
She stood in the dusty street looking after
them till he was gone from sight, and waited with the rest of us,
hoping for him to return. He never did. She grew up to be a beautiful
woman and the mistress of our one-room school. The black-smith’s son
courted her devotedly, but she never forgot the stranger.
An artist of some talent, she painted a
portrait of him, standing on a planet out in starry space, a golden
halo shining above his head. It hung in her room, above a candle and a
scrap of twisted metal from his ship. Once I caught her kneeling to it.
With nowhere else to go, most of us stayed at
home in the village. The doctor’s young bride learned to make her
living as a midwife. The blacksmith’s son got his younger brother to
help at the forge and became a smith himself. News moves slowly on our
planet, but we began to hear tales of the miraculous Agent who had
risen from death, won new believers by the thousand, built a
magnificent Temple of Eternity at the capitol. My sister longed to
follow him there, and cried when my father called him the Agent of
Satan.
The doctor and the schoolmaster returned at
last, in a coach drawn by four fine black horses, a uniformed driver
seated in front and a footman standing behind. Another four-horse team
pulled a long, black-painted wagon. They stopped on the village square.
Half a dozen men in long black robes climbed out of the wagon to set up
a platform on one side of the coach and a black tent on the other. They
unpacked drums and trumpets and instruments I had never seen, and
brought the street to life with music I had never heard.
When a curious crowd had gathered, the
schoolmaster hopped out of the black wagon, still nimble on his wooden
leg. No longer the shabby little mouse I remembered, he was robed in
gold and black velvet.
“My father?” The blacksmith’s son limped
anxiously to meet him. “Is he coming home?”
The trumpets drowned anything the schoolmaster
said.
“Is he—is he dead?”
“Alive.” The schoolmaster waved his hand. The
music stopped, and he lifted his voice for the rest of us. “Alive
forever, safe in Eternity.”
He strutted to the coach and climbed to stand
on the driver’s seat. His voice pealed louder. Our village was a sacred
place, he said, because here the Agent had died and risen again from
death. He and the doctor had been blessed to witness that first
miracle. As chosen Voices of Eternity, they had now returned to share
the blessing of eternal life with all of their old friends who wished
it.
My father had pushed to the front of the
crowd.
“By what power, and by what name,” he
demanded, “do you preach the resurrection of the dead?”
“The Agent has power enough of his own.”
Glaring down at him, schoolmaster waved as if to knock him aside. “He
needs no other name, and some of you here witnessed his own
resurrection.”
“I call him by his true names,” my father
shouted. “Satan! Lucifer! Beelzebub! The Prince of Darkness!” He
dropped his voice. “I am sorry to hear you repeating his lies, because
all of you were once true children of our true Lord. I beg you to
repent and confess, that your mortal sins may be blotted out—”
The schoolmaster gestured, and a bray of
trumpets drowned the words.
“You call yourselves Voices,” my father tried
again. “I beg you to listen for the voice of God. Listen to Him in your
hearts, speaking through the Holy Ghost.”
“I never met a holy ghost.”
My father flushed red at the mockery.
“Listen to the words of Eternity!” The
schoolmaster raised his head to look beyond my father. “We bring you
something better than myth and ignorant superstition. I pray you to
heed the verities of scientific truth and save your own precious lives.
Learn the new science of veronics. For you with open minds, let me lay
out the actual facts.”
“Facts?” my father shouted. “Or Satanic lies?”
The blacksmith’s son caught his arm.
“The words of the Agent.” The schoolmaster
frowned as if we were backward students. “He has taught the simple
truth. The veron is an energy particle. Carrying neither mass nor
dimension, it is mind without matter. The so-called human soul in fact
the veronic being. The Agent has taught us how to liberate it into
Eternity. Freed from slavery to the mortal flesh, with all its faults
and ills, your immortal minds can live forever.”
He paused for a paean of rousing music, and
asked for questions when it ceased.
What proof could he offer?
“Look inside yourselves.” He paused, with nods
and smiles of recognition for my mother and my sister. “Haven’t every
one of you hated the limits and pains of your bodies? Haven’t you all
enjoyed moments of liberty from space and time, as you recalled the
past, looked into the future, thought of far-off friends? Those were
precious glimpses of your future freedoms in eternity!
“If you want to live forever, step forward
now!”
The doctor came down from the coach to a table
set up in front of the black tent. Robed like the schoolmaster in gold
and black velvet, he had grown grayer and fatter than I recalled him.
Silently, he spread his arms to urge us forward. The music rose again.
The blacksmith’s deserted wife hobbled toward him. Arthritic and blind,
she leaned on her limping son.
“Eat. Drink.” Intoning the words, the doctor
gestured at a platter and a pitcher on the table. “One little wafer and
one small sip of this veronic fluid will break the chains of flesh to
set you free. But you must be warned.”
He dropped his voice and raised his hands.
“This final feast is only for those who trust
the Agent and accept the miracle of his resurrection. Once you have
felt the joy of eternity, there is no turning back. I must remind you
also that you take nothing with you.”
Tears washing white channels down his
dark-grimed face, the blacksmith’s son shouted the warning into his
mother’s ear. She mumbled and opened her mouth. He dropped jingling
coins into a basket on the table. The doctor laid a tiny white wafer on
her tongue, put a little glass of a blood-red liquid to her drooling
lips. She gulped it down. Two men in black took her arms to help her
into the tent.
Next came the baker’s old and helpless father,
moaning on a stretcher carried by the baker and his helper. A dozen
others shuffled forward. Finally my sister. Tears on her face, she
hugged our mother and our father, darted to startle the blacksmith’s
son with a kiss and a quick embrace, and fell into the line. I caught
her arm to pull her back.
“Let her go.” My father was hoarse with pain.
“She has damned herself.”
The solemn music rose again. The line crept
forward, my sister the last. My father knelt on the ground, murmuring a
prayer. My mother stood silently sobbing. My sister dropped something
into the basket, the gold necklace and gold earrings the blacksmith’s
son had given her. I heard a stifled moan from him. Smiling, she
swallowed the wafer and the liquid. My mother cried out, shrill with
pain. My sister looked back and tried to speak, but her voice was
already gone. Her features stiffened. She staggered. The black robes
hustled her into the tent.
With a final flourish, the music ceased. The
doctor intoned a solemn assurance that these beloved beings were happy
now, forever free from grief and care. He and the schoolmaster climbed
back into the coach. The musicians dismantled their instruments and
knocked down the platform where they had stood. They rolled up the
black tent, loaded everything on the wagon, and followed the coach back
to the road down the river.
The bodies were left lying in a row on the
ground. My mother knelt to close my sister’s eyes. My father stood
above them to beg the Lord that all their sins and blunders might be
forgiven and their souls received into God’s own paradise. Neighbor men
toiled all night, nailing coffins together. Next day a pastor came from
the village below to preach a farewell service before the boxes were
lowered into the row of new graves.
One morning next spring, while my mother was
making breakfast, we saw a bright silver skipship lying in the
cornfield where the stranger’s craft had fallen. Another tall stranger
was poking into the tangle of tall weeds and rusted metal where it had
stopped. He came across the garden to our door.
When I answered his knock, he displayed a holo
card that showed the bright round Earth spinning in starry black space.
Silver print across it identified him as a field inspector for the
Pan-Terran Police. Pointing back at the wreck, he asked for anything we
knew about it. My mother asked him to share our grits and bacon while
we told him what we could about the ship and the Agent and the Church
of Eternity.
“We believed—” She broke into tears when she
spoke of my sister’s death. “We had seen him risen from the dead. She
trusted him.”
“Satan!” my father rasped. “He dragged my
daughter down to Hell!”
“He was a criminal.” The inspector nodded in
sober sympathy. “The tale he told you was largely a hoax. It’s true
that he was a native Earthman, but no verons exist, no veronic bodies
either. Though he did have microbots in his blood, he had no skills or
know-how to share them with anybody else.”
Sobbing, my mother rose to leave the room.
“Listen to him!” My father was hoarse with his
own emotion. “The Lord will help us bear the truth.”
“A vicious criminal.” Regretfully, the
inspector shook his head. “But also the victim of tragedy. He was the
offspring of a mortal woman’s illicit affair with an immortal. He
inherited his father’s microbots. They should have been destroyed, but
that would have crippled or probably killed him. It must have been a
desperate choice, but his mother kept him as he was and kept his secret
till he was grown. She was arrested when the truth came out, but he
escaped in his father’s skipship. I regret the harm he did here, but at
least his evil career is over.”
“Over?” My father stared at him. “If he is
immortal—”
“His church officials will no doubt claim that
he’s still alive in some veronic paradise.” The inspector grinned. “But
micro- bots aren’t magic. They are only electronic devices. When we
located him here, we were able to shut them down with a radio signal.
His natural body functions had become dependent on the microbots. His
heart stopped when they did.
“He will trouble you no longer.”
“Thank you, sir.” My father reached over the
table to shake his hand. “You have served as a faithful agent of the
Lord.”
“Or the Pan-Terran Police.”
After breakfast, the inspector asked me to
clear the weeds around the wreckage to let him take holos of it. He
walked with my father over our little farm and wanted to see the farm
tools and the mules in the barn. He looked at my mother’s garden and
asked about the plants she grew. He had me show him the windmill and
the water wheel and the grist mill, and tell him how they worked.
He watched me slop the hogs and milk the cows
that night, and went with my parents to the hymn service at the church
while I stayed home to finish the chores. My mother let him sleep in
the room that had been my sister’s. Next morning he watched my father
kindle the fire in the old cast iron stove and watched my mother fix
the breakfast. When we had eaten, he looked sharply at me and asked
what I planned for the future.
“I never had a future,” I told him. “I always
longed to get away, but never had a chance.”
“If he had a chance—” He turned to my parents.
“Could you let him go?”
They stared at him and whispered together.
“If he could really get away—” My mother tried
to smile at my father. “We have each other.”
My father nodded solemnly. “The Lord’s will be
done.”
The inspector let his shrewd eyes measure me
again.
“It would be forever,” he told me gravely. “As
final as death.”
“Let him go,” my father said. “He has earned
his own salvation.”
The inspector took me out to see his skipship.
It was strange and wonderful, but I was too dazed and anxious to
understand what he said about it. He had me sit, looked me in the eye,
and asked for more about my life.
“I stay alive,” I told him. “I’m the janitor
for my father’s church, though I’ve never caught his faith. I help him
at the mill and help my mother in her garden.”
My heart thumping, I waited again until he
asked, “Would you like to be immortal?”
Hardly breathing, I found no words to say.
“Perhaps you can be,” he said. “If you want
the risk. The immortals have to guard their own future. They want no
rivals here, but they have agreed to let us send an expedition to
colonize the Andromeda galaxy. There’s a two-million- year skip each
way, which leaves them safe from any harm from us.”
He frowned and shook his head.
“We ourselves can’t feel so confident. No skip
so far has ever been attempted. It’s a jump into the dark, with no data
to let us compute any sure destination. We may be lost forever from our
own universe of space, with no way back. Even if we’re lucky, we’ll
have new frontiers to face, with our industrial infrastructure still to
build. We’re likely to need the skills and the knowledge you have
learned here. I can sign you on, if you want the chance.”
I said I did.
My mother dried her tears and kissed me. My
father made us kneel and pray together. I hugged them both, and the
inspector took me with him to board the departing mother ship.
All that was two million years ago and two
million light- years behind us. That long jump dropped us into the
gravity well of a giant black hole, but we were able to coast around it
in free fall, with no harm at all. The third skip brought us into low
orbit around our new planet, a kind world that had no native life and
needed no terraforming. My low-tech skills did help us stay alive. The
microbots have learned them, and we are well established now.
I have recalled this story for our children
and their micro- bots to remember. I was at first uneasy about letting
the microbots into my body. For a long time I hardly felt them, but
they’re beginning now to give me a new zest for life, a new happiness
with all my new friends, an endless delight in the wonders of our new
world.
Our new sky blazes with more stars than I ever
imagined, all in strange constellations, but on a clear night we can
make out our home galaxy, a faint fleck of brightness low in the south.
Remembering my parents, who lived so far away and long ago, I wish they
could have known the true afterlife we’ve discovered here.
Gene Wolfe
(tribute site: http://www.op.net/~pduggan/ wolfe.html and
www.ultan.co.uk/) lives in Barrington, Illinois, and is widely
considered the most accomplished writer in the fantasy and science
fiction genres. His four-volume The Book of the New Sun is an acknowledged masterpiece. Some people consider
him among the greatest living American writers. His most recent book is
Return to the Whorl, the third volume of
The Book of the Short Sun (really a single
huge novel), which many of his most attentive readers feel is his best
book yet. He has published many fantasy, science fiction, and horror
stories over the last thirty-six years, and has been given the World
Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Collections of his short fiction
include The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories and Other
Stories, Storeys from the Old Hotel, Endangered Species, and Strange Travelers.
“Shields of Mars” is
from Mars Probes, along with the
DAW 30th Anniversary SF Anthology , and
somewhat by default the most significant SF anthology of the year. The
story is an homage to the planetary romance tradition, to space opera,
to the value system of honor and loyalty in a racially mixed culture.
But in contrast to the Moorcock story later in this book, it is not
space opera but ironic science fiction. It transcends the
disappointments of Mars as it turned out to be without denying
scientific reality, and reinvigorates the SF tropes Mars.
Once they had dueled beneath the russet
Martian sky for the hand of a princess—had dueled with swords that, not
long before, had been the plastic handles of a rake and a spade.
Jeff Shonto had driven the final nail into
the first Realwood plank when he realized that Zaa was standing
six-legged, ankle-deep in red dust, watching him. He turned a little in
case Zaa wanted to say something; Zaa did not, but he four- legged,
rearing his thorax so that his arms hung like arms (perhaps in order to
look more human) before he became a glaucous statue once again, a
statue with formidable muscles in unexpected locations.
Zaa’s face was skull-like, as were the faces
of all the people from his star, with double canines jutting from its
massive jaw and eyes at its temples. It was a good face, Jeff thought,
a kind and an honest face.
He picked up the second Realwood plank, laid
it against the window so it rested on the first, and plucked a nail
from his mouth.
Zaa’s gray Department shirt (“Zaa Leem,
Director of Maintenance”) had been dirty. No doubt Zaa had put it on
clean that morning, but there was a black smear under the left pocket
now. What if they wanted to talk to Zaa, too?
Jeff’s power-hammer said bang,
and the nail sank to the head. Faint echoes from inside the store that
had been his father’s might almost have been the sound of funeral
drums. Shrugging, he took another nail from his mouth.
A good and a kind face, and he and Zaa had
been friends since Mom and Dad were young, and what did a little grease
matter? Didn’t they want Zaa to work? When you worked, you got dirty.
Another nail, in the diagonal corner. Bang. Mind pictures, daydream pictures
showed him the masked dancers who ought to have been there when they
buried Dad in the desert. And were not.
Again he turned to look at Zaa, expecting Zaa
to say something, to make some comment. Zaa did not. Beyond Zaa were
thirty bungalows, twenty-nine white and one a flaking blue that had
once been bright. Twenty-eight bungalows that were boarded up, two that
were still in use.
Beyond the last, the one that had been Diane’s
family’s, empty miles of barren desert, then the aching void of the
immense chasm that had been renamed the Grand Canal. Beyond it, a range
of rust-red cliff that was in reality the far side of the Grand Canal,
a glowing escarpment lit at its summit by declining Sol.
Jeff shrugged and turned back to his plank. A
third nail. Bang . The dancers were
sharp-edged this time, the drums louder. “You’re closing your store.”
He fished more nails from his pocket. “Not to
you. If you want something I’ll sell it to you.”
“Thanks.” Zaa picked up a plank and stood
ready to pass it to Jeff.
Bang.
Echoes of thousands of years just beginning.
“I’ve got one in the shop that feeds the
nails. Want me to get it?”
Jeff shook his head. “For a little job like
this, what I’ve got is fine.”
Bang.
“Back at the plant in a couple hours?”
“At twenty-four ten they’re supposed to call
me.” Jeff had said this before, and he knew Zaa knew it as well as he
did. “You don’t have to be there…”
“But maybe they’ll close it.”
And I won’t have to be the one who tells you.
Jeff turned away, staring at the plank. He
wanted to drive more nails into it, but there was one at each corner
already. He could not remember driving that many.
“Here.” Zaa was putting up another plank. “I
would have done this whole job for you. You know?”
“It was my store.” Jeff squared the new plank
on the second and reached to his mouth for a nail, but there were no
nails there. He positioned his little ladder, leaning it on the newly
nailed one, got up on the lowest step, and fished a fresh nail from his
pocket.
Bang.
“Those paintings of mine? Give them back and
I’ll give you what you paid.”
“No.” Jeff did not look around.
“You’ll never sell them now.”
“They’re mine,” Jeff said. “I paid you for
them, and I’m keeping them.”
“There won’t ever be any more tourists, Jeff.”
“Things will get better.”
“Where would they stay?”
“Camp in the desert. Rough it.” Bang.
There was a silence, during which Jeff drove
more nails.
“If they close the plant, I guess they’ll send
a crawler to take us to some other town.”
Jeff shrugged. “Or an orthopter, like Channel
Two has. You saw Scenic Mars. They
might even do that.”
Impelled by an instinct he could not have
described but could not counter, he stepped down—short, dark, and
stocky—to face Zaa. “Listen here. In the first place, they can’t close
the plant. What’d they breathe?”
Even four-legging, Zaa was taller by more than
a full head; he shrugged, massive shoulders lifting and falling. “The
others could take up the slack, maybe.”
“Maybe they could. What if something went
wrong at one of them?”
“There’d be plenty of time to fix it. Air
doesn’t go that fast.”
“You come here.”
He took Zaa by the arm, and Zaa paced beside
him, intermediate armlike legs helping support his thorax and abdomen.
“I want to show you the plant.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Come on. I want to see it myself.” Together,
the last two inhabitants of the settlement called Grand Canal went
around the wind-worn store and climbed a low hill. The chain-link fence
enclosing the plant was tall and still strong, but the main gate stood
open, and there was no one in the guard shack. A half mile more of
dusty road, then the towers and the glassy prisms, and the great pale
domes, overshadowed by the awe-inspiring cooling stack of the nuclear
reactor. On the left, the spherical hydrogen tanks and thousands upon
thousands of canisters of hydrogen awaiting the crawler. Beyond those,
nearly lost in the twilight, Number One Crusher. It would have been a
very big plant anywhere on Earth; here, beneath the vastness of the
russet sky, standing alone in the endless red-and-black desert, it was
tiny and vulnerable, something any wandering meteor might crush like a
toy.
“Take a good look,” Jeff said, wishing Zaa
could see it through his eyes.
“I just did. We might as well go now. They’ll
be wanting to call you pretty soon.”
“In a minute. What do you suppose all that
stuff’s worth? All the equipment?”
Zaa picked his teeth with a sharp claw. “I
don’t know. I guess I never thought about it. A couple hundred
million?”
“More than a billion. Listen up.” Jeff felt
his own conviction growing as he spoke. “I can lock the door on my
store and board up the windows and walk away. I can do that because I’m
still here. Suppose you and I just locked the gate and got on that
crawler and went off. How long before somebody was out here with ten
more crawlers, loading up stainless pipe, and motors, and all that
stuff? You could make a better stab at this than I could, but I say
give me three big crawlers and three men who knew what they were doing
and I’d have ten million on those crawlers in a week.”
Zaa shook his head. “Twelve hours. Eight, if
they never took a break and really knew their business.”
“Fine. So is the Department going to lock the
door and walk away? Either they gut it themselves—not ten million, over
a billion—or they’ll keep somebody here to keep an eye on things.
They’ll have to.”
“I guess.”
“Suppose they’ve decided to stop production
altogether. How long to shut down the pile and mothball everything?
With two men?”
“To do it right?” Zaa fingered the point of
one canine. “A year.”
Jeff nodded. “A year. And they’d have to do it
right, because someday they might have to start up again. We’re pretty
well terraformed these days. This out here isn’t much worse than the
Gobi Desert on Earth. A hundred years ago you couldn’t breathe right
where we’re standing.”
He studied Zaa’s face, trying to see if his
words were sinking in, if they were making an impression. Zaa said,
“Sure.”
“And everybody knows that. Okay, suppose one
of the other plants went down. Totally. Suppose they lost the pile or
something. Meltdown.”
“I got it.”
“Like you say, the air goes slow now. We’ve
added to the planetary mass—covered the whole thing with an ocean of
air and water vapor three miles thick, so there’s more gravity.” Jeff
paused for emphasis. “But it goes, and as it goes, we lose gravity. The
more air we lose, the faster we lose more.”
“I know that.”
“Sure. I know you do. I’m just reminding you.
All right, they lose one whole plant, like I said.”
“You never lose the pile if you do it right.”
“Sure. But not everybody’s as smart as you
are, okay? They get some clown in there and he screws up. Let’s take
the Schiaparelli plant, just to talk about. How much fossil water have
they got?”
Zaa shrugged.
“I don’t know either, and neither do they.
They could give you some number, but it’s just a guess. Suppose they
run out of water.”
Zaa nodded and turned away, four-legging
toward the main gate.
Jeff hurried after him. “How long before
people panic? A week? A month?”
“You never finished boarding up.”
“I’ll get it later. I have to be there when
they call.”
“Sure,” Zaa said.
Together, as they had been together since Jeff
was born, they strode through the plant gate upon two legs and four,
leaving it open behind them. “They’re going to have to give us power
wagons,” Jeff said. “Suppose we’re at home and we have to get here
fast.”
“Bikes.” Zaa looked at him, then looked away.
“In here you’re the boss. All right, you had your say. I listened to
everything.”
It was Jeff’s turn to nod. He said, “Uh-huh.”
“So do I get to talk now?”
Jeff nodded again. “Shoot.”
“You said it was going to get better, people
were going to come out here from Elysium again. But you were boarding
up your store. So you know, only you’re scared I’ll leave.”
Jeff did not speak.
“We’re not like you.” To illustrate what he
meant, Zaa began six-legging. “I been raised with you—with you Sol
people is what I mean. I feel like I’m one of you, and maybe once a
week I’ll see myself in a mirror or someplace and I think, my gosh, I’m
an alien.”
“You’re a Martian,” Jeff told him firmly. “I
am, too. You call us Sols or Earthmen or something, and most of my
folks were Navajo. But I’m Martian, just like you.”
“Thanks. Only we get attached to places, you
know? We’re like cats. I hatched in this town. I grew up here. As long
as I can stay, I’m not going.”
“There’s food in the store. Canned and dried
stuff, a lot of it. I’ll leave you the key. You can look after it for
me.”
Zaa took a deep breath, filling a chest
thicker even than Jeff’s with thin Martian air that they had made. “You
said we’d added to the mass with our air. Made more gravity. Only we
didn’t. The nitrogen’s from the rock we dig and crush. You know that.
The oxygen’s from splitting water. Fossil water from underground. Sure,
we bring stuff from Earth, but it doesn’t amount to shit. We’ve still
got the same gravity we always did.”
“I guess I wasn’t thinking,” Jeff conceded.
“You were thinking. You were scraping up any
kind of an argument you could to make yourself think they weren’t going
to shut us down. To make me think that, too.”
Jeff looked at his watch.
“It’s a long time yet.”
“Sure.”
He pressed the combination on the keypad—nine,
nine, two, five, seven, seven. You could not leave the door of the
Administration Building open; an alarm would sound.
“What’s that?” Zaa caught his arm.
It was a voice from deep inside the building.
Zaa leaped away with Jeff after him, long bounds carrying them the
length of the corridor and up the stair.
“Mister Shonto? Administrator Shonto?”
“Here I am!” Panting, Jeff spoke as loudly as
he could. “I’m coming!”
Undersecretary R. Lowell Bensen, almost in
person, was seated in the holoconference theater; in that dim light, he
looked fully as real as Zaa.
“Ah, there you are.” He smiled; and Jeff, who
was superstitious about smiles, winced inwardly.
“Leem, too. Good. Good! I realized you two
might be busy elsewhere, but good God, twenty-four fifteen. A time
convenient for us, a convenient time to get you two out of bed. Believe
me, the Department treats me like that, too. Fourteen hours on a good
day, twice around the clock on the bad ones. How are things in Grand
Canal?”
“Quiet,” Jeff said. “The plant’s running at
fifteen percent, per instructions. We’ve got a weak hydraulic pump on
Number One Crusher, so we’re running Number Two.” All this would have
been on the printout Bensen had undoubtedly read before making his
call, but it would be impolite to mention it. “Zaa Leem here is making
oversized rings and a new piston for that pump while we wait for a new
one.” Not in the least intending to do it, Jeff gulped. “We’re afraid
we may not get a new pump, sir, and we want to be capable of one
hundred percent whenever you need us.”
Bensen nodded, and Jeff turned to Zaa. “How
are those new parts coming, Leem?”
“Just have to be installed, sir.”
“You two are the entire staff of the Grand
Canal Plant now? You don’t even have a secretary? That came up during
our meeting.”
Jeff said, “That’s right, sir.”
“But there’s a town there, isn’t there? Grand
Canal City or some such? A place where you can hire more staff when you
need them?”
Here it came. Jeff’s mouth felt so dry that he
could scarcely speak. “There is a town, Mr. Bensen. You’re right about
that, sir. But I couldn’t hire more personnel there. Nobody’s left
besides—besides ourselves, sir. Leem and me.”
Bensen looked troubled. “A ghost town, is it?”
Zaa spoke up, surprising Jeff. “It was a
tourist town, Mr. Bensen. That’s why my family moved here. People
wanted to see aliens back then, and talk to some, and they’d buy our
art to do it. Now—well, sir, when my folks came to the Sol system, it
took them two sidereal years just to get here. You know how it is these
days, sir. Where’d you take your last vacation?”
“Isis, a lovely world. I see what you mean.”
“The Department pays me pretty well, sir, and
I save my money, most of it. My boss here wants me to go off to our
home planet, where there are a lot more people like me. He says I ought
to buy a ticket, whenever I’ve got the money, just to have a look at
it.”
Bensen frowned. “We’d hate to lose you, Leem.”
“You’re not going to, Mr. Bensen. I’ve got the
money now, and more besides. But I don’t speak the language or know the
customs, and if I did, I wouldn’t like them. Do you like aliens, sir?”
“I don’t dislike them.”
“That’s exactly how I feel, sir. Nobody comes
to Grand Canal anymore, sir. Why should they? It’s just more Mars, and
they live here already. Me and Mr. Shonto, we work here, and we think
our work’s important. So we stay. Only there’s nobody else.”
For a moment no one spoke.
“This came up in our meeting, too.” Bensen
cleared his throat, and suddenly Jeff understood that Bensen felt
almost as embarrassed and self-conscious as he had. “Betty Collins told
us Grand Canal had become a ghost town, but I wanted to make sure.”
“It is,” Jeff muttered. “If you’re going to
shut down our plant, sir, I can draw up a plan—”
Bensen was shaking his head. “How many
security bots have you got, Shonto?”
“None, sir.”
“None?”
“No, sir. We had human guards, sir. The Plant
Police. They were only police in Grand Canal, actually. They were laid
off one by one. I reported it—or my predecessor and I did, sir, I ought
to say.”
Bensen sighed. “I didn’t see your reports. I
wish I had. You’re in some danger, I’m afraid, you and Leem.”
“Really, sir?”
“Yes. Terrorists have been threatening to
wreck the plants. Give in to their demands, or everyone suffocates. You
know the kind of thing. Did you see it on vid?”
Jeff shook his head. “I don’t watch much, sir.
Maybe not as much as I should.”
Bensen sighed again. “One of the news shows
got hold of it and ran it. Just one show. After that, we persuaded them
to keep a lid on it. That kind of publicity just plays into the
terrorists’ hands.”
For a moment he was silent again, seeming to
collect his thoughts; Zaa squirmed uncomfortably. “Out there where you
are, you’re safer than any of the others. Still, you ought to have
security. You get supplies each thirty-day?”
Jeff shook his head again. “Every other
thirty-day, sir.”
“I see. I’m going to change that. A supply
crawler will come around every thirty-day from now on. I’ll see to it
that the next one carries that new pump.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But you’ll be getting a special resupply as
quickly as I can arrange it. Security bots. Twenty, if I can scrape
that many together. Whatever I can send.”
Jeff began to thank him again, but Bensen cut
him off. “It may take a while. Weeks. Until you get them, you’ll have
to be on guard every moment. You’re running at fifteen percent, you
said. Could you up that to twenty-five?”
“Yes, sir. To one hundred within a few days.”
“Good. Good! Make it twenty-five now, and let
us know if you run into any problems.”
Abruptly, Bensen was gone. Jeff looked at Zaa,
and Zaa looked at Jeff. Both grinned.
At last Jeff managed to say, “They’re not
shutting us down. Not yet anyhow.”
Zaa rose, two-legging and seeming as tall as
the main cooling stack. “These terrorist have them pissing in their
pants, Jeff. Pissing in their pants! We’re their ace in the hole.
There’s nobody out here but us.”
“It’ll blow over,” Jeff found he was still
grinning. “It’s bound to, in a year or two. Meanwhile we better get
Number One back on line.”
They did, and when they had finished, Zaa
snatched up a push broom, holding it with his right hand and his right
intermediate foot as if it were a two-handed sword. “Defend yourself,
Earther!”
Jeff backed away hurriedly until Zaa tossed
him a mop, shouting, “They can mark your lonely grave with this!”
“Die, alien scum!” Jeff made a long thrust
that Zaa parried just in time. “I rid the spaceways of their filth
today!” Insulting the opponent had always been one of the best parts of
their battles.
This one was furious. Jeff was smaller and not
quite so strong. Zaa was slower; and though his visual field was
larger, he lacked the binocular vision that let Jeff judge distances.
Even so, he prevailed in the end, driving Jeff
through an open door and into the outdoor storage park, where after
more furious fighting he slipped on the coarse red gravel and fell
laughing and panting with the handle of Zaa’s push broom at his throat.
“Man, that was fun!” He dropped his mop and
held up his hands to indicate surrender. “How long since we did this?”
Zaa considered as he helped him up. “Ten
years, maybe.”
“Way too long!”
“Sure.” Sharp claws scratched Zaa’s scaly
chin. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. We always wanted real swords, remember?”
As a boy, Jeff would have traded everything he
owned for a real sword; the spot had been touched, and he found that
there was still—still—a little, wailing ghost of his old desire.
“We could make swords,” Zaa said. “Real
swords. I could and you could help.” Abruptly, he seemed to overflow
with enthusiasm. “This rock’s got a lot of iron in it. We could smelt
it, make a crucible somehow. Make steel. I’d hammer it out—”
He dissolved in laughter beneath Jeff’s stare.
“Just kidding. But, hey, I got some high-carbon steel strip that would
do for blades. I could grind one in an hour or so, and I could make
hilts out of brass bar stock, spruce them up with file work, and fasten
them on with epoxy.”
Though mightily tempted, Jeff muttered, “It’s
Department property, Zaa.”
Zaa laid a large, clawed hand upon his
shoulder. “Boss boy, you fail to understand. We’re arming ourselves.
What if the terrorists get here before the security bots do?”
The idea swept over Jeff like the west wind in
the Mare Erythraeum, carrying him along like so much dust. “How come
I’m the administrator and you’re the maintenance guy?”
“Simple. You’re not smart enough for
maintenance. Tomorrow?”
“Sure. And we’ll have to practice with them a
little before we get them sharp, right? It won’t be enough to have
them, we have to know how to use them, and that would be too dangerous
if they had sharp edges and points.”
“It’s going to be dangerous anyhow,” Zaa told
him thoughtfully, “but we can wear safety helmets with face shields,
and I’ll make us some real shields, too.”
The shields required more work than the
swords, because Zaa covered their welded aluminum frames with densely
woven plastic-coated wire, and wove a flattering portrait of Diane Seyn
(whom he had won in battle long ago) into his, and an imagined picture
of such a woman as he thought Jeff might like into Jeff’s.
Although the shields had taken a full day
each, both swords and shields were ready in under a week, and the fight
that followed—the most epic of all their epic battles—ranged from the
boarded up bungalows of Grand Canal to the lip of the Grand Canal
itself, a setting so dramatic that each was nearly persuaded to kill
the other, driving him over the edge to fall—a living meteor—to his
death tens of thousands of feet below. The pure poetry of the thing
seemed almost worth a life, as long as it was not one’s own.
Neither did, of course. But an orthopter taped
them as it shot footage for a special called Haunted
Mars. And among the tens of billions on Earth who watched a
few seconds of their duel were women who took note of their shields and
understood.
Nancy Kress
[www.sff.net/people/nankress] lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. She is
one of today’s leading SF writers. She is known for her complex medical
SF stories, and for her biological and evolutionary extrapolations in
such classics as Beggars in Spain (1993),
Beggars and Choosers (1994), and
Beggars Ride (1996). In recent years, she has
written Maximum Light (1998),
Probability Moon (2000), and
Probability Sun (2001), and last year published
Probability Space, the final book in a trilogy
of hard SF novels set against the background of a war between humanity
and an alien race. Her stories are rich in texture and in psychological
insight, and have been collected in Trinity and Other
Stories (1985), The Aliens of Earth
(1993) and Beaker’s Dozen (1998). She has won two Nebulas and a Hugo for them,
and been nominated for a dozen more of these awards.
“Patent
Infringement,” from Asimov’s, is a
short, amusing story told in memos and letters, about a guy whose genes
are used to create a medicine. He asks for a share of the royalties.
Pohl and Kornbluth, still the models in SF, were never more sharply
satirical than this.
PRESS RELEASE
Kegelman-Ballston Corporation is proud to
announce the first public release of its new drug, Halitex, which cures
Ulbarton’s Flu completely after one ten-pill course of treatment.
Ulbarton’s Flu, as the public knows all too well, now afflicts upward
of thirty million Americans, with the number growing daily as the
highly contagious flu spreads. Halitex “fluproofs” the body by
inserting genes tailored to confer immunity to this persistent and
debilitating scourge, whose symptoms include coughing, muscle aches,
and fatigue. Because the virus remains in the body even after symptoms
disappear, Ulbarton’s Flu can recur in a given patient at any time.
Halitex renders each recurrence ineffectual by “fluproofing” the body.
The General Accounting Office estimates that
Ulbarton’s Flu, the virus of which was first identified by Dr. Timothy
Ulbarton, has cost four billion dollars already this calendar year in
medical costs and lost work time. Halitex, two years in development by
Kegelman-Ballston, is expected to be in high demand throughout the
nation.
New York Post
KC ZAPS ULBARTON’S FLU
NEW DRUG DOES U’S
FLU 4 U
Martin Blake,
Attorney at Law
Chief Legal Counsel, Kegelman-Ballston Corporation
The New York Times
HALITEX BLACK MARKET
CASE TO BEGIN TODAY
This morning the circuit court of Manhattan
County is scheduled to begin hearing the case of Kegelman-Ballston
v. Meese. This case, heavily publicized during recent
months, is expected to set important precedents in the controversial
areas of gene patents and patent infringement of biological properties.
Protesters from the group FOR US: CANCEL KIDNAPPED-GENE PATENTS, which
is often referred to by its initials, have been in place on the court
steps since last night. The case is being heard by Judge Latham P.
Farmingham III, a Republican who is widely perceived as sympathetic to
the concerns of big business.
This case began when Jonathan J. Meese, an
accountant with The Pet Supply Catalog Store….
The New York Times
MEESE CONVICTED
PLAINTIFF GUILTY OF “HARBORING” DISEASE-FIGHTING
GENES WITHOUT COMPENSATING DEVELOPER
KEGELMAN-BALLSTON
The New York Times
BLUE GENES FOR DRUG THIEF
JONATHAN J. MEESE SENTENCED TO SIX MONTHS FOR PATENT INFRINGEMENT
Michael Moorcock
(www.multiverse.org/ and www.eclipse. co.uk/sweetdespise/moorcock/)
lives in Bastrop, Texas. Once the firebrand editor of New
Worlds, and the polemicist behind the British
New Wave of the 1960s, and still one of the great living SF and fantasy
writers, Moorcock is known more for his avant-garde work, and his
support of other writers pushing the boundaries of genre, than for his
genre work. He is now a recognized literary figure in the UK, a
significant contemporary writer. Nevertheless, he has deep roots in
genre fiction, and his love for certain genre works and writers (for
instance Leigh Brackett, Charles Harness, and Alfred Bester) is
long-term and enduring.
“Lost Sorceress of
the Silent Citadel” is another story from Mars Probes. It is an exercise in nostalgia, a swash- buckling
planetary romance that brings back Mars as an exciting setting for SF
adventure for an audience that knows better but is still willing to
indulge in it. It is primarily an homage to Leigh Brackett, but also to
her honorable tradition, which now (we say with some regret) prospers
more in the media than in the SF literature—though not entirely: see
the Neal Asher story earlier in this book. Moorcock succeeds both
because of his sincere feelings for Brackett’s achievements and because
of his sheer talent and experience at writing fantasy and science
fiction adventure.
(Homage to Leigh
Brackett)
They came upon the Earthling naked, somewhere in the
Shifting Desert when Mars’ harsh sunlight beat through thinning
atmosphere and the sand was raw glass cutting into bare feet. His skin
hung like filthy rags from his bloody flesh. He was starved, unshaven,
making noises like an animal. He was raving—empty of identity and will.
What had the ghosts of those ancient Martians done to him? Had they
traveled through time and space to take a foul and unlikely vengeance?
A novella of alien mysteries—of a goddess who craved life—who lusted
for the only man who had ever dared disobey her. A tale of Captain John
MacShard, the Half-Martian, of old blood and older memories, of a
restless quest for the prize of forgotten centuries….
CHAPTER
ONE
Whispers of an
Ancient Memory
“That’s Captain John MacShard, the
tomb-thief.” Schomberg leaned his capacious belly on the bar, wiping
around it with a filthy rag. “They say his mother was a Martian
princess turned whore, and his father—”
Low City’s best-known antiquities fence,
proprietor of the seedy Twenty Capstans, Schomberg murmured wetly
through lips like fresh liver. “Well, Mercury was the only world would
take them. Them and their filthy egg.” He flicked a look toward the
door and became suddenly grave.
Outlined against the glare of the Martian noon
a man appeared to hesitate and go on down the street. Then he turned
and pushed through the entrance’s weak energy gate. Then he paused
again.
He was a big, hard-muscled man, dressed in
spare ocher and brown, with a queer, ancient weapon, all baroque
unstable plastics and metals, prominent on his hip.
The Banning gun was immediately recognized
and its owner identified by the hardened spacers and krik traders who used the place.
They said only four men in the solar system
could ever handle that weapon. One was the legendary Northwest Smith;
the second was Eric John Stark, now far off-system. The third was
Dumarest of Terra, and the fourth was Captain John MacShard. Anyone
else trying to fire a Banning died unpleasantly. Sometimes they just
disappeared, as if every part of them had been sucked into the gun’s
impossible energy cells. They said Smith had given his soul for a
Banning. But MacShard’s soul was still apparent, behind that steady
gray gaze, hungering for something like oblivion.
From long habit Captain John MacShard remained
in the doorway until his sight had fully adjusted to the sputtering
naphtha. His eyes glowed with a permanent feral fire. He was a
lean-faced, slim-hipped wolf’s head whom no man could ever tame.
Through all the alien and mysterious spheres of interplanetary space,
many had tried to take the wild beast out of Captain John MacShard. He
remained as fierce and free as in the days when, as a boy, he had
scrabbled for survival over the unforgiving waste of rocky crags and
slag slopes that was Mercury and from the disparate blood of two
planets had built a body which could withstand the cruel climate of a
third.
Captain John MacShard was in Schomberg’s for a
reason. He never did anything without a reason. He couldn’t go to sleep
until he had first considered the action. It was what he had learned on
Mercury, orphaned, surviving in those terrible caverns, fighting
fiercely for subsistence where nothing would grow and where you and the
half- human tribe which had adopted you were the tastiest prey on the
planet.
More than any Earthman, he had learned the old
ways, the sweet, dangerous, old ways of the ancient Martians. Their
descendants still haunted the worn and whispering hills which were the
remains of Mars’ great mountain ranges in the ages of her might, when
the Sea Kings ruled a planet as blue as turquoise, as glittering red as
rubies, and as green as that Emerald Isle which had produced Captain
John Mac- Shard’s own Earth ancestors, as tough, as mystical and as
filled with wanderlust as this stepson of the shrieking Mercurian
wastelands, with the blood of Brian Borhu, Henry Tudor, and Charles
Edward Stuart in his veins. Too, the blood of Martian Sea Kings called
to him across the centuries and informed him with the deep wisdom of
his Martian forebears. That long-dead kin had fought against the Danes
and the Anglo-Saxons, been cavaliers in the Stuart cause and marshals
in Napoleon’s army. They had fought for and against the standard of
Rhiannon, in both male and female guise, survived blasting sorcery and
led the starving armies of Barrakesh into the final battle of the
Martian pole. Their stories, their courage and their mad fearlessness
in the face of inevitable death were legendary.
Captain John MacShard had known nothing of
this ancestry of course and there were still many unsolved mysteries in
his past, but he had little interest in them. He had the instincts of
any intelligent wild animal, and left the past in the past. A catlike
curiosity was what drove him and it made him the best archaeological
hunter on five planets—some, like Schomberg, called him a grave-looter,
though never to his face. There was scarcely a museum in the inhabited
universe which didn’t proudly display a find of Captain John
MacShard’s. They said some of the races which had made those artifacts
had not been entirely extinct until the captain found them. There
wasn’t a living enemy who didn’t fear him. And there wasn’t a woman in
the system who had known him that didn’t remember him.
To call Captain John MacShard a loner was
something of a tautology. Captain John MacShard was loneliness
personified. He was like a spur of rock in the deep desert, resisting
everything man and nature could send against it. He was endurance. He
was integrity, and he was grit through and through. Only one who had
tested himself against the entire fury of alien Mercury and survived
could know what it meant to be MacShard, trusting only MacShard.
Captain John MacShard was very sparing in his
affections but gave less to himself than he gave to an alley-brint, a wounded ray-rat, or the scrawny
street kid begging in the hard sour Martian sun to whom he finally
tossed a piece of old silver before striding into the bar and taking
his usual, which Schomberg had ready for him.
The Dutchman began to babble something, but
Captain John MacShard placed his lips to the shot glass of Vortex
Water, turned his back on him, and surveyed his company.
His company was pretending they hadn’t seen
him come in.
From a top pocket MacShard fished a twisted
pencil of Venusian talk-talk wood and stuck it between his teeth,
chewing on it thoughtfully. Eventually his steady gaze fell on a fat
merchant in a fancy fake skow-skin
jerkin and vivid blue tights who pretended an interest in his
fancifully carved flagon.
“Your name Morricone?” Captain John MacShard’s
voice was a whisper, cutting through the rhythmic sound of men who
couldn’t help taking in sudden air and running tongues around drying
mouths.
His thin lips opened wide enough for the
others to see a glint of bright, pointed teeth before they shut tight
again.
Morricone nodded. He made a halfhearted
attempt to smile. He put his hands on either side of his cards and made
funny shrugging movements.
From somewhere, softly, a shtrang
string sounded.
“You wanted to see me,” said Captain John
MacShard. And he jerked his head toward a corner where a filthy table
was suddenly unoccupied.
The man called Morricone scuttled obediently
toward the table and sat down, watching Captain John MacShard as he
picked up his bottle and glass and walked slowly, his antique ghat-scale leggings chinking faintly.
Again the shtrang
string began to sound, its deep note making peculiar harmonies in the
thin Martian air. There was a cry like a human voice which echoed into
nowhere, and when it was gone the silence was even more profound.
“You wanted to see me?” Captain John MacShard
moved the unlit stogie from one side of his mouth to the other. His
gray, jade-flecked eyes bore into Morricone’s shifting black pupils.
The fat merchant was obviously hyped on some kind of Low City “head
chowder.”
There wasn’t a drug you couldn’t buy at
Schomberg’s where everything was for sale, including Schomberg.
The hophead began to giggle in a way that at
once identified him as a cruffer,
addicted to the fine, white powdered bark of the Venusian high tree
cultures, who used the stuff to train their giant birds but had the
sense not to use it themselves.
Captain John MacShard turned away. He wasn’t
going to waste his time on a druggy, no matter how expensive his
tastes.
Morricone lost his terror of Captain John
MacShard then. He needed help more than he needed dope. Captain John
MacShard was faintly impressed. He knew the kind of hold cruff had on its victims.
But he kept on walking.
Until Morricone scuttled in front of him and
almost fell to his knees, his hands reaching out toward Captain John
MacShard, too afraid to touch him.
His voice was small, desperate, and it held
some kind of pain Captain John MacShard recognized. “Please…”
Captain John MacShard made to move past, back
into the glaring street.
“Please, Captain
MacShard. Please help me…” His shoulders slumped, and he
said dully: “They’ve taken my daughter. The Thennet have taken my
daughter.”
Captain John MacShard hesitated, still looking
into the street. From the corner of his mouth he gave the name of one
of the cheapest hotels in the quarter. Nobody in their right mind would
stay there if they valued life or limb. Only the crazy or desperate
would even enter the street it was in.
“I’m there in an hour.” Captain John MacShard
went out of the bar. The boy he’d given the silver coin to was still
standing in the swirling Martian dust, the ever-moving red tide which
ran like a bizarre river down the time-destroyed street. The boy
grinned up at him. Old eyes, young skin. A slender snizzer lizard
crawled on his shoulder and curled its strange, prehensile tail around
his left ear. The boy touched the creature tenderly, automatically.
“You good man, Mister Captain John MacShard.”
For the first time in months, Captain John
MacShard allowed himself a thin, self-mocking grin.
CHAPTER
TWO
Taken by the
Thennet!
Captain John MacShard left the main drag
almost at once. He needed some advice and knew where he was most likely
to find it. There was an old man he had to visit. Though not of their
race, Fra Energen had authority over the last of the Memiget Priests
whose Order had discovered how rich the planet was in man-made
treasure. They had also been experts on the Thennet as well as the
ancient Martian pantheon.
His business over with, Captain John MacShard
walked back to his hotel. His route took him through the filthiest,
most wretched slums ever seen across all the ports of the spaceways. He
displayed neither weakness nor desire. His pace was the steady,
relentless lope of the wolf. His eyes seemed unmoving, yet took in
everything.
All around him the high tottering tenement
towers of the Low City swayed gently in the glittering light, their
rusted metal and red terra cotta merging into the landscape as if they
were natural. As if they had always been there.
Not quite as old as Time, some of the
buildings were older than the human race. They had been added to and
stripped and added to again, but once those towers had sheltered and
proclaimed the power of Mars’ mightiest sea lords.
Now they were slums, a rat warren for the scum
of the spaceways, for half-Martians like Captain John MacShard, for
stranger genetic mixes than even Brueghel imagined.
In that thin atmosphere you could smell the
Low City for miles and beyond that, in the series of small craters
known as Diana’s Field, was Old Mars Station, the first spaceport the
Earthlings had ever built, long before they had begun to discover the
strange, retiring races which had remained near their cities, haunting
them like barely living ghosts, more creatures of their own mental
powers than of any natural creation—ancient memories made physical by
act of will alone.
Millennia before, the sea lords and their
ladies and children died in those towers, sensing the end of their race
as the last of the waters evaporated and red winds scoured the streets
of all ornament and grace. Some chose to kill themselves as their fine
ships became so many useless monuments. Some had marshaled their
families and set off across the new-formed deserts in search of a
mythical ocean which welled up from the planet’s core.
It had taken less than a generation, Captain
John MacShard knew, for a small but navigable ocean to evaporate
rapidly until it was no more than a haze in the morning sunlight. Where
it had been were slowly collapsing hulls, the remains of wharfs and
jetties, endless dunes and rippling deserts, abandoned cities of
poignant dignity and unbelievable beauty. The great dust tides rose and
fell across the dead sea bottoms of a planet which had run out of
resources. Even its water had come from Venus, until the Venusians had
raised the price so only Earth could afford it.
Earth was scarcely any better now, with water
wars turning the Blue Planet into a background of endless skirmishes
between nations and tribes for the precious streams, rivers, and lakes
they had used so dissolutely and let dissipate into space, turning
God’s paradise into Satan’s wasteland.
And now Earth couldn’t afford Venusian water
either. So Venus fought a bloody civil war for control of what was left
of her trade. For a while MacShard had run bootleg water out of New
Malvern. The kind of money the rich were prepared to pay for a tiny
bottle was phenomenal. But he’d become sickened with it when he’d
walked through London’s notorious Westminster district and seen
degenerates spending an artisan’s wages on jars of gray reconstitute
while mothers held the corpses of dehydrated babies in their arms and
begged for the money to bury them.
“Mr. Captain John MacShard.”
Captain John MacShard knew the boy had
followed him all the way to the hotel. Without turning, he said: “You’d
better introduce yourself, sonny.”
The boy seemed ashamed, as if he had never
been detected before. He hung his head. “My dad called me Milton,” he
said.
Captain John MacShard smiled then. Once. He
stopped when he saw the boy’s face. The child had been laughed at too
often and to him it meant danger, distrust, pain. “So your dad was Mr.
Eliot, right?”
The boy forgot any imagined insult. “You knew
him?”
“How long did your mother know him?”
“Well, he was on one of those long-haul ion
sailors. He was a great guitarist. Singer. Wrote all his own material.
He was going to see a producer when he came back from Earth with enough
money to marry. Well, you know that story.” The boy lowered his eyes.
“Never came back.”
“I’m not your pa,” said Captain John MacShard
and went inside. He closed his door. He marveled at the tricks the
street kids used these days. But that stuff couldn’t work on him. He’d
seen six-year-old masters pulling the last Uranian bakh
from a tight-fisted New Nantucket blubber-chaser who had just finished
a speech about a need for more workhouses.
A few moments later, Morricone arrived.
Captain John MacShard knew it was him by the quick, almost hesitant
rap.
“It’s open,” he said. There was never any
point in locking doors in this place. It advertised you had something
worth stealing. Maybe just your body.
Morricone was terrified. He was terrified of
the neighborhood and he was terrified of Captain John MacShard. But he
was even more terrified of something else. Of whatever the Thennet
might have done to his daughter.
Captain John MacShard had no love for the
Thennet, and he didn’t need a big excuse to put a few more of their
number in hell.
The gaudily dressed old man shuffled into the
room, and his terror didn’t go away. Captain John MacShard closed the
door behind him. “Don’t tell me about the Thennet,” he said. “I know
about them and what they do. Tell me when they took your daughter and
whatever else you know about where they took her.”
“Out past the old tombs. A good fifty or sixty
versts from here. Beyond the Yellow Canal. I paid a breed to follow
them. That’s as far as he got. He said the trail went on, but he wasn’t
going any farther. I got the same from all of them. They won’t follow
the Thennet into the Aghroniagh Hills. Then I heard you had just come
down from Earth.” He made some effort at ordinary social conversation.
His eyes remained crazed. “What’s it like back there now?”
“This is better,” said Captain John MacShard.
“So they went into the Aghroniagh Hills? When?”
“Some two days ago…”
Captain John MacShard turned away with a
shrug.
“I know,” said the merchant. “But this was
different. They weren’t going to eat her or—or—play with her…” His skin
crawled visibly. “They were careful not to mark her. It was as if she
was for someone else. Maybe a big slaver? They wouldn’t let any of
their saliva drip on her. They got me, though.” He extended the twisted
branch of burned flesh that had been his forearm.
Captain John MacShard drew a deep breath and
began to take off his boots. “How much?”
“Everything. Anything.”
“You’ll owe me a million hard deens if I bring her back alive. I won’t
guarantee her sanity.”
“You’ll have the money. I promise. Her name’s
Mercedes. She’s sweet and decent—the only good thing I ever helped
create. She was staying with me…the vacation…her mother and I…”
Captain John MacShard moved toward his board
bed. “Half in the morning. Give me a little time to put the money in a
safe place. Then I’ll leave. But not before.”
After Morricone had shuffled away, his
footsteps growing softer and softer until they faded into the general
music of the rowdy street outside, Captain John MacShard began to
laugh.
It wasn’t a laugh you ever wanted to hear
again.
CHAPTER
THREE
The Unpromised Land
The Aghroniagh Hills had been formed by a
huge asteroid crashing into the area a few million years earlier, but
the wide sweep of meadowland and streams surrounding them had never
been successfully settled by Captain John MacShard’s people. They were
far from what they seemed.
Many settlers had come in the early days,
attracted by the water and the grass. Few lasted a month, let alone a
season. That water and grass existed on Mars because of Blake, the
terraplaner. He had made it his life’s work, crossing and recrossing
one set of disparate genes with another until he had something which
was like grass and like water and which could survive, maybe even
thrive and proliferate, in Mars’ barren climate. A sort of liquid algae
and a kind of lichen, at root, but with so many genetic modifications
that its mathematical pedigree filled a book.
Blake’s great atmosphere pumping stations had
transformed the Martian air and made it rich enough for Earthlings to
breathe. He had meant to turn the whole of Mars into the same lush
farmland he had seen turn to dust on Earth. Some believed he had grown
too ambitious, that instead of doing God’s work, he was beginning to
believe he, himself, was God. He had planned a city called New
Jerusalem and had designed its buildings, its parks, streams, and
ornamental lakes. He had planted his experimental fields and brought
his first pioneer volunteers and given them seed he had made and
fertilizer he had designed, and something had happened under the
unshielded Martian sunlight which had not happened in his laboratories.
Blake’s Eden became worse than Purgatory.
His green shoots and laughing fountains
developed a kind of intelligence, a taste for specific nutrients, a
means of finding them and processing them to make them edible. Those
nutrients were most commonly found in Earthlings. The food could be
enticed the way an anemone entices an insect. The prey saw sweet water,
green grass and it was only too glad to fling itself deep into the
greedy shoots, the thirsty liquid, which was only too glad to digest
it.
And so fathers had watched their children die
before their eyes, killed and absorbed in moments. Women had seen
hard-working husbands die before becoming food themselves.
Blake’s seven pioneer families lasted a year
and there had been others since who brought certain means of defeating
the so-called Paradise virus, who challenged the hungry grass and
liquid, who planned to tame it. One by one, they went to feed what had
been intended to feed them.
There were ways of surviving the Paradise.
Captain John MacShard had tried them and tested them. For a while he
had specialized in finding artifacts which the settlers had left
behind, letters, deeds, cherished jewelry.
He had learned how to live, for short periods
at least, in the Paradise. He had kept raising his price until it got
too high for anybody.
Then he quit. It was the way he put an end to
his own boredom. What he did with all his money nobody knew, but he
didn’t spend it on himself.
The only money Captain John MacShard was known
to exchange in large quantities was for modifications and repairs to
that ship of his, as alien as his sidearm, which he’d picked up in the
Rings and claimed by right of salvage. Even the scrap merchants hadn’t
wanted the ship. The metal it was made of could become poisonous to the
touch. Like the weapon, the ship didn’t allow everyone to handle her.
Captain John MacShard paid a halfling
phunt-renter to drive him to the edge of the Paradise, and he promised
the sweating driver the price of his phunt if he’d wait for news of his
reappearance and come take him back to the city. “And any other
passenger I might have with me,” he had added.
The phunter
was almost beside himself with anxiety. He knew exactly what that green
sentient weed could do, and he had heard tales of how the streams had
chased a man halfway back to the Low City and consumed him on the spot.
Drank him, they said. No sane
creature, Earthling or Martian, would risk the dangers of the Paradise.
Not only was the very landscape dangerous,
there were also the Thennet.
The Thennet, whose life-stuff was unpalatable
to the Paradise, came and went comfortably all year round, emerging
only occasionally to make raids on the human settlements, certain that
no posse would ever dare follow them back to their city of tunnels,
Kong Gresh, deep at the center of the Aghroniagh Crater, which lay at
the center of the Aghroniagh Hills, where the weed did not grow and the
streams did not flow.
They raided for pleasure, the Thennet. Mostly,
when they craved a delicacy. Human flesh was almost an addiction to
them, they desired it so much. They were a cruel people and took
pleasure in their captives, keeping them alive for many weeks
sometimes, especially if they were young women. But they savored this
killing. Schomberg had put it graphically enough once: The longer the torment, the sweeter the meat.
His customers wondered how he understood such minds.
Captain John MacShard knew Mercedes Morricone
had a chance at life. He hoped, when he found her, that she would still
want that chance.
What had Morricone said about the Thennet not
wishing to mark her? That they were capturing her for someone else?
Who?
Captain John MacShard wanted to find out for
himself. No one had needed to pay the Thennet for young girls in years.
The wars among the planets had given the streets plenty of good-looking
women to choose from. Nobody ever noticed a few missing from time to
time.
If the Thennet were planning to sell her for
the food they would need for the coming Long Winter, they would be
careful to keep their goods in top quality, and Mercedes could well be
a specific target. The odds were she was still alive and safe. That was
why Captain John MacShard did not think he was wasting his time.
And it was the only reason he would go this
far into the Aghroniaghs, where the Thennet weren’t the greatest
danger.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Hell Under The Hill
It was hard to believe the Thennet had ever
been human, but there was no doubt they spoke a crude form of English.
They were said to be degenerated descendants of a crashed Earth ship
which had left Houston a couple of centuries before, carrying a
political investigative committee looking into reports that Earth
mining interests were using local labor as slaves. The reports had been
right. The mining interests had made sure the distinguished senators
never got to see the evidence.
Captain John MacShard was wearing his own
power armor. It buzzed on his body from soles to crown. The silky
energy, soft as a child’s hand, rippled around him like an atmosphere.
He flickered and buzzed with complex circuitry outlining his veins and
arteries, following the course of his blood. This medley of soft sounds
was given a crazy rhythm by the ticking of his antigrav’s notoriously
dangerous regulators as he flew an inch above the hungry, whispering
grass, the lush and luring streams of Paradise.
Only once did he come down, in the ruins of
what was to have been the city of New Jerusalem and where the grass did
not grow.
Here he ran at a loping pace which moved him
faster over the landscape and at the same time recharged the antigrav’s
short-lived power units.
He was totally enclosed in the battlesuit of
his own design, his visible skin a strange arsenical green behind the
overlapping energy shields, his artificial gills processing the
atmosphere to purify maximum oxygen. Around him as he moved was an
unstable aura buzzing with gold and misty greens, skipping and sizzling
as elements in his armor mixed and reacted with particles of
semi-artificial Martian air, fusing them into toxic fumes which would
kill a man if taken straight. Which is why Captain John MacShard wore
his helmet. It most closely resembled the head of an ornamental
dolphin, all sweeping flukes and baroque symmetry, the complicated,
delicate wiring visible through the thin plasdex skin, while the
macro-engineered plant curving from between his shoulder blades looked
almost like wings. He could have been one of the forgotten beasts of
the Eldren which they had ridden against Bast-Na-Gir when the first
mythologies of Mars were being made. The transparent steel visor plate
added to this alien appearance, enlarging and giving exaggerated curve
to his eyes. He had become an unlikely creature whose outline would
momentarily baffle any casual observer. There were things out here
which fed off Thennet and human alike. Captain John MacShard only
needed a second’s edge to survive. But that second was crucial.
He was in the air again, his batteries at
maximum charge. He was now a shimmering copper angel speeding over the
thirsty grass and the hungry rivers of Paradise until he was at last
standing on the shale slopes of the Aghroniagh Mountains.
The range was essentially the rim of a huge
steep-sided crater. At the crater’s center were peculiar pockets of
gases which were the by-product of certain rock dust interacting with
sunlight. These gases formed a breeding and sleeping environment for
the Thennet, who could only survive so long away from what the first
Earth explorers had called their “clouds.” Most of the gas, which had a
narcotic effect
on humans, was drawn down into their burrows
by an ingenious system of vents and manually operated fans. It was the
only machinery they used. Otherwise they were primitive enough, though
inventive murderers who delighted in the slow, perverse death of
anything that lived, including their own sick and wounded. Suicide was
the commonest cause of death.
As Captain John MacShard raced through the
crags and eventually came to the crater walls, he knew he might have a
few hours left in which to save the girl. The Thennet had a way of
letting the gases work on their human victims so that they became
light-headed and cheerful. The Thennet knew how to amuse humans.
Sometimes they would let the human feel this
way for days, until they began to get too sluggish.
Then they would do something which produced a
sudden rush of adrenaline in their victim. And thereafter it was
unimaginable nightmare. Unimaginable because no human mind could
conceive of such tortures and hold the memory or its sanity. No mind,
that is, except Captain John MacShard’s. And it was questionable now
that Captain John MacShard’s mind was still in most senses human.
Here’s where I was
too late. There’s her bone and necklace again. That’s the burrow into
middle chamber. Gas goes low there. All these thoughts
passed through his head as he retraced steps over razor rocks and
unstable shale. He had been paid four times to venture into Thennet
territory. Twice he had successfully brought out living victims, both
still relatively sane. Once he had brought out a corpse. Once he had
left a corpse where he found it. Seven times before that, curiosity had
taken him there. The time they captured him, his chances of escape had
been minimal. He was determined not to be captured again.
Now, however, there was something different
about the sinister, smoking landscape of craters and spikes. There was
a kind of silence Captain John MacShard couldn’t explain. A sense of
waiting. A sense of watching.
Unable to do anything but ignore the instinct,
he dropped down into the fissures and began to feel his way into the
first flinty corridors. He had killed five Thennet guards almost
without thought by the time he had begun to descend the great main
passage into the Thennet underworld. He always killed Thennet at a
distance, if he could. Their venom could sear into delicate circuitry
and destroy his armor and his lifelines.
Three more Thennet fell without knowing they
were dead. Captain John MacShard felt no hesitation about killing them
wherever he came across one. He killed them on principle, the way they
killed by habit. The less of the Thennet there were, the better for
everyone. And each corpse offered something useful to him as he crept
on downward into the subsidiary tunnels, following still familiar
routes.
The walls of the caverns were thick with
flaking blood and ordure, which the Thennet used for building
materials. Mostly it had hardened, but every so often it became soft
and slippery. Captain John MacShard had to adjust his step, glad of his
gills as well as his armor, which meant he did not have to smell or
touch any of the glistening stuff, though every so often his air system
overloaded and he got just a hint of the disgusting stench.
But something was wrong. His armor began to
pop and tremble. It was a warning. Captain John MacShard paused in the
slippery passage and considered withdrawing. There would normally be
more Thennet, males and females, shuffling through the passages, going
about their business, tending their eggs, tormenting their food.
He had a depressing feeling that he couldn’t
easily get back, that he was already in a trap. Was it a trap which had
been set for him specifically? Or could anyone be the prey? This wasn’t
the Thennet. Could it be the Thennet had new leadership and wider
goals? Captain John MacShard could smell intelligence. This was
intelligence. And it wasn’t a kind he’d smelled before. Not in Thennet
territory. Mostly what you smelled was terror and ghastly glee.
There was something else down here. Something
which had a personality. Something which had ambitions. Something which
was even now gathering power.
Captain John MacShard had learned to trust his
instincts, and his instincts told him he would have to fight to return
to the surface. What was more, he had an unpleasant feeling about what
he might have to fight….
His best chance was to pretend he had noticed
nothing, but keep his attention on that intelligence, even as he sought
out the merchant’s daughter. What was her name? Mercedes?
The narrow, fetid tunnels of the Thennet city
were familiar, but now they were opening up, growing wider and taller,
as if the Thennet had been working on them. But why?
And then, suddenly, a wave of thought struck
against his own mind—a wave which boomed with the force of a tidal
wave. It almost stopped him moving forward. It was a moment before the
sense of the thoughts began to filter in to him.
No longer. No
longer. I am the one. And I am more than one. I am Shienna Sha
Shanakana of the Yellow Price, and I shall again become the goddess I
once was when Mars was young. I have paid the Yellow Price. I claim
this star system as my own. And then I shall claim the universe….
The girl?
Captain John MacShard could not stop the question.
All he received was a wave of mockery which
again struck, with an almost physical weight.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Ancient and Modern
A voice began to whisper through the
serpentine tunnels. It was cold as space, hard and sharp as Mercurian
steel.
The female Mercedes
is gone. She is gone, Earther. There is nothing of her, save this
flesh, and I am already changing the flesh so that it is more to my
taste. She’ll produce the egg. First the body, then the entire planet.
Then the system. Then the stars. We shall thrive again. We shall feast
at will among the Galaxies.
So that was it! Yet another of Mars’ ancient
ghosts trying to regain its former power. These creatures had been
killed, banished, imprisoned long ago, during the last of Mars’
terrible wars.
They had reached an enormous level of
intellectual power, ruling the planet and influencing the whole system
as they became capable of flinging their mental energy through
interplanetary space, to control distant intelligences and rule through
them.
They considered themselves to be gods, though
they were mortal enough in many respects. It had been their arrogance
which had brought them low.
So abstract and strange had become their
ambitions that they had forgotten the ordinary humans, those who had
chosen not to follow their bizarre path, whose lives became wretched as
the Eldren used all the planet’s resources to increase their powers.
They had grown obsessed with immortality, recording themselves onto
extraordinary pieces of jewelry containing everything needed to
reconstitute the entire individual. Everything but ordinary humans to
place the jewels in their special settings and begin the process, which
required considerable human resources, ultimately taking the lives of
all involved. For most of the ordinary humans had died of starvation
and dehydration as those powers plundered their planet of all
resources, melting the poles so that first there was an abundance of
water, the time of the beginnings of the Sea Kings’power, but then, as
quickly, the evaporation had begun, dissipating into empty space, no
longer contained by the protective layers of ozone and oxygen. The
water could not come back. It was a momentary shimmer in the vastness
of space as it was drawn inevitably toward the sun.
Captain John MacShard knew all this because
his mother had known all this. He had not known his mother, had not
known he had emerged, a brawling, bawling independent creature from the
egg she had saved, even as she and her husband died, victims of the
planet’s unforgiving climate. He had not known how he had come to live
among the aboriginal ape people. The fiercely tribal Mercurians had
been fascinated by his tanned, pale hide, so unlike their own dark
green skins. They had never thought him anything but one of themselves.
They had come to value him. He had been elected a kind of leader. He
had taken them to food and guarded them against the giant rock snakes.
He had taught them to kill the snakes, to preserve their meat. They
named him Tan-Arz or Brown-Skin.
Tan-Arz was his name until the Earthlings
found him at last. His father’s brother had paid for the search, paid
to bring him back to Earth during that brief Golden Age before the
planet again descended into civil war. Back to the Old Country. Back to
Ireland. Back to Dublin and Trinity College. Then to South London
University.
Dublin and London had not civilized Captain
John MacShard, but they had taught him the manners and ways of a
gentleman. They had not educated Captain John MacShard, but they had
informed his experience. Now he understood his enemies as well as his
friends. And he understood that the law of the giant corporations was
identical to the law he had learned on Mercury.
Kill or be killed. Trust nothing and no one.
Power is survival. He smelled them. He was contemptuous of most of
them, though they commanded millions. They were his kind. They were his
kind gone soft, obscenely greedy, decadent to the marrow.
His instinct was to wipe them out, but they
had trained him to serve them. And he had served them. At first, when
the wars had begun, he had volunteered. He had served well and
honorably, but as the wars got dirtier and the issues less clear, he
found himself withdrawing.
He realized that he had more sympathy, most of
the time, with the desperate men he was fighting than with the great
patricians of Republican Earth.
His refusal to take part in a particularly
bloody operation had caused him to be branded a traitor.
It was as an outlaw he had arrived on Mars.
They had hunted him into the red wastelands and known he could not have
lived.
But Mars was a rest cure compared to Mercury.
Captain John MacShard had survived. And Captain John MacShard had
prospered.
Now he captained his own ship, the gloriously
alien Duchess of Malfi, murmuring
and baroque in her perpetually shifting darkness. Now he could pick and
choose whom he killed and whom he didn’t kill.
He had no financial need to continue this
dangerous life, no particular security to be derived, even the security
of familiarity. Nothing to escape from. Nothing within him he could not
confront. He did it because he was who he was.
He was Captain John MacShard and Captain John
MacShard was a creature of action, a creature which only came fully
alive when its own life was in the balance. A wild creature that longed
for the harsh, savage places of the universe, their beauties and their
dangers.
But Captain John MacShard had no wish to die
here in the slimey burrows of the unhuman Thennet. He had no desire to
serve the insane ends of the old Martian godlings who saw their
immortality slowly fading and longed for all their power again.
You, Captain John
MacShard, will help me. And I will reward you. Before you die, I will
make you the sire of the supernatural. Already the blood of my Martians
mingles with your own. It is why you are so perfect for my plans.
John MacShard: You
are no longer the Earthboy who grew up wild with the submen of Mercury.
You are of our own blood, for your mother drew her descent directly
from the greatest of the Sea Kings and the Sea Kings were our own
children—so much of our blood has mingled with yours that you are now
almost one of us.
Let your blood bring
you home, John MacShard.
“My blood is my own! It belongs to nobody but
me! Every atom has been fought for and won.”
It is the blood of
gods and goddesses, John MacShard. Of kings and queens.
“Then it’s still mine. By right of
inheritance!” John MacShard was all aggression now, though the voices
speaking to him were patient, reasonable. He had heard similar voices
before. As he lay writhing in his own filthy juices on one of the Old
Ones’ examining slabs.
It is your Earth
blood, however, which will give us our glory back. That vital, sturdy,
undiluted stuff will bring us back our power and make Mars know her old
fear of the unhumans who ruled her before the Sea Kings ruled.
Welcome home,
Captain John MacShard, last of the Sea Kings. Welcome home to the
Palace of Queen Shienna Sha Shanakana, Seventh of the Seven Sisters who
guard the Shrine of the Star Pool, Seventh of the Seven Snakes,
Sorceress of the Citadel of Silence where she has slept for too many
centuries.
The little mortal
did its job well, though unconsciously. I needed its daughter’s womb
and I needed you, John MacShard. And now I have both. I will reemerge
from the great egg fully restored to my power and position.
Behold, Captain John
MacShard! The Secrets of the Silent Citadel!
CHAPTER
SIX
Queen of the
Crystal Citadel
All at once the half-Martian was surrounded
by crystal. Crystal colored like rainbows, flashing and murmuring in a
cold wind that blew from all directions toward the center where a
golden woman sat, smiling at him, beckoning to him, and driving all
thought momentarily from his mind as he began to stumble forward. He
wanted nothing else in the world but to mate with her. He would die, if
necessary, to perform that function.
It took Captain John MacShard a few long
seconds to bring himself back under control. Faces formed within the
crystal towers. Familiar faces. The faces of friends and enemies who
welcomed Captain John MacShard and bid him join them, in their good
company, for eternity. These were the siren voices which had tempted
Ulysses and his men across the void of space. Powerful intelligences
trapped within indestructible crystal. Intelligences which, legend had
it, could be freed by the stroke of a sacred sword held in the hand of
one man.
Captain John MacShard shuddered. He had no
such sword. Only his jittering Banning cannon in its heavy webbing. He
laid his hand on the gun and seemed to draw reassurance from it.
His white wolf’s teeth were clenched in his
lean jaw. “No. I’m not your dupe and I’m not Earth’s dupe. I’m my own
man. I’m Captain John MacShard. There is no living individual more free
than me in the universe and no one more ready to fight to keep that
freedom.”
Yes,
murmured the voice in his head. It was a seductive voice. Think of the power and therefore the freedom you
have when we are combined…Power to do whatever you desire, to possess
whatever you desire, to achieve whatever you desire. You will be reborn
as Master of the Universe. The whole of existence will be yours, to
satisfy your rarest appetites….
The voice was full of everything feminine. He
could almost smell it. He could see the figure outlined at the center
of the crystal palace. The lithe young body with its waves of golden
hair, clad in gold, with golden threads cascading down her perfect
thighs, with golden cups supporting her perfect breasts and golden
sandals on her perfect feet. He could see her quite clearly, yet she
seemed the length of a football field away. She was beckoning to him.
“All I want is the power to be free,” said
Captain John MacShard. “And I already have that. I got it long ago.
Nobody gave it to me. I took it. I took it on Mercury. I took it on
Earth. I took it on Mars, and I took it on Venus. Not a year goes by
when I do not take that freedom again, because that is the only way you
preserve the kind of freedom I value. My very marrow is freedom.
Everything in me fights to maintain that freedom. It is unconscious and
as enduring as the universe itself. I am not the only one to possess it
or to know how to fight to keep it. It is the power of all the human
heroes who overcame impossible odds that I carry in my blood. You
cannot defeat that. Whatever you do, Shienna Sha Shanakana, you cannot
defeat that.”
She was laughing somewhere in his mind. That
laughter coursed along his spine, over his buttocks, down his legs. It
was directed. She was displaying the powers of her own incredible
mentality.
Captain John MacShard examined the body of the
girl he had come to rescue. Of course the Martian sorceress possessed
her, probably totally. But was there anything of the girl left? It was
crucial that he know.
He forced himself to push forward and thought
he saw something like astonishment in the girl’s eyes. Then another
intelligence took control of her face and the eyes blazed with eager
fury, as if the goddess had found a worthy match. There was an ancient
knowledge in those eyes which, when they met Captain John MacShard’s,
saw its equal in experience.
But all Captain John MacShard cared about was
that he had glimpsed human eyes, a human face. Somewhere, Mercedes
Morricone still existed. That body which pulsed with strange, stolen
life and glaring intelligence, still contained the girl’s soul. That
was what he had needed to know.
“Give the human its body back,” said Captain
John MacShard, switching to servos so that his arm whined up,
automatically bringing the Banning cannon to bear on the golden goddess
who now smiled at him with impossible promises. “Or I will destroy it
and in so doing destroy you. I am Captain John MacShard, and you must
know I have never made a threat I was not prepared to follow through.”
You cannot destroy
me with that, with a mere weapon. I draw my strength from all this—all
these—from all my companions still imprisoned in the crystal.
Ultimately, of course, I may release them. As they come to acknowledge
that I am Mistress of the Silver Machine.
And now Captain John MacShard looked up. It
was as if someone had tilted him by the chin. And above him stretched
the vibrating wires and twisting ribbons of silver that told him the
terrible truth. Inadvertently he had stepped into the core of one of
the ancient Martian machines.
The sorceress had set a trap. And it had been
a subtle trap, a trap which showed the mettle of his enemy.
The trap had used his own stupid pride against
him.
He cursed himself for an idiot, but already he
was inspecting the peculiar twists and loops of the machine, which
seemed to come from nowhere and disappear into nothing. A funnel of
silver energy was at the apex, high above.
Yet, perhaps most impressively, this silver
citadel of science was absolutely silent.
Silent, save for the faintest whisper, like
the hiss of a human voice, far away, the sweet, persuasive suggestions
of this seductive sorceress slipping into his synapses, soothing his
ever-wary soul, preparing him for the big sleep, the long good-bye….
Everything that was savage. Everything that
had made him fight to survive in the wastelands of Mercury. Everything
that he had learned in the cold depths of space and the steamy seas of
Venus. Everything he had been taught in the seminaries of Dublin and
the academies of London. Everything came to Captain John MacShard’s aid
then. And there was a possibility that everything would not be enough.
The silent crystals around him began to
vibrate, almost in triumph. And there, below the pulsing silver fire,
the goddess danced.
He knew why Shienna Sha Shanakana danced and
he tried desperately to take his eyes off her. He had never seen
anything quite so beautiful. He had never desired a woman more. He felt
something close to love.
With a strangled curse which peeled his lips
back from his teeth, he took the Banning in both hands, his fingers
playing across the weird lines and configurations of the casing as if
he drew music from an instrument.
The goddess smiled but did not stop dancing.
Neither did the crystals of her citadel stop dancing. Everything moved
in delicate, subtle silence. Everything seduced him. If there had been
music, he might have resisted more easily. But the music was somewhere
in his head. There was a tune. It was taking charge of his arms and
legs. Taking over his mind. Was he also dancing? Dancing with her in
those strange, sinuous movements so reminiscent of the snakes which had
pursued them on Mercury until he had become the hunter and turned them
into food for himself and his tribe?
Oh, you are strong
and resourceful and mighty and everything a hero should be. A true
demigod to mate with a demigoddess and create a mighty god, a god who
in turn will create entire new universes, an infinity of power. Look
how beautiful you are, Captain John MacShard, what a perfect specimen
of your kind.
A silver mirror appeared before him and he saw
not what she described but the wild beast which had survived the deadly
wastes of Mercury, the demonic creature who had slain the Green Emperor
of Venus and wrested a planet from the grip of Grodon Worbn, the pious
and vicious Robot Chancellor of Ganymede.
But the sweetness of her perfume, the sound of
those golden, silky threads brushing against her skin, the rise and
fall of her breasts, the promise in her eyes…
All this Captain John MacShard shook off, and
he thought he saw a look of some astonishment, almost of admiration, in
those alien orbs. His fingers would scarcely obey him, but they moved
without thought, from pure habit, flicking across the Banning, touching
it here, adjusting something there. An instrument made for aliens.
No human hand had ever been meant to operate
the Banning, which was named not for its maker but for the first man
who had died trying to find out how it worked. General Banning had
prided himself on his expertise with alien artifacts. He had not died
immediately, but from the poisons which had eaten into his skin and
slowly digested his flesh. Captain John MacShard had never bothered to
find out how the Banning worked. He simply knew how to work it. The way
so many Spanish boys simply know how to coax the most beautiful music
from the guitar.
The same intelligences, who Captain John
MacShard believed to have perished out beyond Pluto, had also made his
ship. There was a philosophy inherent to his ship, which rejected most
who tried to board her vast, echoing interior, whose very emptiness was
essential to her function, to her existence, and the weapon, and
somehow Captain John MacShard understood the philosophy and loved the
purity of the minds which had created it.
His respect was what had almost certainly
saved his life more than once as he learned the properties and sublime
beauty of the Banning and the ship.
He was panting. What had he been doing?
Dancing? Before a mirror? The mirror was gone now. The goddess had
stopped dancing. Indeed, she was leaning forward, fixing Captain John
MacShard with strange eyes in which flecks of rainbow colors flashed
and flared. The red lips parted to show white, even teeth. The young
flesh glowed with inner desires, impossible promises…
Come, John MacShard.
Come to me and fulfill your noble destiny.
Then Captain John MacShard was sweeping the
Banning around him in an arc. He aimed at the crystals while the gun’s
impossible circuits and surfaces plated and replated in a blur of
changes, from gold to copper to jade to silver to gold as the great gun
seemed to expand under Captain John MacShard’s urgent caresses. Yet
nothing dramatic happened to the crystals. They darkened, but they did
not break. The light went from glaring day to misty night.
A terrifying silence fell.
He swept the gun again. Still the crystal
held. And whatever was within the crystal held, too. It was harder to
see movement, perhaps because the inhabitants were protecting
themselves. But the gun had done nothing.
The silence continued.
Then the golden girl laughed. Her laughter was
the sweetest music in the universe.
Did you think,
Captain John MacShard, your famous gun could conquer Shienna Sha
Shanakana, Priestess of the Silent Citadel, Sorceress of the Seven
Dials? The stupid Knights of the Balance who came against us from far
Cygnus met their match. They planned to conquer us, but we killed them
all, even before they reached the inner planets ….
He looked up. She was so much closer now. Her
wonderful beauty loomed over him. He gasped. He refused to take a step
back.
Those human lips were filled with the stored
energy of ancient Mars as they smiled down at him. Oh,
yes, Captain John MacShard. You are not here by accident. I did not
send the Thennet to take the girl until I knew you were about to land
at Old Mars Station. And it was I who let the father know you were the
only creature alive that could find his daughter. And you did find her,
didn’t you? You found me. You found Shienna Sha Shanakana who has been
dust, who has not known this desire for uncountable millennia, who has
not felt such need, such joyous lust….
Now Captain John MacShard took that backward
step, the great Banning cannon loose on its webbing, swinging as his
hands sought something in his clothing. Now his fists were clenched at
his sides.
The goddess licked her sublime lips.
Is that sweat I see
on your manly brow, Captain John MacShard? A hand reached
out and whisked lightly across his forehead. He felt as if a flaming
knife had been drawn through his flesh. Yet he would have given his
whole life to experience that touch again.
He tasted a tongue that was not a human
tongue. It licked at his flesh. It reveled in his smell, the feel of
his hard, muscular body, the racing blood, the pounding heart, the
sight of his perfect manhood. He was everything humans or Martians
could be; everything the female might desire in a male.
Her touch yielded to him, offered him a power
he knew she would never really give up. He had enjoyed the most expert
seductresses, but this creature brought the experience of centuries,
the instincts of her stolen body, the cravings of a female which had
not known any kind of feeling, only a burning ambition, for longer than
most of Earth’s greatest civilizations had come and gone. And those
cravings were centered on Captain John MacShard.
You will sire the
new Martian race, she promised, as she moved her golden
breastplates against his naked chest. You will
die knowing that you have fulfilled your greatest possible destiny.
And Captain John MacShard believed her. He
believed her to the depths of his being. He wanted nothing else.
Nothing but to serve her in any way she demanded. The gun hung
forgotten at his side. He reached out his arms to receive from her
whatever she desired to give, to give to her whatever she needed to
take. It was true. He was hers. Hers to use and then to bind so that
later his own son might feed upon his holy flesh and become him. That
was his destiny. The eternal life which lay before him.
But first,
she whispered, you must entertain me
.
Then he suddenly knew the son must be sired,
the remains of the humans driven from the bodies and the blood mingled
in the painful and protracted mating rituals of those first Martians.
She moved to enfold him in that final, lethal
embrace.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The Poisoned
Chalice
They came upon the Earthling naked,
somewhere in the Shifting Desert, almost a hundred versts
from the Aghroniagh Hills. He had no armor, no weapons. His skin hung
like filthy rags on his bloody, blistered flesh. Both his legs had
long, deep red lines running from thigh to heel, as if a white-hot
sword blade had been placed on the limbs. He could see, but his eyes
were turned inward. He was mumbling to himself. There was foam on his
mangled lips. He was raving, seemingly empty of identity and will, and
the noises that came occasionally from deep in his chest were the
sounds a wild beast might make. At other times, he seemed amused.
The patrol which found him had been looking
for Venusian chuff runners and
couldn’t believe anything lived in his condition. They were
superstitious fellows. They thought at first he was a ghost. Then they
decided he had fallen among ghosts, within the influence of those
mythical Martians frozen in jewels and dreaming deep within the planet.
Some of the customs people had seen Earthling explorers who had
returned from expeditions in a state not much better than this.
But then one of the patrol recognized Captain
John MacShard and they knew that whatever enemy he had met out here, it
must have been a powerful one. They identified the long scars down his
legs and on his hands as burns from Thennet venom. But how had they
gotten there? The marks did not look typical of Thennet torture.
They began to take him back to Old Mars
Station where there was a doctor, but he roused himself, gathered his
senses and pointed urgently toward the Aghroniaghs. It seemed he had a
companion.
They had gone seventy versts
before their instruments detected a human figure lying in the shade of
a rock, a small bottle nearby. Indications were that the figure was
barely alive.
Captain John MacShard sank back into the craft
as soon as he saw Mercedes Morricone. He let go. He allowed oblivion at
last to overcome him.
He would never deliberately recall and would
never tell anyone what Shienna Sha Shanakana, Sorceress of the Silent
Citadel, had made him do, as she took hold of his mind. He would never
admit what he had allowed her to do in order to ensure the success of a
desperate, maybe suicidal, plan.
She knew she could not fully control him and
it had whetted her curiosity, made her test her powers in ways she had
never expected to test them. She fed off him. She tasted at his brain
the way a wealthy woman might take a delicate bite of a chocolate to
see if it suited her. Some of what she took from him she discarded as
so much waste. Memories. Affections. Pride.
But then she had become puzzled. Her own power
seemed to ebb and flow. He was naked, and he had torn his own flesh for
her amusement, had capered and drooled for her amusement. John MacShard
was no longer a thinking being. She had sucked him dry of everything
she herself lacked. Dry of everything human.
Or so it had seemed…
For Captain John MacShard had learned all he
had needed to learn from the veteran priest he had talked to in Old
City before he left. He had kept some of his wits by tapping the venom
from the Thennet he had killed, keeping it in crushable vials until the
moment came when he needed that level of pain to keep his mind from the
likes of Shienna Sha Shananaka’s seductions. It had been her embrace
that had seared them both. But he intended to reverse her spell. He had
reversed the path of most of the energy she had been drawing from her
compatriots in their crystal prisons. He had absorbed it in the gun.
For the gun didn’t merely expel energy, it
also attracted energy. It processed its own power from the planet’s
energy, wherever that energy was to be found. The blood and soul she
had sucked from him was still under his control. He had let her draw
him in, let her take his very soul, somehow keeping his own
consciousness as he was absorbed into her, somehow linking with that
other terrified fragment of soulmind that was the girl to whom he was
able to give strength, a chance at life.
Somewhere in that ruined, apparently lunatic
skull, there was a battle still taking place, through the twists and
turns of an alien space and time—a battle for control of a human
creature that had perished so that a goddess might survive. It was not
only Captain John MacShard’s vigorous blood she had sucked, nor his
diamond-hard mind, but his will. A will which, ironically, she could
not control. A will strong enough to take possession of a demigoddess.
Captain John MacShard was still there.
Actually inside her. Actually working to destroy her. There had never
been an individual more ruggedly determined to maintain its identity
against all odds. He had summoned everything he possessed as she
embraced him and had broken the vials containing the venom he had
gathered from the Thennet. The venom burned his body as well as hers.
The girl’s body became useless to her. She began to remove herself from
it. And Captain John MacShard, the skin of his hands and legs bubbling
as the venom ate into them, kept his will directed to his goal.
She had been astonished to discover a mind as
powerful as her own—as thoroughly trained as her own in the Martian
forms of mental control and counter-control which Earthers had
nicknamed “brain-brawling” and which more subtle observers knew as a
combination of mental fencing and mental chess whose outcome could
annihilate the defeated.
But the searing venom kept his mind free
enough from her dominance and ultimately allowed him to break from her
embrace. She had advanced on him, a roaring, shouting thing of raw
energy, the ruined human body abandoned.
Then Captain John MacShard forced himself
toward his fallen Banning cannon. The gun lay in a heap of clothing and
circuitry which he had stripped from his own body before beginning to
strip the flesh as she had demanded.
But all the while his iron will had kept the
crucial parts of himself free. Now he had the gun in his hands and the
golden whirlwind that was the true form of Shienna Sha Shanakana,
Sorceress of the Silent Citadel, was advancing toward him, triumphant
in the knowledge that the gun had already failed to break the crystal
coffins in which her kin-folk were still imprisoned.
But Captain John MacShard knew more about the
people who had made the Banning than she did. Her folk had merely
killed them. Captain John MacShard had examined the culture they had
left behind in their great, empty ship. Captain John MacShard had a
human quality which the ancient Martians, for all their powers, always
lacked and which would always undo them. They had no curiosity about
those they fed upon. Captain John MacShard had the curiosity of the
Venusian saber-tooth whose reactions matched his own. He had learned so
much from The Duchess of Malfi.
He had never meant to destroy the crystal
tombs with his gun. That would have released even more of the greedy
immortals from their already fragile captivity. Instead he had used the
gun’s powering devices, the cells which sucked in energy of cosmic
proportions, which in turn powered the gun when it was needed. The
instrument in his hands could contain the raw power of an entire
universe—and expel that same power wherever it was directed.
The gun hadn’t failed to break the crystals,
but it had absorbed their enormous energy.
It had gathered the power of the silent
crystals into the gun so that the Sorceress could no longer call upon
it. Her energy, uncontained, began to dissipate. She began to return to
the body of the girl. But she had reckoned without the power of the
Banning cannon.
She was held in balance between her own
desperate lust for flesh and the relentless draw of the Banning.
MacShard’s last act had been to take the
girl’s apparently lifeless body and carry it through the winding,
filthy tunnels of the Thennet, who had all long since fled, and somehow
get her up to the surface as a goddess shrilled and boomed in the
crystal chamber. The whole planet seemed to shake with her frustrated
attempts to draw more strength from her imprisoned brothers and
sisters.
She was outraged. Not because she knew she
might actually die, but because a puny little halfling threatened to
best her. She could not bear the humiliation.
He saw an intense ball of light pursue him for
a few moments and then become a face. Not the face he had seen before
but a face at once hideous and obscenely beautiful. She was being
dragged down to him, down to where the alien gun sucked at her very
soul. Then she stopped resisting it. She might have lived on, as she
had lived for millennia, but she chose oblivion. She let go of her
consciousness. Only her energy remained in the gun’s energy cells. But
Captain John MacShard would never be sure.
Nothing but natural hazards blocked his
progress to the top. At last he was stretched, gasping on the thin,
sour air, staring upward.
Suddenly a sad wind began to stretch a curtain
of dark blue across the sky. It seemed for a moment that Mars lived
again, lived when the seas washed her wealthy, mysterious beaches.
At the surface, Captain John MacShard realized
he would have to leave the Banning behind if he was to get the girl to
safety. He must risk it. It had enough charge to do extraordinary
damage. If mishandled, it would not only destroy any living thing
within a hundred yards, it would probably destroy a good-sized portion
of the planet or worse. He suspected that it was as safe from the
Thennet as it was from the Sorceress of the Silent Citadel. He hoped to
cross the Paradise before he smelled human again.
It had not been until the following night that
he had stopped. The girl was just conscious, a shoulder and leg raw
from Thennet venom, though her face, by a miracle, had not been
touched. He had left her what little water he had brought and had
stumbled on. He had been walking toward the Old City when the customs
patrol found him.
The port doctors shook their heads. They could
see no hope of saving him. But then Morricone stepped in. He flew
Captain John MacShard to Phobos and the famous Clinique Al Rhabia,
where his daughter was already recovering. They had worked on him. A
billion deen had been spent on him,
and they had saved him.
And in saving Captain John MacShard they
instilled the germ of a new kind of anger, a profound understanding of
the injustice which could let crippled boys beg in the Martian dust but
fly the privileged to Phobos and the finest new medicine science could
create.
He wasn’t ungrateful to Morricone. Morricone
had kept his bargain, paid the price and better. He didn’t blame
Morricone for his failure to understand, for not having the imagination
to see that for every hero’s life he saved, there were millions of
ordinary people who would never be given the chance to be heroes.
They found his gun for him. Nobody dared
handle it, but they picked it out of a dune with their waldos and
brought it to him in a sealed canister.
Captain John MacShard saw Mercedes Morricone a
couple of times after he left the Clinique and was waiting for his ship
to be recircuited according to his new instructions. Plastic surgery
had rid her of most of the scars. She was more than grateful to him.
She knew him in a way no woman had ever known him before. And she loved
him. She couldn’t help herself. She understood Captain John MacShard
had nothing to offer her now that he had given her back her life.
Yet maybe there was something. A clear feeling
of affection, almost a father’s love for a daughter. He realized, to
his own surprise, that he cared about her. He even let her come along
when he took the kid aboard The Duchess of
Malfi and showed him the wild, semistable gases and
gemstones which were her controls. He wanted the boy to remember that
the ship could be understood and handled. And Mercedes had fallen in
love all over again, for the ship had a beauty that was unique.
Pretending to joke, she said they could be a
hardy little pioneer family, the three of them, setting off for the
worlds beyond the stars. How marvelous it would be to stand at his side
as he took the alien ship into the echoing corridors of the multiverse,
following fault lines created in the impossibly remote past through the
infinitely layered realities of intraspatial matter. How marvelous it
would be to see the sights that he would see.
He was loading the heavy canister down into a
cradle he’d made for it and which fitted beside his compression bed. He
had commissioned himself a new power suit. It rippled against his body,
outlining muscles and sinews as he moved gracefully to his familiar
tasks, checking screens and globes, columns of glittering force.
The boy was content to look, wide-eyed. And
maybe he understood. Maybe he just pretended.
And maybe Captain John MacShard pretended not
to understand her when she spoke of that impossible future. He didn’t
tell her what you had to become to steer The
Duchess through time and space. What you must cease to be.
What you must learn never to desire, never to think about.
He was gentle when he escorted her home from
the spaceport, took her and the boy to her father’s big front door,
kissed her cheek, and bade her good-bye for the last time.
She held the boy’s hand tight. He was her link
to her dream. He might even become her best dream. She was going to get
him educated, she said, as best you could these days.
The girl and the boy watched Captain John
MacShard leave.
His perfect body was suddenly outlined against
the huge, scarlet sun as it settled on the Martian horizon. Ribbons of
red dust danced around his feet as he strode back up the drive of her
father’s mansion, between the artificial cedars and the holograph
fountains. He walked to the gates, seemed about to turn, changed his
mind, and was gone.
The girl and the boy were standing there again
in the morning at Old Mars Station as The
Duchess blasted off en route for the new worlds beyond Pluto
where Captain John MacShard thought he might find what he was looking
for.
He had gained something more than the cosmic
power which resided in his gun. He now knew what love—ordinary, decent,
celebratory human love—was. He had felt it. He still felt it.
The ship was cruising smoothly, her own
intelligence taking over. He turned away from his instruments and
poured himself a much-needed shot of Vortex Water.
Staring up at the great tapestry of stars,
thinking about all the worlds and races which must inhabit them,
Captain John MacShard turned away from his instruments.
Like the wild creature that he was, he shook
off the dust and the horror and the memory of love.
By the time his alien ship was passing
Jupiter, Captain John MacShard was his old self again. He patted the
gun in its special case; his Banning was now powered by the life-stuff
of the gods.
Soon he could start hunting the really big
game.
The interstellar game.