Forbidden Planets (16 page)
“So, Lu, there we were, our ship hung up on fractal coral, the waters full of savage zero knots. None of us had eaten anything other than a slice of pi in the past week, and half our crew lay in sick bay, undergoing emergency Fourier Transforms. And what do you think Captain Pongo says? ‘Damn the toroids, full secant ahead!’ ”
Maruta laughed heartily at the punchline of her own anecdote, then tilted her head back to glug down an immoderate slug of her drink. I admired the sheer mechanical efficiency of her slim throat as it worked, let my eyes roam over the rest of her fine body, which was clothed in the latest fashionable cuirass and greaves from designer Hulda Loveling. Maruta was visibly happy to be reembodied and was exulting in her pure physicality.
As was I. I had missed her more than I had imagined I would, over the past several weeks. I tried to convey that by sensuously gripping her knee, although the joint of her greaves didn’t actually allow for any flesh-to-flesh contact.
“Damn dangerous job, Ruta. Always said so. But you’re good at it, and you enjoy it, so that’s all that counts. I’m just happy you’re back safely. Pretty lonely here without you.”
Maruta grinned broadly, then leaned forward to bring her face close to mine. The pungent odor of Ghostyhead wafted off her lips. “I didn’t really have time to miss you, Lu. But once I got back, I realized once more just how much you mean to me. So, what do you say to finishing our drinks and going back to your place?”
Closing her eyes and inching even closer, she invited a kiss. I moved to comply. But our lips never connected.
The noisy, revelry rich environment of the Sand Castle suddenly became quiet as a deepsea trench. Maruta and I both straightened up to see what had caused the hush.
Standing in the fine-grained flowing curtain of the doorway was a naked Singularity.
Appearing as a dark-haired, light-skinned human male some seven feet tall, impeccably proportioned and endowed in masculine fashion, the Singularity was instantly recognizable as such by his magisterium corona. No one knew the origin or exact nature of the field that always surrounded an incarnate Singularity, but the presence of the refulgence was an unmistakable sign of posthuman activity.
For several eternal frozen seconds, none of us humans dared do so much as breathe or blink. Then a few brave souls fingered their Lifelines, insta-texting calls to Ess-Cubed.
The Singularity took no notice of these silent cries for help, although I’m sure he registered them. Rather, he just proceeded further into the club.
There was a single step down from the doorway. The Singularity moved off the step but did not obey gravity’s injunction to meet the floor. Rather, he walked through the air, one-step-high.
And he headed straight for Maruta and me.
I got down off my stool, and Maruta followed. Those patrons of the bar nearest us backed hurriedly away, some falling over themselves in their efforts to disassociate themselves from us.
For me and Maruta, there was no point in running, no point in adopting a combative stance. But somehow it just felt better to meet this intrusion on my feet rather than sitting down.
With no haste and an air of implacable deliberate-ness, the Singularity closed the interval between us. I had plenty of time to experience a gamut of emotions: fear, curiosity, anger, envy, and, inexplicably, shame and guilt. All my surroundings, including the stressor-shaped circulating-particle walls and ceiling of the room, assumed a preternatural lucidity. I wasn’t sure if this was just plain old human fight-or-flight sharpening of my senses or some kind of magisterium leakage.
Halfway across the room, the worst thing happened.
The Singularity smiled and held out a hand, like some kind of commission-driven flitter salesman.
The essential banality of the gesture chilled me more than anything that had preceded it.
Inevitably, the Singularity reached us, still grinning and inviting a handshake. For all the insignificant good it would do, I interposed myself protectively between the intruder and Maruta. The fringes of his magisterium tickled my vision, inducing strange fractures and curdlings in the scene before me. I blinked three times rapidly, and the effect lessened, although things still did not look quite right.
Still hovering six inches above the floor, the Singularity spoke first, introducing himself.
“Magister Zawinul. I’ve come for your woman.”
Zawinul was a planet halfway across the Milky Way, although of course just a few steps distant on the Indrajal. It had gone posthuman only last week, making the nightly media reports on such occurences, which was why that world’s name was fresh in my mind.
The Singularity’s bold, blunt statement of its purpose did not surprise me by its tone. Although I had never dealt with a Magister-class entity before, I understood that they did not cater to human norms of behavior.
But the substance of Zawinul’s speech sent a shockwave through my whole being. I found myself responding intemperately, even though no one had ever had any luck dialoging with a Singularity.
“Fuck you! Maruta’s not my woman, she’s her own woman. And you can’t have her!”
Magister Zawinul lowered the hand I had refused to shake and frowned. With absurd irrelevance, I wondered what ineffable higher-level states of supraconsciousness these human subroutines could be intended to mirror.
“You deny the sub-Planckian connections that bind you and her because you can not see them as I can. If it were you I wanted instead, I would have politely informed the woman that I was taking her man. But as matters stand, I did the reverse.”
“Screw all that shit about who belongs to who! Why are you even talking about taking Maruta? You’re a godling! Whatever you think you need her for, you can make her equivalent faster than I can spit!”
“Not so. Some noetic-plectic aspects of the plenum are irreproducible, unique, even from my perspective. Humans belong to that category. Hence I must have this specimen and no other. She completes me.”
I started to bluster some more when Maruta interrupted me. Stepping out from behind me, she said, with admirable if not entirely altruistic fervor, “Lu, it’s no use. If he wants me, I’ll have to go.”
I looked at her. She seemed bewitched by the Magister’s glamour, her face reflecting his aura, which danced in her eyes. I gripped her by the shoulders and shook her.
“Snap out of it, Ruta! You don’t know what you’re getting into!”
Magister Zawinul softly placed one hand on my own shoulder then. It felt like a silk glove filled with live bees. “She is making a wise decision. Do not interfere with the woman’s choice—”
His touch was enough to make me explode.
I whirled around, aiming a solid blow at his jaw.
When my fist intersected the magisterium corona, it was as if my hand had transected an event horizon. The motion of my limb simultaneously sped up and slowed down, smearing across all scales. But my fist never connected with Zawinul’s jaw.
I was trapped immovably, as if I had tried to bop a tarbaby. There was no pain involved for me. No physical pain. But my heart ripped in two as I witnessed what came next.
I had to watch as Zawinul’s magisterium expanded to enclose Maruta in its field. The two of them began to ascend.
My hand popped out of the retreating corona, freeing me—but too late to do anything.
When Zawinul’s aura touched the stressor fields of the ceiling, the entire building underwent instant catastophic collapse. Whether Zawinul intended this or it was just an accident, I can’t be sure.
But they say with Magister-level entities that “accident” is a null term.
The Sand Castle and much of its furnishings were configured of shaped stressor fields confining whirling grains of common beach sand along various architectural planes. The building was only two stories high and not very big, so there was probably less than a ton of sand dispersed along its dimensions.
But all of that sand came down in a flash when the stressor fields died, burying me and all the other patrons.
The next thing I knew, public-safety guardians were blowing off the mounds of granular debris with shaped-field wands, hauling out the victims, applying whatever medical fixes were deemed necessary, up to and including complete revivification for the suffocated, and then lining us all up to have our brains slowed down by Ess-Cubed.
The Singularity Suppression Squad.
I tried to protest. I wasn’t so concerned for myself and the forthcoming neurotampering. I knew the effects were necessary and temporary. But Maruta’s uncertain fate was uppermost in my mind, and I felt that any delay my slowed reactions might incur just added risk to her plight.
I attempted to step out of line, saying, “I’ve got to contact the Reticulate. A woman’s been kidnapped—”
One of the SSS men, a burly bruiser with a surprisingly high-pitched voice, pushed me back. “The Reticulate knows everything already. We’re the only authorities you need to see right now, sir. This won’t take but a minute—”
And with that admonition, they hit us with a full blast from their Vingean-model handheld synapse degraders.
I could feel my mind slow down and contract. The tenor of my thoughts didn’t alter, but their speed decreased radically. As measured by the rate of my molasses-thick mentation, time seemed to lengthen interminably. All the untouched curious bystanders in the streets around the collapsed Sand Castle were talking and moving at what appeared to be super-fast rates.
The SSS men and women began to hustle us into waiting transports. I wanted to ask where they were taking us. I opened my mouth to speak, but I only managed to disgorge a single glacially protracted word: “Whu . . . huh . . . huh . . . air . . . ?” But by the time the last phoneme exited my throat, we were already bundled into the transports and under way.
I knew that my planet had to protect itself against the possibility of magisterial contamination, of any accidentally or deliberately planted Singularity seeds left behind in the minds of those who had brushed against Zawinul. And the best way to do that was to deny the Singularity the wetware platforms it needed to replicate, with a dose of glial freezedown followed by a short quarantine.
The threat of going posthuman was a constant danger that every civilized world in the galaxy, human or alien, had to be continually on guard against. (What, exactly, was so bad about going posthuman was never made precisely clear by the Reticulate. But most sentients prefered the familiar to the unfamiliar, and that natural tendency sufficed to make the posthuman worlds a bête noire.) Still, I resented on some level the necessity for having my own personal brain impounded, so to speak, in the cause.
By the time I finished this short chain of thought, I and my fellow zombies found ourselves already installed in comfortable—but locked—temporary quarters, where ceiling-mounted degraders kept us suitably quiescent.
Four days of this treatment were sufficient for the experts to declare us free of contamination. Our mentalities were restored to their baseline levels, with a bit of free neuro-toning thrown in as a little thank you for our cooperation.
Once freed, I headed straight for the nearest offices of the Reticulate.
I told my story at successively higher levels of the interstellar bureaucracy, until I found myself in the office of a fourth-degree Lustron named Permananden Avouris. Avouris was a Licorice Whip, a genderless being who resembled that favorite human candy: long, thin, supple curveless body with ridged skin. As a testament to the jokester nature of any putative Creator (one contemporary cult believed that massed magisters working retrochronally were responsible for the creation of the multiverse), the Licorice Whips came in two races, red and black. Avouris was a black.
Coiled in his chair, his limbless upper torso gently swaying back and forth in a faintly hypnotic manner, Avouris reviewed my case before speaking. At last, he said, “You are Lucerne Locarno?”
“Yes, yes. I thought that would be well established by this point!”
Ignoring my indignation, Avouris continued. “You have no legal standing in this case on which to initiate any formal complaint or remediative action. You are not pair-bonded to Maruta Forcroy or otherwise contractually entangled. Is entangled the right word?”
“But I’ve known Maruta for ten years now. We’ve been lovers on and off again for half that time.”
“These relationships are nugatory.”
“Look, the Singularity himself said that Maruta was my woman. He claimed that sub-Planckian connections existed between us.”
“The testimony of any Magister-class entity is automatically deemed nonfalsifiable, suspect, and inadmissable in any Reticulate proceeding. You cannot appeal to the transgressor in this case. It is surreal. Is surreal the right word?”
“I shouldn’t even have to be pressing the Reticulate on this matter. One of your citizens has been abducted.”
“Actually, that is citizens, plural. At the same moment Magister Zawinul appeared to you and Maruta Forcroy, he was simultaneously appearing to exactly one thousand four hundred and thirty-two other female individuals on this world, all of whom ended up absquatulating with him. Is absquatulating the right word?”
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