The Best of Michael Swanwick (10 page)

Abigail groped into the clamshell. “Go,” she said.

The metal closed about her seamlessly, encasing her in darkness. She floated in a lotus position, bobbing slightly.

A light gripping field touched her, stilling her motion. On cue, hypnotic commands took hold in her brain. Her breathing became shallow; her heart slowed. She felt her body ease into stasis. The final command took hold.

Abigail weighed fifty keys. Even though the water in her body would not be transmitted, the polymer chain she was to be transformed into would be two hundred seventy-five kilometers long. It would take fifteen minutes and seventeen seconds to unravel at light speed, negligibly longer at translation speed. She would still be sitting in Clotho when the spiders began knitting her up.

It was possible that Garble had gone mad from a relatively swift transit. Paul doubted it, but he wasn’t taking any chances. To protect Abigail’s sanity, the meds had wetwired a travel fantasy into her brain. It would blind her to external reality while she traveled.

***

She was an eagle. Great feathered wings extended out from her shoulders. Clotho was gone, leaving her alone in space. Her skin was red and leathery, her breasts hard and unyielding. Feathers covered her thighs, giving way at the knees to scaley talons.

She moved her wings, bouncing lightly against the thin solar wind swirling down into Ginungagap. The vacuum felt like absolute freedom. She screamed a predator’s exultant shrill. Nothing enclosed her; she was free of restrictions forever.

Below her lay Ginungagap, the primal chasm, an invisible challenge marked by a reed smudge of glowing gases. It was inchoate madness, a gibbering impersonal force that wanted to draw her in, to crush her in its embrace. Its hunger was fierce and insatiable.

Abigail held her place briefly, effortlessly. Then she folded her wings and dove.

A rain of X rays stung through her, the scattering of Ginungagap’saccretion disk. They were molten iron passing through a ghost. Shrieking defiance, she attacked, scattering sparks in her wake.

Ginungagap grew, swelled, until it swallowed up her vision. It was purest black, unseeable, unknowable, a thing of madness. It was Enemy.

A distant objective part of her knew that she was still in Clotho, the polymer chain being unraveled from her body, accelerated by a translator, passing through two black holes, and simultaneously being knit up by the spiders. It didn’t matter.

She plunged into Ginungagap as effortlessly as if it were the film of a soap bubble.

In—

—and out.

It was like being reversed in a mirror, or watching an entertainment run backward. She was instantly flying out the way she came. The sky was a mottled mass of violet light.

The stars before her brightened from violet to blue. She craned her neck, looked back at Ginungagap, saw its disk-shaped nothingness recede, and screamed in frustration because it had escaped her. She spread her wings to slow her flight and—

—was sitting in a dark place. Her hand reached out, touched metal, recognized the inside of a clamshell device.

A hairlike crack of light looped over her, widened. The clamshell opened.

Oceans of color bathed her face. Abigail straightened, and the act of doing so lifted her up gently. She stared through the transparent bubble at a phosphorescent foreverness of light.

My God
, she thought.
The stars
.

The stars were thicker, more numerous than she was used to, large and bright and glittery-rich. She was probably someplace significant, a star cluster or the center of the galaxy; she couldn’t guess. She felt irrationally happy to simply
be
; she took a deep breath, then laughed.

“Abigail Vanderhoek.”

She turned to face the voice and found that it came from a machine. Spiders crouched beside it, legs moving silently. Outside, in the hard vacuum, were more spiders.

“We regret any pain this may cause,” the machine said.

Then the spiders rushed forward. She had no time to react. Sharp mandibles loomed before her, then dipped to her neck. Impossibly swift, they sliced through her throat, severed her spine. A sudden jerk, and her head was separated from her body.

It happened in an instant. She felt brief pain, and the dissociation of actually
seeing
her decapitated body just beginning to react. And then she died.

***

A spark. A light.
I’m alive
, she thought. Consciousness returned like an ancient cathode tube warming up. Abigail stretched slowly, bobbing gently in the air, collecting her thoughts. She was in the sister-Clotho again, not in pain, her head and neck firmly on her shoulders. There were spiders on the platform, and a few floating outside.

“Abigail Vanderhoek,” the machine said. “We are ready to begin negotiations.”

Abigail said nothing.

After a moment, the machine said, “Are you damaged? Are your thoughts impaired?” A pause, then, “Was your mind not protected during transit?”

“Is that you waving the legs there? Outside the platform?”

“Yes. It is important that you talk with the other humans. You must convey our questions. They will not communicate with us.”

“I have a few questions of my own,” Abigail said. “I won’t cooperate until you answer them.”

“We will answer any questions provided you neither garble nor garble.”

“What do you take me for?” Abigail asked. “Of course I won’t.”

***

Long hours later she spoke to Paul and Dominguez. At her request, the spiders had withdrawn, leaving her lone. Dominguez looked drawn and haggard. “I swear we had no idea the spiders would attack you,” Dominguez said. “We saw it on the screens. I was certain you’d been killed…” His voice trailed off.

“Well, I’m alive, no thanks to you guys. Just what
is
this crap about an explosive substance in my bones, anyway?”

“An explosive—I swear we know nothing of anything of the sort.”

“A close relative to plastique,” Paul said. “I had a small editing device attached to Clotho’s translator. It altered roughly half the bone marrow in your sternum, pelvis and femurs in transmission. I’d hoped the spiders wouldn’t pick up on it so quickly.”

“You actually did,” Abigail marveled. “The spiders weren’t lying; they decapitated me in self-defense. What the holy hell did you think you were
doing
?”

“Just a precaution,” Paul said. “We wetwired you to trigger the stuff on command. That way we could have taken out the spider installation if they’d tried something funny.”

“Um,” Dominguez said, “this
is
being recorded. What I’d like to know, Ms. Vanderhoek, is how you escaped being destroyed.”

“I didn’t,” Abigail said. “The spiders killed me. Fortunately, they anticipated the situation and recorded the transmission. It was easy for them to re-create me—after they edited out the plastique.”

Dominguez gave her an odd look. “You don’t—feel anything particular about this?”

“Like what?”

“Well—” He turned to Paul helplessly.

“Like the real Abigail Vanderhoek died and you’re simply a very realistic copy,” Paul said.

“Look, we’ve been through this garbage before,” Abigail began angrily.

Paul smiled formally at Dominguez. It was hard to adjust to seeing the two in flat black-and-white. “She doesn’t believe a word of it.”

“If you guys can pull yourselves up out of your navels for a minute,” Abigail said, “I’ve got a line on something the spiders have that you want. They claim they’ve sent probes through their black hole.”

“Probes?” Paul stiffened. Abigail could sense the thoughts coursing through his skull, of defenses and military applications.

“Carbon-hydrogen chain probes. Organic probes. Self-constructing transmitters. They’ve got a carbon-based secondary technology.”

“Nonsense,” Dominguez said. “How could they convert back to coherent matter without a receiver?”

Abigail shrugged. “They claim to have found a loophole.”

“How does it work?” Paul snapped.

“They wouldn’t say. They seemed to think you’d pay well for it.”

“That’s very true,” Paul said slowly. “Oh, yes.”

The conference took almost as long as her session with the spiders had. Abigail was bone weary when Dominguez finally said, “That ties up the official minutes. We now stop recording.” A line tracked across the screen, was gone. “If you want to speak to anyone off the record, now’s your chance. Perhaps there is someone close to you…”

“Close? No.” Abigail almost laughed. “I’ll speak to Paul alone, though.”

A spider floated by outside Clotho II. It was a golden crablike being, its body slightly opalescent. It skittered along unseen threads strung between the open platforms of the spider star-city. “I’m listening,” Paul said.

“You turned me into a bomb, you freak.”

“So?”

“I could have been killed.”

“Am I supposed to care?”

“You damn well ought to, considering the liberties you’ve taken with my fair white body.”

“Let’s get one thing understood,” Paul said. “The woman I slept with, the woman I cared for, is dead. I have no feelings toward or obligations to you whatsoever.”

“Paul,” Abigail said. “
I’m not dead
. Believe me, I’d know if I were.”

“How could I possibly trust what you think or feel? It could all be attitudes the spiders wetwired into you. We know they have the technology.”

“How do you know that
your
attitudes aren’t wetwired in? For that matter, how do you know anything is real? I mean, these are the most sophomoric philosophic questions there are. But I’m the same woman I was a few hours ago. My memories, opinions, feelings—they’re all the same as they were. There’s absolutely no difference between me and the woman you slept with on the
Clarke
.”

“I know.” Paul’s eyes were cold. “That’s the horror of it.” He snapped off the screen.

Abigail found herself staring at the lifeless machinery.
God, that hurt
, she thought.
It shouldn’t, but it hurt
. She went to her quarters.

The spiders had done a respectable job of preparing for her. There were no green plants, but otherwise the room was the same as the one she’d had on the
Clarke
. They’d even been able to spin the platform, giving her an adequate down-orientation. She sat in her hammock, determined to think pleasanter thoughts. About the offer the spiders had made, for example. The one she hadn’t told Paul and Dominguez about.

Banned by their chemistry from using black holes to travel, the spiders needed a representative to see to their interests among the stars. They had offered her the job.

Or perhaps the plural would be more appropriate—they had offered her the jobs. Because there were too many places to go for one woman to handle them all. They needed a dozen, in time perhaps a hundred Abigail Vanderhoeks.

In exchange for licensing rights to her personality, the right to make as many duplicates of her as were needed, they were willing to give her the rights to the self-reconstructing black-hole platforms.

It would make her a rich woman—a hundred rich women—back in human space. And it would open the universe. She hadn’t committed herself yet, but there was no way she was going to turn down the offer. The chance to see a thousand stars. No, she would not pass it by.

When she got old, too, they could create another Abigail from their recording, burn her new memories into it, and destroy her old body.

I’m going to see the stars
, she thought.
I’m going to live forever
. She couldn’t understand why she didn’t feel elated, wondered at the sudden sense of melancholy that ran through her like the precursor of tears.

Garble jumped into her lap, offered his belly to be scratched. The spiders had recorded him, too. They had been glad to restore him to his unaltered state when she made the request. She stroked his stomach and buried her face in his fur.

“Pretty little cat,” she told him. “I thought you were dead.”

Trojan Horse

It’s all inside my head,” Elin said wonderingly. It was trite. A chimney swift flew overhead, and she could feel its passage through her mind. A firefly landed on her knee. It pulsed cold fire, then spread its wings and was gone, and that was a part of her too.

“Please try not to talk too much.” The wetware tech tightened a cinch on the table, adjusted a bone inductor. His red-and-green facepaint loomed over her, receded. “This will go much faster if you cooperate.”

Elin’s head felt light and airy. It was
huge.
It contained all of Magritte, from the uppermost terrace down to the trellis farms that circled the inner lake. Even the blue-and-white Earth that hovered just over one rock wall. They were all within
her. They were all, she realized, only a model, the picture
her mind assembled from sensory input. The exterior universe—the real universe—lay beyond.

“I feel giddy.”

“Contrast high.” The tech’s voice was neutral, disinterested. “This is a very different mode of perception from what you’re used to—you’re stoned on the novelty.”

A catwalk leading into the nearest farm rattled within Elin’s mind as a woman in agricultural blues strode by, gourd-collecting bag swinging from her hip. It was night outside the crater, but biological day within, and the agtechs had activated tiers of arc lights at the cores of the farms. Filtered by greenery, the light was soft and watery.

“I could live like this forever.”

“Believe me, you’d get bored.” A rose petal fell on her cheek, and the tech brushed it off. He turned to face the two lawyers standing silently nearby. “Are the legal preliminaries over now?”

The lawyer in orangeface nodded. The one in purple said, “Can’t her original personality be restored at all?”

Drawing a briefcase from his pocket, the wetware tech threw up a holographic diagram between himself and the witnesses. The air filled with intricate three-dimensional tracery, red-and-green lines interweaving and intermeshing.

“We’ve mapped the subject’s current personality.” He reached out to touch several junctions. “You will note that here, here, and here, we have what are laughingly referred to as impossible emotional syllogisms. Any one of these renders the subject incapable of survival.”

A thin waterfall dropped from the dome condensers to a misty pool at the topmost terrace, a bright razor-slash through reality. It meandered to the edge of the next terrace, and fell again.

“A straight yes or no answer will suffice.”

The tech frowned. “In theory, yes. In practical terms it’s hopeless. Remember, her personality was never recorded. The accident almost completely randomized her emotional structure—technically she’s not even human. Given a decade or two of extremely delicate memory probing, we could
maybe
construct a facsimile. But it would only resemble the original: it could never be the primary Elin Donnelly.”

Elin could dimly make out the equipment for five more waterfalls, but they were not in operation at the moment. She wondered why.

The attorney made a rude noise. “Well then, go ahead and do it. I wash my hands of this whole mess.”

The tech bent over Elin to reposition a bone inductor. “This won’t hurt a bit,” he promised. “Just pretend that you’re at the dentist’s, having your teeth replaced.”

She ceased to exist.

***

The new Elin Donnelly gawked at everything she passed by-the desk workers in their open-air offices, a blacksnake sunning itself by the path, the stone stairways cut into the terrace walls. Coming off the topmost of these stairs, into a stand of sapling no higher than she, she stumbled and almost fell. Her companion caught her and roughly set her back on her feet.

“Try to pay attention,” the lawyer said, frowning under her loops of purple facepaint. “We have a lot of detail work to go over.”

Elin smiled vaguely. They broke out of the saplings into a meadow, and butterflies scattered at their approach. Her gaze went from them to a small cave in the cliffs ahead, then up to the stars, as jumpy and random as their flight.

“—so you’ll be stuck on the Moon for a full lunation—almost a month—if you want to collect your settlement. I.G. Feuchtwaren willcarry your expenses until then, drawing against their final liability.Got that?”

And then—suddenly, jarringly—Elin could focus again. She took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I—okay.”

“Good.” The attorney canceled her wetware, yanking the skull plugs and briskly wrapping them around her briefcase. “Then let’s have a drink—it’s been a long day.”

They had arrived at the cave. “Hey, Hans!” the lawyer shouted. “Give us some service here, will you?”

A small man with the roguish face of a comic-opera troll popped into the open, work terminal in hand. “One minute,” he said. “I’m on the direct flex time—got to wrap up what I’m working on first.”

“Okay.” The lawyer dropped to the grass and began toweling her lace. Elin watched, fascinated, as a new pattern of fine red-and-black lines, permanently tattooed into the skin, emerged from under the paint.

“Hey!” Elin said. “You’re a Jesuit.”

“You expected IGF to ship you a lawyer from Earth orbit?” She stuck out a hand. “Donna Landis, S.J. I’m the client-overseer for the Star Maker project, but I’m also available for spiritual guidance. Mass is at nine Sunday mornings.”

Elin leaned back against the cliff. Grapevines rustled under her weight. Already she missed the blissed-out feeling of a few minutes before. “Actually, I’m an agnostic.”

“You
were.
Things may have changed.” Landis folded the towel into one pocket, unfolded a mirror from another. “Speaking of which, how do you like your new look?”

Elin studied her reflection. Blue paint surrounded her eyes, narrowing to a point at the bridge of her nose, swooping down in a long curve to the outside. It was as if she were peering through a large blue moth, or a pair of hawk wings. There was something magical about it, something glamorous. Something very unlike her.

“I feel like a raccoon,” she said. “This idiot mask.”

“Best get used to it. You’ll be wearing it a lot.”

“But what’s the point?” Elin demanded. She was surprised by her own irritation. “So I’ve got a new personality; it’s still
me
in here. I don’t feel any weird compulsion to run amok with a knife or walk out an airlock without a suit. Nothing to warn the citizenry about, certainly.”

“Listen,” Landis said. “Right now you’re like a puppy tripping over its own paws because they’re too big for it. You’re a stranger to yourself—you’re going to feel angry when you don’t expect to, get sentimental over surprising things. You can’t control your emotions until you learn what they are. And until then, the rest of us deserve—”

“What’ll you have?” Hans was back, his forehead smudged black where he had incompletely wiped off his facepaint.

“A little warning. Oh, I don’t know, Hans. Whatever you have on tap.”

“That’ll be Chanty. And you?” he asked Elin.

“What’s good?”

He laughed. “There’s no such thing as a good lunar wine. The air’s too moist. And even if it weren’t, it takes a good century to develop an adequate vineyard. But the Chanty is your basic drinkable glug.”

“I’ll take that, then.”

“Good. And I’ll bring a mug for your friend, too.”

“My friend?” She turned and saw a giant striding through the trees, towering over them, pushing them apart with two enormous hands. For a dizzy instant, she goggled in disbelief, and then the man shrank to human stature as she remembered the size of the saplings.

He grinned, joined them. “Hi. Remember me?”

He was a tall man, built like a spacejack, lean and angular. An untidy mass of black curls framed a face that was not quite handsome, but carried an intense freight of will.

“I’m afraid…”

“Tory Shostokovich. I reprogrammed you.”

She studied his face carefully. Those
eyes.
They were fierce almost to the point of mania, but there was sadness there, too, and—she might be making this up—a hint of pleading, like a little boy who wants something so desperately he dare not ask for it. She could lose herself in analyzing the nuances of those eyes. “Yes,” she said at last, “I see it now—the resemblance.”

“I’m pleased.” He nodded to the Jesuit. “Father Landis.”

She eyed him skeptically. “You don’t seem your usual morose self, Shostokovich. Is anything wrong?”

“No, it’s just a special kind of morning.” He smiled at some private joke, returned his attention to Elin. “I thought I’d drop by and get acquainted with my former patient.” He glanced down at the ground, fleetingly shy, and then his eyes were bright and audacious again.

How charming,
Elin thought. She hoped he wasn’t
too
shy. And then had to glance away herself, the thought was so unlike her. “So you’re a wetware surgeon,” she said inanely.

Hans reappeared to distribute mugs of wine, then retreated to the cave’s mouth. He sat down, workboard in lap, and patched in the skull-plugs. His face went stiff as the wetware took hold.

“Actually,” Tony said, “I very rarely work as a wetsurgeon. An accident like yours is rare, you know—maybe once, twice a year. Mostly I work in wetware development. Currently I’m on the Star Maker project.”

“I’ve heard that name before. Just what is it, anyway?”

Tory didn’t answer immediately. He stared down into the lake, a cool breeze from above ruffling his curls. Elin caught her breath.
I hardly know this man,
she thought wildly. He pointed to the island in the center of the lake, a thin stony finger that was originally the crater’sthrust cone.

“God lives on that island,” he said.

Elin laughed. “Think how different human history would be if He’d had a sense of direction!” And then wanted to bite her tongue as she realized that he was not joking.

“Typical,” Landis said, glowering at Tory. “Only an atheist would call her that.”

“What do you
call
her, then?”

“A victim of technology.” She swigged down a mouthful of wine.
“Jeez,
that’s vile stuff.”

“Uh, guys?” Elin said. “I’m not getting much of an answer.”

Tory rubbed the back of his neck ruefully. “
Mea culpa.
Well, let megive you a little background. Most people think of wetware as beingsoftware for people. But that’s too simplistic, because with machines, you start out blank—with a clean slate—and with people, there’s some ten million years of mental programming already crammed into their heads.

“So to date we’ve been working
with
the natural wetware. Wecounterfeit surface traits—patience, alertness, creativity—and package them like so many boxes of bonemeal. But the human mind isvast and unmapped, and it’s time to move into the interior, to do some basic research.

“And that’s the Star Maker project. It’s an exploration of the basic substructural programming of the mind. We’ve redefined the overstructure programs into an integrated system we believe will be capable of essence-programming, and in one-to-one congruence with the inherent substructure of the universe.”

“What jargonistic rot!” Landis gestured at Elin’s stoneware mug. “Drink up. The Star Maker is a piece of experimental theology that IGF dreamed up. As Tory said, it’s basic research into the nature of the mind. The Vatican Synod is providing funding so we can keep an eye on it.”

“Nipping heresy in the bud,” Tory said sourly.

“That’s a good part of it. IGF is trying to create a set of wetware that will reshape a human mind into the popular notion of God. Bad theology, but there it is. They want to computer-model the infinite. Anyway, the specs were drawn up, and it was tried out on—what was the name of the test subject?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Tory said quickly.

“Coral something-or-other.”

Only half-listening by now, Elin unobtrusively studied Tory. He sat, legs wide, staring into the mug of Chanty. There were hard lines on his face, etched by who-knew-what experiences?
I don’t believe in love at first sight,
Elin thought. Then again, who knew
what
she might believe in anymore? It was a chilling thought, and she retreated from it.

“So did this Coral become God?”

“Patience. Anyway, the volunteer was plugged in, wiped, reprogrammed, and interviewed. Nothing useful.”

Tory raised a finger in objection. “In one hour we learned more about the structure and composition of the universe than in
all of the history of science to date.”

“It was deranged gibberish.” She tapped Elin’s knee. “We interviewed her, and then canceled the wetware. And what do you think happened?

“I’ve never been big on rhetorical questions.” She didn’t take her eyes off Tory.

“She didn’t come down. She was stuck there.”

“Stuck?”

Tory plucked a blade of grass, let it fall. “What happened was thatwe had rewired her to absolute consciousness. She was not only aware of all her mental functions, she was in control of them—right down to the involuntary reflexes. Which also put her in charge of her own metaprogrammer.”

“
Metaprograrnmer
is just a buzzword for a bundle of functions by which the brain is able to make changes in itself,” Landis threw in.

“Yeah. What we didn’t take into account, though, was that she’d
like
being God. When we began deprogramming her, she simply overrode our instructions and reprogrammed herself back up.”

“The poor woman,” Elin said, in part because she knew it was expected of her. And yet—what a glorious experience, to be God! Something within her thrilled to it. It would almost be worth the price.

“Which leaves us with a woman who thinks she’s God,” Landis said. “I’m just glad we were able to hush it up. If word got out to some of those religious illiterates back on Earth—”

“Listen,” Tory said. “I didn’t really come here to talk shop. I wantedto invite my former patient on the grand tour of the Steam Grommet Works.”

Elin looked at him at him blankly. “Steam…”

He swept an arm to take in all of Magritte, the green pillars and grey cliffs alike, and there was something proprietary in his gesture.