The Best of Michael Swanwick (11 page)

Landis eyed him suspiciously. “You two might need a chaperone,” she said. “I think I’ll tag along to keep you out of trouble.”

Elin smiled sweetly. “Fuck off,” she said.

***

A full growth of ivy covered Tory’s geodesic trellis hut. He led the way in, stooping to touch a keyout by the doorway. “Something classical?”

“Please.” And as he gently began removing her jumpsuit, the holotape sprang into being, surrounding them with rich reds and cobalt blues that coalesced into stained glass patterns in the air. Elin pulled back a bit and clapped her hands. “It’s Chartres,” she cried, delighted. “The cathedral at Chartres!”

“Mmmm.” Tory teased her down onto the grass floor.

The north rose window swelled to fill the hut and slowly revolved overhead. It was all angels and doves, kings and prophets, with gold lilies surrounding the central rosette. Deep and powerful, infused with gloomy light, it lap-dissolved into the lancet of Sainte Anne.

One by one, the hundred and seventy-six windows of Chartres appeared in turn, wheeling about them, slow and stately at first, then more quickly. The holotape panned down the north transept to the choir, to the apse, and then up into the ambulatory. Swiftly then, it cut to the wounded Christ and the Beasts of Revelation set within the dark spaces of the west rose. The outer circle—the instruments of the Passion—closed about them.

Elin gasped.

The tape proceeded down the nave, window by window, still brightening, pausing at the Vendôme chapel and moving on. Until finally the oldest window, the Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière, fairly blazed in a frenzy of raw glory. A breeze rattled the ivy, and two leaves fell through the hologram to tap against their skin and slide to the ground.

The Belle Verrière held for a moment longer then faded again, the light darkening, and the colors ran and were washed away by a noiseless gust of rain.

Elin let herself melt into the grass, drained and lazy, not caring if she never moved again. Beside her Tory chuckled, playfully tickled her ribs. “Do you love me? Hey? Tell me you love me.”

“Stop!” She grabbed his arms and bit him in the side—a small nipping bite, more threat than harm—ran a tongue across his left nipple. “Hey, listen, I hit the sack with you a half hour after we met. What do you want?”

“Want?” He broke her hold, rolled over on top of her, pinioning her wrists above her head. “I want you to know”—and suddenly he was absolutely serious, his eyes unblinking and glittery-hard—“that I love you. Without doubt or qualification. I love you more than words could ever express.”

“Tory,” she said. “Things like that take time.” The wind had died down. Not a blade of grass stirred.

“No, they don’t.” It was embarrassing looking into those eyes; she refused to look away. “I feel it. I know it. I love every way, shape, and part of you. I love you beyond time and barrier and possibility. We were meant to be lovers, fated for it, and there is
nothing,
absolutely nothing, that could ever keep us apart.” His voice was low and steady. Elin couldn’t tellwhether she was thrilled or scared out of her wits.

“Tory, I don’t know—”

“Then wait,” he said. “It’ll come.”

***

But it was a long night. And a restless hour after Tory had slipped easily into sleep, Elin put on her jumpsuit and went outside.

She walked into a gentle darkness, relieved by Earthshine and the soft glow of walking lights on the catwalks above. There was a rustling in the grass, and a badger passed within ten feet of her, intent on its nightly foraging. She wandered.

There was a lot that had to be sorted out. This evening, to begin with, this sudden sexual adventure. It was like nothing she had ever done before, and it forced her to admit to herself that she had been changed—that nothing was ever going to be the same for her again.

She found a secluded spot away from the cluster of huts Tory lived among, and hunkered down against a boulder. She thought back to her accident. And because it was a matter of stored memory, the images were crisp and undamaged.

***

Elin had been the end of her shift on Wheel Laboratory 19 in Henry Ford Orbital Industrial Park when it happened. She was doing development work in semiconductors.

“Theta is coming up to temperature,” her workboard said.

“Check.” Elin put the epsilon lab to bed and switched the controls over. Holding theta up flush against the hub cylinder, she gingerly mixed two molten alloys, one dense, the other light.

Wheel Lab 19 was shaped like a rimless bicycle wheel. Two dozen spindly arms spread out evenly from thick central hub. At various distances along the spokes were twenty-three sliding lab units and a single fixed workspace. The wheel rotated fast enough to give the workspace constant Earth-normal gravity.

When the mix began to cool, Elin dropped the lab a half-kilometer to the end of its arm. Mercury shifted between ballast tanks to keep the rotation constant, and the lab went from fractional Greenwich gravity to a full nine gees.

A dozen different readouts had to be checked. Elin felt a momentary petulant boredom, and then the workboard readjusted her wetware, jacking up her attentiveness so that she ran through the ritual in detached professional fascination.

As the new alloy cooled, its components tried to separate out, creating an even stratification gradient across the sample. Elin waited, unblinking, until all the readouts balanced, then swiftly jabbed a button and quick-froze the wafer. Using waldoes, she lifted the sample from its mold and placed it in a testing device.

“Measurements recorded. Delta is prepped.”

“Check.” Elin ran the lab back to the hub. The workboard adjusted her wetware again, damping down patience and widening scope of attention. Deftly, she chose the same component alloys, varying the mix slightly, and set them to heat. By then the workboard was demanding her attention on chi.

It was all standard industrial wetware so far, no different from that used by thousands of research workers daily. But then the workboard gave the ten-second warning that the interfacing program was about to be shut off. Her fingers danced across the board, damping down reactions, putting the labs to bed. The wetware went quiescent.

With a shiver, Elin was herself again. She grabbed a towel and wiped off her facepaint. Then she leaned back and transluced the wall—might as well put her feet up until her replacement showed. Stretching, she felt the gold wetware wires angling from the back of her skull, lazily put off yanking them.

Was
I really that indolent?
Elin wondered.

Earth bloomed underfoot, crept over her shoulder and disappeared. New Detroit and New Chicago rose from the floor, their mirrors flashing as the twinned residential cylinders slid slowly upward. Bright industrial satellites gleamed to every side: zero-gee factories and fullerspheres, wheels, porcupines, barbells, and cargo grids.

Earth rose again, larger than a dinner plate. Its clouds were a dazzling white on the dayside. Cities gleamed softly in the night.

A load of cargo drifted by. It was a jumble of containers lashed together by nonmagnetic tape and shot into an orbit calculated to avoid the laser cables and power transmission beams that interlaced the Park. A bit of motion caught Elin’s eye, and she swiveled to follow it.

A man was riding the cargo, feet braced against a green carton, hauling on a rope slipped through the lashings. He saw her and waved. She could imagine his grin through the mirrored helmet.

That’s rather dashing,
Elin thought.

Elin snorted, started to look away, and almost missed seeing it happen.

Somehow, in leaning back that fraction more, the cargohopper had put too much strain on the lashings. A faulty rivet popped, and the cargo began to slide. Brightly colored cartons drifted apart, and the man went tumbling end-over-end away.

One end of the lashing was still connected to an anchor carton, and the free end writhed like a wounded snake. A bright bit of metal—the failed rivet—broke free and flew toward the juncture of the wheel lab’s hub and spokes.

Reliving the incident, Elin’s first reaction was to somehow help the man, to suit up and go out with a lifeline before Traffic Control scooped him up.

The old Elin Donnelly snickered. Traffic Control was going to come down on the jerk with both feet, and serve him right too. He was going to have to pay salvage fines not only for the scattered cargo but for himself as well. Which is what you got when you go looking for a free ride.

She was still smiling sardonically when the rivet struck the lab, crashing into a nest of wiring that
should not
have been exposed.

Two wires short-circuited, sending a massive power transient surg-ing up through the workboard. Circuits fused and incited. The boardwent haywire.

And a microjolt of electricity leaped up two gold wires, hopelessly scrambling the wetware through Elin’s skull.

For a moment, everything was blank. Then—“Whooh.” Elin shook her head, reached back, and unplugged the leads. She laughed weakly to herself. Without bothering to opaque the walls, Elin unjugged a vacuum suit and began to climb the workspace arm to the hub. Ballast tanks whispered to her each time her hands touched a rung. Rings of lights paced her up the arm. She floated into the hub, and the touch of weightlessness was as cold as death.

Automatically, Elin set the mass driver for New Detroit. Through the hub aperture, she could see the twin residential cylinders, oblong lozenges, either of which she could hide with one thumb. Something within her shrieked and gibbered with the desire to pluck them from the sky, dash them to the ground.

“Something is very wrong with my mind,” Elin said aloud. She giggled merrily as magnetic forces tugged at the metal hands of her suit, accelerated her to speed, and flung her out into the void.

An hour later the medics recovered her body from New Detroit’s magnetic receiving net. It was curled in on itself, arms wrapped about knees, in a fetal position. When they peeled her out of the suit, Elin was alternating between hysterical gusts of laughter and dark gleeful screams.

***

Morning came, and after a sleepy, romantic breakfast, Tory plugged into his briefcase and went to work. Alone again, Elin wandered off to do some more thinking.

There was no getting around the fact that she was not the metallurgist from Wheel Lab 19, not anymore. That woman was alien to her now. They shared memories, experiences—but how differently they saw things! She no longer understood that woman, could not sympathize with her emotions, indeed found her distasteful.

Elin strolled downslope because that was easiest. She stopped at an administrative cluster and rented a briefcase. Then, at a second-terrace café that was crowded with off-shift biotechs, she rented a table and sat down to try to trace the original owner of her personality.

As Elin had suspected, she found that her new persona was indeed copied from that of a real human being; creating a personality from whole cloth was still beyond the abilities of even the best wetware techs. She was able to determine that it had come from IGF’s inventory, and that duplication of personality was illegal—which presumable meant that the original owner was dead.

But she could not locate the original owner. Selection had been made by computer, and the computer wouldn’t tell. When she tried to find out, it referred her to the Privacy Act of 2037.

“I think I’ve exhausted all of the resources of self-discovery available to me,” she told the waiter when he came to collect his tip. “And I’ve still got half the morning left to kill.”

He glanced at her powder-blue facepaint, and smiled politely.

***

“It’s selective black.”

“Hah?” Elin turned away from the lake, found that an agtech carrying a long-handled net had come up behind her.

“The algae—it absorbs light into the infrared. Makes the lake a great thermal sink.” The woman dipped her net into the water, seined up a netful of dark green scum, and dumped it into a nearby trough. Water drained away through the porous bottom.

“Oh,” Elin stared at the island. There were a few patches of weeds where drifting soil had settled. “It’s funny. I never used to be very touristy. More the contemplative type, sort of homebodyish. Now I’ve got to be
doing
something, you know?”

The agtech dumped another load of algae into the trough. “I couldn’t say.” She tapped her forehead. “It’s the wetware. If you want to talk shop, that’s fine. Otherwise, I can’t.”

“I see.” Elin dabbed a toe in the warm water. “Well—why not? Let’s talk shop.”

Someone was moving at the far edge of the island. Elin craned her neck to see. The agtech went on methodically dipping her net into the lake as God walked into view.

“The lake tempers the climate, see. By day it works by evaporative cooling. Absorbs the heat, loses it to evaporation, radiates it out the dome roof via the condensers.”

Coral was cute as a button.

A bowl of fruit and vegetables had been left near the waterline. She walked to the bowl, considered it. Her orange jumpsuit nicely complemented her
cafe-au-lait
skin. She was so small and delicate that by contrast Elin felt ungainly, an awkward if amiable giant.

“We also use passive heat pumps to move the excess heat down to a liquid storage cavern below the lake.”

Coral stopped, picked up a tomato. Her features were finely chiseled. Her almond eyes should have had snap and fire in them, to judge by the face, but they were remote and unfocused. Even white teeth nipped at the food.

“At night we pump the heat back up, let the lake radiate it out to keep the crater warm.”

On closer examination—Elin had to squint to see so fine—the face was as smooth and lineless as that of an idiot. There was nothing there;no emotion, no purpose, no detectable intellect.

“That’s why the number of waterfalls in operation varies.”

Now Coral sat down on the rocks. Her feet were dirty, but the toenails pink and perfect. She did not move. Elin wanted to shy a rock at her to see if she would react.