The Best of Michael Swanwick (12 page)

What now?
Elin wondered. She had seen the sights, all that Magritte had to offer, and they were all tiresome, disappointing. Even—no, make that
especially—
God. And she still had almost a month to kill.

“Keeping the crater tempered is a regular balancing act,” the agtech said.

“Oh, shut up.” Elin took out her briefcase, and called Father Landis. “I’m bored,” she said, when the hologram had stabilized.

Landis hardly glanced up from her work. “So get a job,” she snapped.

***

Magritte had begun as a mining colony. But the first swatches of lunar soil had hardly been scooped from Mare Imbrium’s surface when the economic winds shifted, and it became more profitable to mine areas rich in specific minerals than to process the undifferentiated mélange soil. The miners had left, and the crater was sold at a loss to a consortium of operations that were legally debarred from locating Earthside.

From the fifteenth terrace Elin stared down at the patchwork clusters of open-air laboratories and offices, some separated by long stretches of undeveloped field, others crammed together in the hope of synergistic effect. Germ warfare corporations mingled with nuclear-waste engineering firms. The Mid-Asian Population Control Project had half a terrace to itself, and it swarmed with guards. There were a few off-Swiss banking operations.

“You realize,” Tory said, “that I’m not going to be at all happy about this development.” He stood, face impassive in red and green, watching a rigger bolt together a cot and wire in the surgical equipment.

“You hired me yourself,” Elin reminded him.

“Yes, but I’m wired into professional mode at the moment.” The rigger packed up his tools, walked off. “Looks like we’re almost ready.”

“Good.” Elin flung herself down on the cot, and lay back, hands folded across her chest. “Hey, I feel like I should be holding a lily!”

“I’m going to hook you into the project intercom so you don’t get too bored between episodes.” The air about her flickered, and a clutch of images overlaid her vision. Ghosts walked through the air, stared at her from deep within the ground. “Now we’ll shut off the external senses.” The world went away, but the illusory people remained, each within a separate hexagonal field of vision. It was like seeing through the eyes of a fly.

There was a sudden overwhelming sense of Tory’s presence, and sourceless voice said, “This will take a minute. Amuse yourself by calling up a few friends.” Then he was gone.

Elin floated, free of body, free of sensation, almost godlike in her detachment. She idly riffled through the images, bypassing Landis, and stopped at a chubby little man drawing a black line across his forehead.
Hello, Hans,
she thought.

He looked up and winked. “How’s it hanging, kid?”

Not so bad. What are you up to?

“My job. I’m the black-box monitor this shift.” He added an orange starburst to the band, surveyed the job critically in a pocket mirror. “I sit here with my finger on the button”—one hand disappeared below his terminal—”and if I get the word, I push. That sets off explosives in the condenser units and blows the dome.
Pfffft.
Out goes the air.”

She considered it: A sudden volcano of oxygen spouting up and across the lunar plains. Human bodies thrown up from the surface, scattering, bursting under explosive decompression.

That’s
grotesque,
Hans.

“Oh, it’s safe. The button doesn’t connect unless I’m wetwired intomy job.”

Even so.

“Just a precaution: a lot of the research that goes on here wouldn’t be allowed without this kind of security. Relax—I haven’t lost a dome yet.”

The intercom cut out, and again Elin felt Tory’s presence, a sensation akin to someone unseen staring over her shoulder. “We’re trying a series of Trojan Horse programs this time—inserting you into the desired mental states instead of making you the states. We’ve encapsulated your surface identity and routed the experimental programs through a secondary level. So with
this
series, rather than identifying with the programs, you’ll perceive them all indirectly.”

Tory, you have got to be the most jargon-ridden human being in existence. How about repeating that in English?

“I’ll show you.”

Suddenly Elin was englobed in a sphere of branching crimson lines, dark and dull, that throbbed slowly. Lacy and organic, it looked the way she imagined the veins in her forehead to be like when she had a headache.

“That was anger,” Tory said. “You’re mind shunted it off into visual imagery because it didn’t identify the anger with itself.”

That’s what you’re going to do then—program me into the God-state so that I can see it but not experience it?

“Ultimately. Though I doubt you’ll be able to come up with pictures. More likely, you’ll feel that you’re in the presence of God.” He withdrew for a moment, leaving her more than alone, almost nonexistent. Then he was back. “We start slowly, though. The first session runs you up to the basic metaprogramming level, integrates all your mental processes, and puts you in low-level control of them. The nontechnical term for this is ‘making the Christ.’ Don’t fool around with anything you see or sense.” His voice faded, she was alone, and then everything changed.

She was in the presence of someone wonderful.

Elin felt that someone near at hand, and struggled to open the eyes she no longer possessed; she had to see. Her existence opened, and people began appearing before her.

“Careful,” Tory said. “You’ve switched on the intercom again.”

I want to see!

“There’s nobody to see. That’s just your own mind. But if you want, you can keep the intercom on.”

Oh.
It was disappointing. She was surrounded by love, by a crazily happy sense that the universe was holy, by wisdom deeper than the world. By all rights, it
had
come from a source greater than herself.

Reason was not strong enough to override emotion. She riffled through the intercom, bringing up image after image and discarding them all, searching. When she had run through the project staff, she began hungrily scanning the crater’s public monitors.

Agtechs in the trellis farms were harvesting strawberries and sweet peas. Elin could taste them on her tongue. Somebody was seining up algae from the inner lake, and she felt the weight of the net in callused hands. Not far from where she lay, a couple was making love in a grove of saplings and she…

Tory, I don’t think I can take this. It’s too intense.

“You’re the one who wanted to be a test pilot.”

Dammit, Tory—!

Donna Landis materialized on the intercom. “She’s right, Shostokovich. You haven’t buffered her enough.”

“It didn’t seem wise to risk dissociative effects by cranking her ego up too high—”

“Who’s paying for all this, hah?”

Tory grumbled something inaudible, and dissolved the world.

Elin floated in blackness, soothing and relaxing. She felt good. She had needed this little vacation from the tensions and pressures of her new personality. Taking the position had been the right thing to do, even if it did momentarily displease Tory.

Tory…She smiled mentally. He was exasperating at times, but still she was coming to rely on having him around. She was beginning to think she was in love with him.

A lesser love, perhaps. Certainly not the love that is the Christ.

Well, maybe so. Still, on a
human
level, Tory filled needs in her she hadn’t known existed. It was too much effort to argue with herself, though. Her thoughts drifted away into a wordless, luxurious reveling in the bodiless state, free from distractions, carefree and disconnected.

Nothing is disconnected. All the universe is a vast
net of intermeshingprograms.
Elin was amused at herself. That had sounded like something Tory would say. She’d have to watch it; she might love the man, but she certainly didn’t want to end up talking like him.

You worry needlessly. The voice of God is subtle, but it is not your own.

Elin started. She searched through her mind for an open intercom channel, didn’t find one.
Hello,
she thought.
Who said that?

The answer came to her not in words, but in a sourceless assertion of identity. It was cool, emotionless, something she could not describe even to herself, but by the same token absolute and undeniable.

It was God.

Then Tory was back and the voice, the presence, was gone.
Tory?
she thought,
I think I just had a
religious experience.

“That’s very common under sensory deprivation—the mind clears out a few old programs. Nothing to worry about. Now relax for a jiff while I plug you back in—how does that feel?”

The Presence was back again, but not nearly so strongly as before; she could resist the urge to chase after it.
That’s fine, Tory, but listen, I really think—

“Let’s leave analysis to those who have been programmed for it,shall we?”

***

The lovers strolled aimlessly through a meadow, the grass brushing up higher than their waists. Biological night was coming; the agtechs flicked the daylight off and on twice in warning.

“It was real, Tory. She talked with me; I’m not making it up.”

Tory ran a hand through his dark curly hair, looking abstracted. “Well. Assuming that my professional opinion was wrong—and I’ll be the first to admit that the program is a bit egocentric—I still don’t think we have to stoop to mysticism for an explanation.”

To the far side of Magritte, a waterfall was abruptly shut off. The stream of water scattered, seeming to dissolve in the air. “I thought you said she was God.”

“I only said that to bait Landis. I don’t mean that she’s literally God, just god
like.
Mentally, she’s a million years more highly developed than we. God is just a convenient metaphor.”

“Um. So what’s your explanation?”

“There’s at least one terminal on the island—the things are everywhere. She probably programmed it to cut into the intercom without the channels seeming to be open.”

“Could she do that?”

“Why not? She has that million-year edge on us—and she used to be a wetware tech; all wetware techs are closet computer hacks.” He did not look at her, had not looked at her for some time.

“Hey.” She reached out to take his hand. “What’s wrong with you tonight?”

“Me?” He did not meet her eyes. “Don’t mind me, I’m just sulking because you took the job. I’ll get over it.”

“What’s wrong with the job?”

“Nothing. It’s just dangerous as sin, is all. Look, I know I can’t talk you out of it, and I know I have no business trying. I’m just being moody.”

She guided his arm around her waist, pressed up against him. “Well, don’t be. It’s nothing you can control—I have to have work to do. My boredom threshold is very low.”

“I know that.” He finally turned to face her, smiled sadly. “I do love you, you know.”

“Well…maybe I love you, too.”

His smile banished all sadness from his face, like a sudden wind that breaks apart the clouds. “Say it again.” His hands reached out to touch her shoulders, her neck, her face. “One more time, with feeling.”

“Will not!” Laughing, she tried to break away from him, but he would not let go, and they fell in a tangle to the ground. “Beast!” They rolled over and over in the grass. “Brute!” She hammered at his chest, tore open his jumpsuit, tried to bite his neck.

Tory looked embarrassed, tried to pull away. “Hey, not out here! Somebody could be watching.”

The agtechs switched off the arc lamps, plunging Magritte into darkness.

Tory reached up to touch Elin’s face. They made love.

***

Physically it was no different from things she had done countless times before with lovers and friends and the occasional stranger. But she had committed herself in a way the old Elin had never dared to, let Tory in past her defenses, laid herself open to pain and hurt, trusting him. He was a part of her now. And everything was transformed, made new and wonderful.

Until they were right at the brink of orgasm, the both of them, and half delirious she could let herself go, murmuring, “I love you, love you, God, I love you, love…” And just as she climaxed, Tory stiffened and arced his head back, and in a voice that was wrenched from the depths of passion, whispered, “Coral…”

***

Elin strode furiously among the huts a terrace down from where she had left Tory asleep in the grass. They had lain together silently after making love, and he had no way of knowing that she was holding him so tightly, burying her head behind his, not out of love or passion, but from outraged anger and fear of what she might do if she had to look at his face.

Some few huts, sheltered from each other by scatterings of maple saplings, were dark. The rest glowed softly from the holotapes within—diffuse, scattered rainbow patterns unreadable outside their fields of focus. Elin halted before one hut, stood indecisively. Finally, because she needed somebody to talk to, she rapped on the lintel.

Father Landis stuck her head out the doorway, blinked sleepily. “Oh, it’s you, Donnelly. What do you want?”

To her absolute horror, Elin broke into tears.

Landis ducked back inside, reemerged zipping up her jumpsuit. She cuddled Elin in her arms, made soothing noises, listened to her story.

“Coral,” Landis said. “Ahhh. Suddenly everything falls into place.”

“Well, I wish you’d tell me, then!” She tried to blink away the angry tears. Her face felt red and raw and ugly; the wetware paint was all smeared.

“Patience, child.” Landis sat down cross-legged beside the hut, patted the ground beside her. “Sit here and pretend that I’m your mommy, and I’ll tell you a story.”

“Hey, I didn’t come here—”

“Who are you to criticize the latest techniques in spiritual nurturing, hey?” Landis chided gently. “Sit.”