To Hold Infinity (2 page)

Dark clouds, tinged with eerie yellow, rolled over Hokkaido's majestic peaks. The island sternly frowned upon the sombre, swelling Pacific waves. As salt spray spattered Yoshiko's face, her fingers tightened on the cold safety rail.

Ken's grave. She hoped the children—no, Akira was thirty-five, his wife the same—would they give Ken's grave the care it needed, while she was gone?

Oh, Ken.

She should have planted that micro-maple.

Wind buffeted her small body and she stepped unsteadily backwards, the wet deck slippery beneath her feet. Though she looked like a forty-year-old athlete—her age held at bay by
bushido
discipline and femtocyte telomere-repair—inside, her full sixty years lay heavily upon her.

“Mother?” Akira's voice was almost lost upon the wind.

He stood with Kumiko, his wife, dutifully behind the fluorescent orange holo-ribbon which demarcated the embarkation strip. Kumiko's porcelain-pale face seemed almost to float in the eldritch prestorm light.

At their feet, a harnessed lynxette crouched, tufted ears laid flat.

The other passengers, some thirty people, were shuffling across the metal deck towards the boarding-ramp. Above them, the silver-white orbital shuttle hovered, poised like a hawk above the restless waves.

“He didn't reply,” said Yoshiko, “to my last h-mail.”

“He'll be there. With acceptance tests and only one small gateway, the infoflow to Fulgor is massive right now. Personal h-mail has no chance.”

Full connection of Fulgor's Skein to EveryWare—the interwoven NetEnvs of fifty worlds, including Earth—was imminent. In the skewed topology of commerce, Skein was fast becoming civilization's heart. It was technically superior, the heart of Fulgor's previously isolationist economy. Akira had explained all this.

“If you say so.” Yoshiko's voice was soft.

Tetsuo. If you wanted to, you would surely have found a way.

The boarding chime sounded, oddly flat.

Yoshiko picked up her narrow carry-case from the deck. It was two and a half metres long, the one item she had not entrusted to a smartcart.

Akira and Kumiko bowed, the precision of that gesture a token of their love.

Yoshiko made her way to the other passengers.

Most were middle-aged Terrans, finely dressed in comparison to Yoshiko's plain jumpsuit. A few children. Among the crowd, a trio of tall, pale people—the tallest humans Yoshiko had ever seen—stood out.

Silver light glittered from the fine headgear twisted through their hair.

Luculenti.

She wondered what they had been doing on Earth.

As she watched them—they appeared to be conversing without words, changing expressions flickering across their features—she wondered at their height and slender strength. Natural genetic drift, under offworld conditions?

Maybe. But Yoshiko's professional instinct was aroused. She suspected semilegal morphing femtocytes. Fulgor had only been settled for two centuries.

She drifted closer.

The Luculenta woman held her head close to her male companion. Yoshiko looked at her sculpted coiffure, interwoven with silver fibres. Did the headgear ever get caught in things? Did it hurt?

“—children's nexus ware.” The Luculentus man had switched to speech. “A stability other cultures lack, don't you think?”

His patrician accent stiffened Yoshiko's spine.

“Awful conditions,” the man added, looking around. “Local colour, I suppose.”

The third of the Luculenti, a crimson-haired teenage girl, looked embarrassed.

“Temporary facilities, I believe,” said the Luculenta woman soothingly.

Yoshiko smiled inwardly. Perhaps, truly, the outdoor platform and the long wait were not what a Luculentus was used to.

Everyone shuffled closer to the ramp. A child's laughter rang out.

Above, the sky was darkening quickly.

Suddenly, white and purple lightning spat, and the shuttle's wings flashed white. Torrential rain began to fall in silver sheets, crashing upon the metal deck.

There was a visceral crash of thunder.

Yoshiko took her place on the boarding-ramp's moving strip. She looked back through the near-metallic haze at Akira's forlorn figure. Kumiko must have taken the lynxette below.

The ramp lurched, and stopped.

Yoshiko grabbed for the rail but a strong young hand grasped her arm, steadying her. The Luculenta girl, crimson hair turned purple by the rain and plastered against her headgear.

“It's kind of fun, isn't it?” The girl shouted above the torrent's roar. “The storm, I mean.”

Yoshiko looked around at the other passengers. Their shoulders were hunched, their faces pinched and miserable. The rain was implacable.

Yoshiko laughed.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is.”

Until this moment, she had moved in a daze, coerced by friends and family to take this trip. They were worried, she knew, about the black depression hanging over her since Ken's death. But suddenly, right now, she saw that this journey was right. Something she had to do.

Buffeted by wind and rain, she walked up the stalled ramp with the Luculenta girl at her side.

At the hatchway, where a steward was ushering people in, she looked back. Akira was gone, and she felt the old darkness pressing at her again.

The hardwood sheath at her waist, tucked inside her jumpsuit, dug into her like guilt. The tanto dagger was legal. It was also the samurai woman's traditional suicide weapon.

No one bowed farewell to her.

Storm-rain fell, sweeping chaos across the deck, as pitiless and inevitable as death.

 

In the darkness, twigs snagged his headgear, and leaves scrunched under foot. His skin crawled. He pictured wriggling insectoids, dropping from the night-bound branches.

Forest. Wilderness.

Rafael Garcia de la Vega despised it.

He blinked his smartfilmed eyes twice, stepping up the gain. The moonlight scarcely penetrated the shadows. He double-blinked again, to extend the frequency range.

Tiny heat-sparks of life, everywhere. Rafael shuddered.

If Marianan were alive he could have done this remotely, through Skein—though he had not risked such a thing before.

But she was dead. Offline. If he wanted her, he had to have her physical remains.

His ankles ached.

Rustling sounds. Ignore.

He pushed through undergrowth, pulled aside a fernlike frond.

Sloping below, a long meadow, pale silver in the moonlight. Beyond, a crystal villa, its peach and orange radiance spilling out into the night. Faint strains of swirling music.

By the villa, a tower pointed like a bony finger towards the alpha moon.

Hidden by the hated forest, he crouched, afraid to leave its cover.

Marianan.

Down there, she waited for him. The sweet decaying fragments of her once-ripe soul.

Laughter rose inside him. What good was the game, without attendant risk?

He stepped out into the open.

Slowly, heart thumping, he moved down the grassy slope. Stars wavered and broke apart above him, their light scattered by his drifting smartatom film, his protection from SatScan surveillance.

Drenched with chill sweat, he stepped over a low stone wall, and crouched beneath ornate topiary.

Cut-off point.

He knelt, scanning with enhanced vision, slipping into control interface with the smartatom lattice hovering above him.

No scan-systems flared. No EM pulses tore his smartatoms apart.

The Ortegas were fools. This far from a city, and no security. Hardly a worthy challenge.

He slipped past a raven-shaped hedge. A woman's laughter rang out as he crossed a patio through a pool of light. He could hear men's voices, the clink of glasses.

Enjoy the party.

Something—

He stepped into darkness and froze.

Slowly, he raised his arm, activating the silver bracelet round his wrist.

A small feline shadow slipped across the lawn. A pet. A parasite. Rafael aimed the bracelet—then lowered it.

It wasn't worth spoiling this moment of communion.

A white marble archway led to the family shrines. They beckoned him, as surely as Marianan's pale flawless skin had attracted him in life.

He remembered: bare white shoulders, copper hair, amethyst-beaded headpiece, copper eyes. He had met her just once, at the Perigee Fair, and known immediately that she must be his.

But she had died, in a tragic flyer accident. No one had invited Rafael to the funeral.

No matter. She waited for him, still.

He moved, almost gliding, between two vast and overdecorated family mausoleums. Past a tasteless tomb, its passé holo hypersphere shining brightly.

Marianan's grave, he noted with relief, was simple and classical. A herb-scented candle—real, not holo—flickered before the shrine. Reflected flame danced upon the small crystal dome.

Rafael knelt on the damp-smelling soil. He lifted the dome, and reverently set it aside.

The cylinder, now revealed, was icy silver, trapped by moonlight and candlelight. Marianan's plexcore, offline.

The dead Luculenta's shattered soul awaited him.

Slowly, exquisitely slowly, he dug his fingers into the soil, and felt for the button's indentation like a lover's secret core.

He pressed inwards.

Inside the cylinder, unfocussed thoughts and memories burgeoned as the plexcore powered up. Though her fragile organic brain was decomposing with the rest of her bloated corpse, buried in the soil below, the torn half of Marianan's mind which lay not in organic substrates would soon be his.

Devoid of senses, remembering death, trapped within the activating plexcore, the half-sentient mind-fragments must be tearing themselves apart in pain and confusion.

Don't worry, my sweet. Release is at hand.

Rafael closed his eyes.

 

{{{(HeaderBegin: Module = Node 12A3.33Q8: Type = QuaternaryHyperCode: Axes = 256

Concurrent_Execute

     ThreadOne: .linkfile = Infiltrate.Alpha

     ThreadTwo: .linkfile = Infiltrate.Beta

     ThreadThree: linkfile = CodeSmash

     ThreadFour: .linkfile = SubvertArray

     ThreadFive: .linkfile = MindWolf

End _Concurrent_Execute}}}

 

Shuddering, he loosed his vampire code.

Burning claws raked his brain, scraped his spine, hooked into his nerves and slowly drew them apart. He gasped and shivered at the cold wash of plexcore ware flooding into his cache, filling his torsoimplants.

Too much. Keep control.

He had to contain the torn remnants of Marianan's mind, hold back from integration, until he was safely home.

“Tarfus?”

A deep shudder passed through Rafael.

“Come on, boy. Let's get you in for supper.”

Control. Control, damn it.

The woman's voice was uncultured. Not Luculenta.

Calling the damned feline, as though it couldn't hunt smaller vermin by itself.

Rafael straightened up, forced a straight face despite the dark hunger roiling his guts, and stepped out into the light cast by a large window.

“Oh!” The serving-maid jumped.

The gold and purple feline in her arms spat, baring teeth.

“I beg your pardon,” said Rafael, turning on his most disarming smile. “I didn't mean to startle you. I was just out for some fresh air.”

“That's all right, sir,” said the Fulgida maid, bobbing a short curtsy.

“I'm sorry.” Rafael stepped aside, and gestured for her to pass.

Fulgida, not Luculenta. Without true Skein access, and the means to identify him.

As he waved the woman by, he aimed his bracelet, with its load of soluble toxic darts, at her throat.

The feline hissed.

“Be nice, Tarfus.”

The maid's eyes were troubled.

“He's beautiful,” said Rafael. “Gorgeous coat. And those eyes.”

The maid blushed slightly.

She cradled the feline more tightly, and carried him into the villa.

“Good night,” called Rafael softly, and lowered his arm, deactivating the bracelet.

His heart was pounding. Chaos was mounting, pulsing and burning, inside his implanted cache.

Control.

Trembling, holding his plundered soul-fragments tightly within himself, Rafael retraced his steps, past shrines and mausoleums, out into the dark and pregnant night.

Night's dark vault, a soft grey arch enclosing it: pale grey carpet arcing upwards to either side, narrowing to a ribbon's width above. A kilometre-wide window onto unwinking stars, the flat end of a great cylinder spinning in the void.

Ardua Station.

High above Yoshiko, the inner face was stippled with axial entrances, with radial elevators and crawling smartcarts. Access ways, progressively more utilitarian the closer they were to the zero-g spin axis, led to the busy interior.

Down here at the rim was tourist country. Exclusive boutiques beckoned quietly, offering jewellery and offworld exotica. Farther inside, garish holos advertised bars and clubs.

“Magnificent, isn't it?” the Luculenta girl said, gazing outwards.

“Yes,” said Yoshiko, turning back. Stars and darkness wheeled majestically. “We're lucky.”

To be here. To be alive at all, born of stardust, partaking briefly in the cosmic dream.

“We're just the tiniest blips in time,” the girl muttered. “Transient dissipative structures.”

Yoshiko looked at her, surprised.

“I'm sorry.” The girl laughed. “I shouldn't be morbid.”

No
, thought Yoshiko.
That's the prerogative of those of us who are old.

A memory flash: Tetsuo's halting h-mail, face oddly blank, apologizing for not attending his father's funeral. Business, crucial negotiations. Her own numb disbelief.

Nearly a year ago.

“—have introduced myself earlier.”

“I'm sorry?” Yoshiko jerked herself back to the present.

“Vin,” said the Luculenta girl. “Actually, it's Lavinia. Wretched, don't you think? My friends call me Vin.”

“Sunadomari Yoshiko.”

“Mrs. Sunadomari—”

“Please. Just Yoshiko.”

Vin smiled brightly. “Thank you. Fancy a drink?”

“Yes, but—”

A smartcart rolled up, though Yoshiko hadn't seen Vin gesture for one. In Anglic and Nihongo, it offered refreshments, and Yoshiko chose Terran orange juice.

“You're from Nihonjin Columbia?”

“Yes. Vancouver, originally. Kanazawa prefecture. Then I studied in Quebec.” Yoshiko sighed. “But I've lived in Okinawa now for, oh, many years.”

Because it was your home, Ken, and I would have followed you anywhere.

“We saw a little of FedCan.” Vin sipped from her glass. “Only a couple of days.”

Yoshiko looked at her. “How many Terran languages do you know? Well enough to distinguish regional accents, that is?”

“All of them.”

“I'm sorry?”

Vin ducked her head modestly. “It didn't take me long to pick them up.”

“Good grief.” Yoshiko set her glass down on a safety rail. “Are they all as bright as you, on Fulgor?”

“I guess so. The Luculenti, anyway.”

“I see. And how many Fulgidi are Luculenti?”

“Point oh five percent of the population. Not many.”

Yoshiko wondered how many Luculenti Tetsuo knew.

“My elder son lives on Fulgor,” she said. “My younger son, on Earth, is paying for this trip.”

“Kind of him.”

Very kind, yes. But Yoshiko had seen the fear in Akira's eyes: the fear that, having seen Tetsuo one last time, Yoshiko would be ready for death herself.

Ah, my son. You know me too well.

“I've heard,” said Yoshiko, focussing on the conversation for the girl's sake, “that Fulgor is a paradise.”

“You need to visit other cultures, before you appreciate your own,” said Vin, colour rising slightly in her cheeks.

They both remembered the remarks her father—if he was her father—had made back on Earth.

“In fact,” Vin continued, “there's been a spate of violent deaths, suicides and maybe even murder, just recently, in the city nearest our house.”

“Bad things happen everywhere, I guess.”

“Not on the Fulgor I grew up on, when I was young.”

Yoshiko looked at Vin's grave teenage face, maybe fifteen Terran years old.

Vin said, “We mature more quickly than Earthers.”

Were my thoughts that obvious?
wondered Yoshiko.

“So, is your son in business?”

“Mu-space comms,” said Yoshiko. “Tech consultant.”

“Oh, that's an active field right now. He should be OK.”

Something in her tone made Yoshiko ask, “Is there some reason his work shouldn't be secure?”

Vin looked a little uncomfortable. “Fulgor can be a rough place to do business. Speaking of which—”

She held up a hand, as though asking for silence. A frown etched itself upon her young features, then cleared.

“Sorry,” she said. “We have to take our comms opportunities when we get them. One of my corporations was in trouble, and I had to bail it out. Had to offload one of my smaller companies to do it, though.”

“Oh,” said Yoshiko, feeling stupid.

“Don't worry.” Vin smiled brightly. “I'm sure your son is doing fine.”

“I hope so.”

“Er—Will you excuse me? I need to get back to my folks.”

“Of course. Thanks for your company.”

“See you later.”

Vin walked into the nearest corridor. Yoshiko watched her go, then turned back to the great view window. The stars' motion was hypnotic, but—

Yoshiko did the calculation in her head. Ardua Station must be spinning fast, a revolution every forty-five seconds to produce one g at the outer hull. The night view was a corrected image, slowed down for the tourists.

Shaking her head, she turned away from the beautiful illusion, to the blatantly commercial façade at the station's core.

 

Rafael was all of them, simultaneously.

He felt the soaring pulse in Lydia's body as she/he leaped high—

Anya's pain, the blistered foot, the discipline which produced a perfect arabesque—

Every member of the chorus, movement flowing in perfect synchrony—

And, transcendent, the pattern of his own choreography—

With him, in Skein, he felt the dancers' soul-mothers, their appreciation and delight. Realtime holocams reproduced the crystal sphere in which the girls were dancing, a sphere rising through a clear green sea shot through with bright bacterial streamers.

Hard to hide his inner triumph, his awesome self-control. The intimate presence of Luculentae ladies was a vast temptation. He could plunder their minds and souls, every one of them, here and now.

Finale.

The crystal sphere broke the surface and split apart, opening like a flower, and Lydia sailed high above the kneeling chorus as triumphant horns heralded her leap into freedom.

…And Rafael blinked, dropping out of Skein, and his flyer's lounge—crystal chandeliers, luxuriant chaises longues—crowded into his attention.

There was a patter of applause as the Luculentae ladies, leaving Skein, rose to their feet in appreciation.

“Bravo, Rafael.”

“Exquisite,
par excellence
.”

Rafael rose from his couch and bowed. “You do me too much honour. Your soul-daughters performed magnificently.”

“Rafael?”

“Yes?”

He received a ; unmistakably feminine:

 

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“Ah, Rebecca.”

“You were wonderful.”

He replied with:

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“True beauty,” he said, “is gracious with pale imitation.”

“Sir.” Rebecca curtsied, a hint of mockery in the gesture.

Some of the other Luculentae laughed.

Between Rafael and Rebecca a {public vision} appeared, visible to all:

 

{{Entwined hearts.}}

{{A balladeer crooning a lovers' song.}}

{{Angry hands loading an antique shotgun.}}

{{A red-faced Luculentus: a broad caricature of Rebecca's husband.}}

 

The image broke up like smoke and drifted into nothingness.

“Oh, no. Don't tell him.” Rafael bowed to the Luculenta who had sent the {public vision}. Her name was Xanthia Delaggropos, a newcomer to this circle, and he liked her style. “I'll behave, I promise.”

Xanthia nodded, a mysterious smile on her olive-skinned face, and turned to a smartcart for a drink, indicating her disinterest in continuing the game.

Rafael started to compose a flirtatious , then stopped. A singer and surgeon-programmer by primary professions, Xanthia had that rare extra quality—

Hunger was rising inside him.

He must be mad. Marianan's soul was frozen in his cache, awaiting release: with drugs and meditation he had fought down the urge to merge with her last night.

“If you'll excuse me.” He cleared his throat. “We don't want your soul-daughters to drift away or drown.”

 

{{Turquoise sea. A pale hand flailing desperately, then sinking out of sight.}}

{{Salty tang. Empty ocean waves.}}

 

“Let's hope not, Voretta,” he said, recognizing her style, and smiled with apparent artlessness. He raised his hand in the privacy gesture, but received an interruption.

 

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“My pleasure,” he said, though it might be considered a minor faux pas to respond verbally to a . His control was slipping, and that was partly Xanthia's doing, sitting there so calm and self-assured—

He forced his mind into low-level command interface.

 

{{{HeaderBegin: Module = Node12998.JH17: Type = Trinary-Hyper-Code: Axes = 64

Concurrent_Execute

     ThreadOne: .linkfile = Fusion-ReacterOne

     ThreadTwo: .linkfile =WingConfigure

     ThreadThree: .linkfile = Process-Flight

End_Concurrent_Execute}}}

 

He reconfigured his delta wings, biting atmosphere, revelling in the airflow across his flight surfaces. The fusion reactor was his beating heart, pumping joyous power.

Silver-capped waves flew past beneath him.

Surface.

The water was an icy shock to his fuselage thermal sensors. He spread his wings, exhaling to decelerate, reversing thrust.

 

{{STATUS: (12.45, 44.88, 1, 3.7892, 5.73382, 2.300, 8.999, 0.001)}}

 

Bow wave decreasing. Velocity rapidly falling to zero.

Then he was at rest on the ocean, bobbing gently, his flyer's status a point in eight-dimensional phase space, nicely within the system-ok region.

 

{{{HeaderBegin: Module = Node00076.AA10: Type = Trinary-HyperCode: Axes = 0

Concurrent_Execute

     ThreadOne: .disengage

     ThreadTwo: .disengage

     ThreadThree: .disengage

End_Concurrent_Execute}}}

 

As Rafael's link with the exterior holocams faded, he caught a dreamlike image of nubile girls stepping gingerly from the opened crystal segments onto his smartraft, or diving adventurously into the ocean and striking out with athletic strokes towards the flyer.

He returned his attention to the flyer's lounge.

Voretta was watching him with expectant eyes.

 

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A smile was her only reply. It was enough.