“We were hoping you could talk to your CEO on our behalf.”
“Our? Wait a fraction. You want me to become the blackmailer?”
“He’ll listen to you.”
“No he won’t—” The denial died in my throat. Actually, theory-brain
pointed out, he would. Because you can spin a thousand variations on what will happen if the data spills into the medianet.
It’s all about control, I had told Prescott Four, and I had never had it. I had been set up from the beginning.
On the long ride back to ICE, I pulled up the image of Sophie and I (fuzzy)
and the octopi (not as) and left it there in my field of vision. Eventually, she filled the void in my head.
“Hello, Max.”
“Hello, Sophie.” I had been thinking, going back over the course of events
during this crisis, trying to find a hole in theory-brain’s assessment. I hadn’t had any luck. “I’d like you to do something for me.”
“What is it?”
“The last package. The one being delivered in the ICErack. Can you expedite
it to Prescott Four’s office? Can it get there before I do?”
“Yes, Max, I can do that.”
“I thought you might.”
She was quiet for a fraction. “Are you mad at me?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just tired. This whole thing is—I’ll . . . I’ll be glad when it is done.”
“Yes, Max, I will be too.”
I felt the ’tubebus shift. Apogee. Back down to the surface now. Time to
finish this. “Sophie,” I said, and the words were hard to say, but I had to get them out. “Please stop watching me. It’s an invasion of my bubble.”
“I understand, Max. I’m sorry.”
“I am too, Sophie.” I wiped in the image from my iView. “Good-bye, Sophie.”
“Good-bye, Max.”
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MARK TEPPO
It had been the eyes. Hammurabi’s and Sophie’s. Too similar to be a
coincidence. And to be sure, I had queried a reverse lookup to B-R HumResD,
which came back null. They didn’t have a Visual Monitor tagged with “Sophie.”
I was killnining all the files on my office terminal when the door opened and
Yullg squeezed his gigantic bulk into my tiny three square. He glared at me
for a moment, and eventually realized there wasn’t going to be enough room
for him, me, and Prescott Four. He popped his jaw menacingly and stepped
back, allowing the InterCore CEO to enter.
I tapped the button on my desk that engaged the security screens.
“Grimester signed for the package,” he said. “The one you had routed to
my office.”
“Did he open it?” I asked.
“Of course he did.”
I didn’t say anything. Nor did Prescott Four, and we stared at each other for
a few fractions before he shrugged and looked away. “Well, I was due for
another XA anyway. He was starting to get a little annoying with that . . .”
He waved his hand at his face. “That nasally thing he did.”
I kept wiping my files.
He giggled, and then caught himself. “You should have seen it,” he sighed.
“I did.” I tapped my desk’s v-mon to life and showed him the feed. Grimester
opening the large ICErack and discovering the desiccated corpse inside, and
his ensuing panic that resulted in a minor explosion of bone and dust and
other noisome particulates that come off mummified bodies.
“How did it make you feel?” he asked. “Angry?”
“At who?” I replied.
“Me.”
“Why?”
“Because I . . . ” he paused, reluctant to put it into words.
“The Sandeesh family has tagged me as the executor of their . . . vengeance,
I suppose,” I said. “I’m supposed to convince you that the best thing to do is
to provide restitution for what you stole from them. In return for which,
they’ll vanish. They have shipped you every piece of physical evidence they
ever had. What you do with it is your business.”
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“What about you, Max?”
“I don’t know. I’ll EOE when we’re done here. That’ll make things easier—”
“Max,” he interrupted. “What am I supposed to give you?”
He seemed just as confused as I was about my role. What did I want? I
certainly couldn’t keep working here, not with the knowledge that I had. I
had had to stop theory-brain from listing the ways in which I could be EOLed
in industrial accidents.
I sat back in my chair. It was a hard and uncomfortable surface, one I had
been molding my body to for a long time. Too long, in fact, but what else
could I have done? Entropy was easy.
“I want to be needed, I think.” I glanced around my tiny—and despairingly
empty—office. “ICE is an efficient machine. Like everything else. No one
needs a theorist to think ‘what if?’ any more.”
He gave me a fraction to add to that, and when I didn’t, he nodded. “I’ll have
FinD retro-state you to Director, and then stamp you out with a full 590(t).”
Theory-brain made a suggestion, and I concurred. I raised an eyebrow to
Prescott Four, and he held up his hands. “Plus vestments.”
“I think that’ll help me find a way to be useful somewhere else, sir.”
He started to offer his hand, and then withdrew it, realizing he didn’t really
want to shake this deal.
Nor did I. We’d let the rest of the machine take care of it.
He left without another word, and I caught sight of a dark cloud of
disappointment on Yullg’s face as he was called away by Prescott Four.
And just like that, it was over.
I hadn’t had to tell Prescott Four that I knew iReset could do a sex change;
that I knew whose DNA tags would come up for the mummified body that
had exploded all over his XA’s office; and I didn’t have to tell him that I knew his birth mother had called him “Giselle.”
Nor did I tell him that Hammurabi and Sophie were his grandchildren.
That was their secret to keep.
Regardless of what her tattoo said.
When I got home, there was a package waiting. Inside was a tiny hypercube
key and an Instaprint of a woman’s body. A close-up of her naked torso,
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MARK TEPPO
draped with octopi tentacles. Scrawled on her belly, above her tattoo, was
the phrase “I miss you.”
The hypercube key was coded for domicile access. She had given me root
privileges.
It was, in the end, all I really wanted.
258
SOLDIER, SAILOR
By Lewis Shiner
Stepping out of the airlock behind Reese, Kane was amazed by the weight &
wetness of the air. He could make out the odors of cut grass, honeysuckle & ivy.
Martian night was falling outside the dome & he sensed clouds forming above him.
Rain on Mars. Evenly spaced houses surrounded him, covered with ivy & separated by rows of elephant ears & ferns. The intricacy of the ecological planning startled him; a bee floated over his head & somewhere a mockingbird whistled.
The sight of the colonists sitting on their porches in the sunset filled him
with a mixture of nostalgia & surrealist horror. They smiled & nodded to Kane as if it had been days instead of years since they’d seen a stranger, as if the space program still existed & Reese was once more in uniform.
Reading Ouspensky, he had found the first clue to the strange visions that
spun around the lip of his consciousness. “Every separate human life is a
moment in the life of some great being which lives in us.” But when he tried for a more concrete image than ships & shadowy figures rising from the
ground, it melted away. From Campbell Kane learned of the Pattern of the
Hero, the inexorable circle, the path of exile & return. For an instant the memories—if that was what they were—clarified. Kane saw that he must
take it all personally. Then it was gone again.
Eventually Curtis asked how things were on Earth & Reese framed a careful
reply. Kane paid little attention to the measured, cautious description of the
riots, the famines, the plagues. Instead he examined Curtis, the governor of
the colony, with care. The man was soft, pallid, mannered in his speech.
Kane asked simple questions—limits to the population, energy sources,
chains of command. He found Curtis’s answers evasive, dismissive. Kane felt
the vast gulf between himself & the Earth as an ache inside him.
• • •
LEWIS SHINER
Their first morning on Mars, Reese had taken him to the ruins of the native
city. Kane was fascinated by the enigma of the Martian holocaust—the
artifacts of intelligence assimilated into the processes of nature.
“Why no bodies?” Kane asked, scuffing through the rings of ash, sand &
boiled rock. “They should have mummified when the water went.”
Reese shrugged, the motion barely discernible through his bulky suit.
Kane wandered off, trying to picture the city before the disaster. Some of
the walls were almost intact, blistered & pitted, but recognizable, while on all sides there was only rubble. The stone, obviously artificial, was
indistinguishable from the surrounding rocks. It formed an architecture of
intersecting lines, with the Druidic power of Stonehenge.
At dinner he sat across from Curtis’s wife, Molly. She was tall, dark, full
breasted, with a quality of listless abstraction that Kane found compelling.
He desired her in a dark, impersonal way that was nonetheless intense. As for
Curtis, Kane found him increasingly officious, dangerously authoritative. He
identified Curtis with his uncle; at the thought, the taste of his food turned
sour. His mood turned chaotic & violent & he held his fists under the table until the worst of it passed.
“The panel,” his uncle said, “is circular, about 35 cm in diameter, studded at
irregular but frequent intervals with PROMs.” The fluorescent light was
harsh & Kane’s attention wandered toward the smog & riot-torn streets
outside the window. “At least three of these chips are mutants, and are
responsible for the power output curves on this chart.”
Kane glanced at the chart & away again, despising his uncle, the broad
waxed desk, his own poverty & failure. His uncle’s life depended on his
staying in business; if he failed, his employees would tear him to pieces.
“We have to get those chips into the lab,” his uncle said, “or we’ll never
know why they perform the way they do.”
“You say this panel is dangerous.”
“In the hands of the colonists, yes. It’s been ten years since the space
program was terminated. They undoubtedly need resources from Earth, if
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they’re even alive at all. How do they feel about Earth after we cut them off?
Can we even hope to understand them? A ship powered by that panel is a
weapon pointed at the Earth.”
The walls of the office were lined with renderings of yet more offices. Kane
sat & allowed himself to be manipulated. Something had gone out of him
during his years of student exile. He no longer had the will to resist.
On their second trip to the ruins, Reese took Kane into the central
underground complex. The entrance was small, a vivid black hole in the
orange glow of the desert. Kane lowered himself after Reese & found himself on a steeply descending ramp. As his eyes adjusted to their flashlights he
made out the circular pit to his left. It seemed to have no bottom. The ramp
curved around it & he followed, no more than a spectator, just as he had
been in grade school, watching on TV as Reese planted the US flag on these
same ruins & turned to wave to the cameras.
Now Reese turned off the ramp & moved between tilted slabs of rock to an
inner chamber. Reese’s hand moved & a door swung open from the wall.
Kane followed him inside. The door closed behind them & Kane heard the
unmistakable hiss of pressurized air. Inside his helmet a light changed from
red to green. Reese took off his helmet & opened an inner door. Light flowed from the walls themselves & Kane turned off his flash.
The walls were made of the same artificial stone as the ruins above,
lacking all ornament. Walking into the room, he loosened his helmet & set
it on the floor. The chill air stung his cheeks & made him wince. Here there was finally decoration, a low relief that reminded Kane of a printed circuit
board. It ran from floor to ceiling with circular protrusions at key points,
but no visible dials or meters. He understood the chauvinism of such an
expectation. At the far end of the room, where Reese stood, the outlines of
a door were etched into solid rock. No handle or indentation marred its
surface. Kane pressed his hand to it. He sensed its importance, connected
it instinctively to the disappearance of the Martians, but could not guess its
function. It did not respond to his touch. He turned to look at Reese.
“What does it mean?”
Reese put his helmet back on & started for the door.
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LEWIS SHINER
• • •
Like a fragment of melody on a tape loop: clear, high voices in a minor key,
without a message, offering only coloration, a distortion in his ability to see the world. Or like a flickering at the edges of his vision that seemed to be the curves & angles of fourth-dimensional space. Behind it a sense of alien
personality, lurking. The ghosts of the Martian builders?
Kane wandered barefoot through the city under the dome. It was a quiet
suburb painted by Magritte, too uniform, too clearly defined, too obviously
existing in a vacuum. The grass under his feet was a rich green, round-bladed
& moist. The houses were like those in the poverty-level neighborhoods
where Kane had grown up, after his father died—vinyl siding, short porches,
bushes & trees growing unhindered against the walls.
At the edge of the dome he watched distorted images of dust storms blow
past the double wall of yellowing plastic. High C0 levels & the peak heat of 2
afternoon made him drowsy & short of breath. Reese & Curtis would be at the ruins all day; he had time for an hour or two of sleep.
Retracing his steps, he saw Curtis’s wife, Molly, on the porch of their
bungalow.
A chill of prescience went through him. The Presence in his mind sang to
him as he climbed the single step & stood in front of her. She was solid,
indifferent, languidly sensual. Kane’s hands were clenched again.
“Sit down,” she said, making it a polite question. Kane sat facing her. He
searched her face for information, admiring its clean, symmetrical weight.<
br />
They had reached the neutrality of afternoon. He could not avoid looking at
her breasts, at the wide brown nipples visible through her T-shirt.
“You’d like a drink,” she said, standing. Kane heard the power of command
she chose not to use. He felt her matriarchal strength, her link with the rich, darkly scented vegetation that surrounded them. He followed her into the
gloom of a curtained kitchen, hearing birds cry outside in an eternal,
abstracted spring. He stopped Molly at the refrigerator with a light touch on
the arm. As she turned to him her eyes lost their focus & became distant,
passive. His hands went to her breasts, thumbs touching her nipples as she
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gripped his elbows. She led him into her bedroom, a dim, fragrant place more
personal, more private than her body. Standing across the bed from him she
pulled her clothes off as he watched. The aroma of her body drifted to him,
heavy, sweet, blatantly sexual. Kane shut his eyes, unwilling for a moment to
continue with it: his internal struggles, his helplessness before his own sexual urgings, the climax inevitably empty compared to the ritual preceding it. As
their bodies merged, Molly astride him, her hands on his wrists, Kane felt the
violence rise within him. With effort he delayed his ejaculation until Molly
had satisfied herself; by that time he had become detached from his own
passion. He spasmed quickly & they lay together in the heat of the drowning afternoon.
Kane had been amazed by Reese’s easy acceptance of his uncle’s offer. Clearly
Reese had ulterior motives; Kane had no desire to learn them. From this
understanding came a kind of mutual respect, or at least silence. Reese did
not ask Kane to justify his part in the scenario, a scenario that seemed to
point to both their deaths.
Reese claimed to have translated the Martian engravings during the ten
years he’d spent on Earth, an involuntary furlough caused by the failure of
the space program. Kane eventually began to believe the translations were
genuine, but knew Reese was holding something back.
Reese assembled the entire population of the colony in their conference room.
Kane sat on the back row with a piece of string, idly weaving cat’s cradles.
“Today,” Reese said, “I took the preliminary dictionary to the ruins, with
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