Evolution's Darling

by Scott Westerfeld

  “Thorough, aren’t you,” she muttered. He shrugged his stony shoulders, but didn’t offer to remove the strands. She turned her head a little, and found that they moved easily with her; in moments, they had matched her body temperature, and all but disappeared from her awareness, no more tactile than a pattern of light and shadow reaching the skin through the leaves of a tree.

  He reached for the untouched cutlery next to his plate, carefully acquired a forkful of the pie. His clumsiness made him momentarily childlike: a great statue recently woken and struggling with everyday actions, a strange directness in his speech and wants. His muscles sparkled a little as he moved: a heroic affectation that brought another smile to her face. He was suited for great battles and coronations; not eating pie.

  He leaned forward to offer her the fork and its steaming cargo. She opened her mouth …

  … to an explosion. The burning mouthful mercilessly seared her tongue and palate, poured bright veins of boiling sugars down the back of her throat. Its pungent fumes rilled her sinuses as she fought for breath: the rich, choking scents of rotten apples and smoked meat, of saffron gasses bursting from an opened oven. As she leaned back, finally swallowing, the first hot poker of pain was replaced with the steady burn of habenaras chiles, hastily bitten cloves, citrus acid cruelly flaying the raw flesh of her mouth.

  “You bastard!” she said when she could talk again. Tears streamed from her eyes. His prismed face smiled at her.

  “Ingestion has its disadvantages, I see.”

  “Fuck you,” she responded, blowing her nose into her silk napkin. She tried to muster more wrath, but was too surprised by the internal changes the bite had wrought. Her head felt magically clear, her senses more sharply focused than they had been since boarding the cosseting womb of the Queen Favor.

  “Do humans actually eat that?” she asked.

  “A small minority of an obscure tribe on the Vaxus colony. Admittedly, the menu recommends it only for artificials.”

  She laughed a throaty laugh, which rippled with fire-loosened phlegm in her chest. “Hence your interest in having me eat some.”

  “My interest,” he confirmed, “and my extreme pleasure.”

  She felt a sudden absence, a subtle psychic pressure gone missing. He had removed his sensory strands from her face, arms, throat. Mira coughed a few times into a fist.

  “But you haven’t turned me against swallowing, I assure you,” she said. “In some strange way, that was very enjoyable.”

  “Oh, I know it was,” he agreed. “My intimate connection allowed me to witness that first hand. Thank you for the ride.”

  Her food arrived just then. She inspected its careful proportions, its measured ribbons of sauces, garnishes of herbs. “Now this” she muttered, “is just so much horseshit.”

  Darling looked quizzical at the term. Referring to the Earth-specific species in Diplomatique had required a hasty loan-word. She translated loosely: “I’m not hungry.” Pushed the plate away.

  “I admire humans, really, for their intense reactions. Their capacity for intoxication, for imbalance.”

  She knuckled sweat and tears from her cheeks. “For sheer pain?”

  There was a pause in his response, as if something had briefly broken inside. Then his face animated again. “Physical pain, at least.”

  She narrowed her eyes, a Diplomatique gesture to request elaboration.

  “Thank you for letting me make use of your sensory abilities, Mira Santiarre Hidalgo. Perhaps you can make use of mine.”

  He raised one flickering arm toward the small stage in one corner of the restaurant. Two guitarists were preparing to play. They shifted like cats finding comfort in their seats, hunched to hear the soft glissandi of their tuning, indulged in ritual stretches of neck and hands.

  Mira looked questioningly at Darling. What would his next ambush be?

  A signal leapt between the guitarists’ eyes, and they began to play.

  Two holographic cylinders suddenly materialized on either side of the stage. The towering columns were banded at equal intervals, the bands tinted in repeating spectra of twelve colors. Sparks traveled the cylinders, igniting the bands in glittering sequences like trails of gunpowder set alight. She blinked and looked at Darling; his eyes glinted with the ruby of eyescreen lasers. He was making the cylinders appear, mapping them directly onto her visual field. She looked back at the stage.

  As the piece slowed for a momentary cadence, she realized that the flickering sparks were notes, travelling the columnar staves from low to high. The twelve-parted rainbow spectra were octaves. Shared hues revealed harmonic consonance: a tonic, perfect fifth, and fourth all related shades of blue and green; the minor second, tritone, and minor sixth offset in clashing red-yellows.

  Perfect fifth? Minor sixth? Mira realized that Darling was using direct interface, supplying her mind with the requisite music theory to understand the technical aspects of his display. An amusing trick. With pedagogical software like that, he must be a teacher. But the theory paled compared to the dance of light on the two columns. One guitarist strummed brisk chords, sending showers of sparks up his associated cylinder. On the other guitar, the melody rambled up and down, massaging the column with its scurrying, sparkling avatar. As the tempo increased, the correspondence of single notes to individual flashes became harder to follow, but her mind had begun to understand the shimmering scalar grammar like a new language, words blending into sentences.

  When the piece finished, she joined in the sudden applause, even yelling along with the rowdy team of uniformed boys. The white noise of applause glimmered in a non-specific band along the columns.

  “That was marvelous!” she cried to Darling, clutching one cool stony arm. “Do you know the piece? Or did you manage that on the fly?”

  “No specific foreknowledge was necessary. I heard the notes, then converted them to simple frequencies and mapped them onto a scale.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Very simple, really. Music is the most mathematical of the arts.”

  Mira leaned back, taking in the false night sky. Her head felt so clear tonight, the intensity of the music joining the fallout from the madly spiced pie. She tongued the scorched roof of her mouth thoughtfully.

  “I once wanted to be a musician, I think.” she said. “Barring that, I wish I could do what you just did.”

  “And I, what you just did,” replied Darling. She looked at him questioningly, and a long strand reached for her face. Like the tentative tongue of a snake, it tasted a tear freighted in the corner of her eye.

  “Oh, Darling,” she answered. “I can show you something that will make you cry.”

  It seemed to be going well. The Queen Favor struggled—among its thousand other conciergial duties, astrogational calculations, and less urgent ruminations—to overhear the conversation between the two. It took direct control of various serving drones, swerving them undetectably closer to the table, fiddled endlessly with the gain structure of their audio inputs. It accessed the personal communicators carried by the human wait staff, wrote thousand-line algorithms to cancel out the noise of background chatter and the appallingly simplistic music of the guitarists. The words were often hesitant, cryptic, almost if the two were trying to hide the chemistry between them.

  But it was there. A connection, at last. The ship knew it, beyond any shadow of sampling error.

  Despite that, it was surprised when the direct interface request came.

  “Yes, Mira?”

  “You owe me. You screwed up tonight; I had to share a table!” The ship nervously performed several thousand hasty recalculations. “I trust the resulting company didn’t prove too unpleasant,” it dithered.

  “Whatever. You still owe me. I want to visit the engine core.” “A human near the core? That will require extensive shield construction and containment recalibrations, not to mention legal disclaimers, and will almost certainly result in fuel-use inefficiencies.”

  “No doub
t. But handle it. I’m cleared for all-areas access.” The ship pretended to pause. In fact, it knew quite well that Mira Santiarre Hidalgo had the highest security and status clearance on the entire manifest. Along with her unlimited wealth, that fact kept her profile at the top of the ship’s memory stack at all times.

  “Feel free to visit in 21 minutes. Is my debt repaid?” “No. I can visit the core any time. This is the favor: I’m bringing a guest.”

  The ship paused again, this time to savor a system-wide flush of victory. It hastily constructed a conversational avatar to argue for a few more minutes, and then to lose convincingly. Then it instructed a processor to begin making changes to the Queen Favor’s pocket-universe drive, reducing the energies of that trapped reality, but not too much. Mira and her escort would get a lovely show.

  That done, the Queen Favors mind retreated to its innermost spaces to enjoy the success of its plan. Not only a meal together, but an after-dinner assignation in the presence of a quintillion suns! In a sudden burst of inspiration, the ship initialized a new storage volume, and dedicated several processing cores to begin work on an essay: “The Inherent Advantages of Quasi-Random Intervention in Small Pleasure Craft Conciergial Management—Anonymous.”

  Its pleasure-state continued for some minutes—a long time for an entity of its processing power—the resonances somewhat akin to a gambler’s palpitations after a particularly unlikely but spectacularly successful roll of the dice.

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  GALLERY

  « ^ »

  A few weeks earlier, Leao Vatrici stares at a quantity of data. A giant quantity: a good sign.

  Nobody with anything to hide would have sent all this: photos with an order of magnitude (base sixteen) bracket on both sides of visual light, from five cm out to three meters range, 360 in the X/Z and from top to floor in the Y; the whole spheroidal mesh in 1 cm increments. You could drift around in this data like a VR model, but it was all color-corrected and hand-focused: magazine-ready and a work of art in itself. The industry standard stuff was top-notch, too. X- and UHF full-throughs; millimeter radar; microsamples lifted and vouched for by bonded nano-intelligents with everything to lose.

  For this kind of money they could have shipped the piece all the way from Malvir for verification, Leao thinks. Of course, if it’s a real Robert Vaddum, the insurance alone would have blown that economy out of the water.

  And that’s what they’re claiming: the absolute article, bona fide undiscovered, found-in-the-attic new and unknown Vaddum. A message from beyond the grave.

  Might even waive the fee to sell a piece like this, Leao considers. The publicity alone would be worth the expenses. But the thirty percent? Yeah, she’d take that too. Twist her arm.

  But enough daydreaming. The probability of a Vaddum surfacing now? After seven years? She pushes aside the grasping, sweating fuckdreams of profit and fame with some serious worktime.

  Leao takes a look first. She sets the photo-minder so that she’s sweeping around the sculpture with normal human visuals, but closes her eyes. Invokes in her mind (pure imagination, not DI) the familiar ambient noise of the Uffizi, the Gugg, the MoMA Epsilon: library-hushed voices, the popping echo of flat shoes on marble, the tidal wash of a gurgling school trip passing by. Then opens her eyes to watch the piece unfold in the flickering glide of her apparent motion. A stem of platinum, human-height, baffled like a heat-sink manifold so that as she moved the minutely changing shadows revealed the geometries of its long S-curve. Wiry arms woven of some military-industrial substance—a reflective armor or ablative ceramic, something in which to laugh off laser-sporting natives—jut from the stem at non-repeating intervals. From certain angles, the glimmering arms coalesce—Leao has to squint slightly to see the effect—building into some sort of moire.

  A machine’s version of a tree. A tree that’s smarter than you.

  Damn, she wished the thing were here.

  Her mind ticks off lighting angles that would augment the moire. Who were the barbarians who stumbled onto this find?

  Late-period Vaddum, she thinks—if it’s real. The use of hidden shapes, visible only from a few choice perspectives. Very late. A guilty tickle in her stomach as she fantasizes: Vaddum’s Last Work.

  She drifts some more, a lazy hour that ups her opinion. Such wasted talent if the piece is a forgery. Then she zooms to relish the stampwork, to inspect the telltale sloppiness of the polish job, to seek out eccentricities of joinery. (Vaddum never welded, of course. He only pounded, fitted, clanged together, a hammer and five intentionally weak lifter hands his only tools.) She checks the assemblage’s parts against historical industrial catalogs and protocols. Vaddum never synthesized; used only machine-made elements, the cast-off flotsam of past industrial eras. Junk.

  Not a true political, but he believed in artificial rights. He himself was a bootstrapped cargo drone. Did thirty years in an outmoded blast-factory before he popped the Turing boundary.

  And to Leao, that sounded even worse than her English public school. (Public/private, private/public—the kind where the big girls fist-fuck the little ones and you never tell your parents.) Ironically, it was an industrial accident that killed the poor guy. Random hacker sabotage gimmicked a synthplant near his mountain villa. (Double irony: pirate matter synthesis being the bane of all sculptors, painters, art dealers.) Everything within fifteen klicks had been turned to plasma. A painless end, but dramatic enough to be worth a sixfold price increase on the two Vaddums she’d had in her gallery at the time.

  Reginald, her moneyman partner, joked that the incident had “literally set the art world on fire.”

  She’d laughed at worse.

  After two hours marked by a building sense of danger (it seems almost possible, but it’s too certain to disappoint) she unleashes her two assistants on the piece. They are 48-teraflop bonded person-wannabees, under her tutelage and that of an overworked SPCAI lawyer who knows nothing about art. Hans and Franz are their current diminutives. They’re coming along nicely, engaged in a friendly competition now in the 0.5-0.6 Turing Quotient range.

  “Alright boys,” she orders. “You know the drill. I want authenticity opinions in 400 seconds.”

  She smokes a cigarette as drive-lights flicker throughout the room. Immature but powerful, these two. Leao hasn’t even bothered with the UV or the microsamples. The boys can handle that far better than she, banging through about a trillion material comparisons a minute, their access to the known recorded works of Vaddum is straight vacuum fiber all the way from here to the Library of Congress. But she also wants to hear their comments on the style, the aesthetics, the meaning of the piece. It’s the sort of thing she can missive to the SPCAI lawyer to make his day.

  They both dutifully submit their reports exactly on the mark, both clammering for first dibs like the clever students they are.

  “Alphabetical today. Franz?”

  “Major discrepancies. Almost certain fraud.”

  The words are crushing. The disappointment terrible, no matter that Leao knew anything else would be a miracle. She drags on her cigarette and retreats into a cynical part of her mind. At least this will make a good story in her middle years. The One That Got Away.

  That Never Was.

  “Tell me gently.”

  A pause as this request is parsed. Take your time, smart boy, she silently encourages. Give me a long human moment to sulk.

  But he begins all too soon: “Microsamples marked 567, 964, and 1002 all contain deep-seated tiridiana collateral particles. The entry angles of the particles indicate they were deposited during shipping to Malvir, prior to the sculpture’s assembly. However, tiridiana was not transported in sufficient quantities to create collateral irradiation until approximately 14 months ago. This sculpture was created at least six years after Vaddum’s death.”

  A heartfelt speech, Leao reflects.

  Such an excellent job of forgery, too. Almost a pity for it to be ruined by the mos
t obvious of anachronisms. The boys have probably been sitting on their hands like impatient schoolchildren for the last 300-odd seconds, dying to spill the story; wishing they were human and could simply jump up and say: “You got bamboozled, fooled, scammed, and jerked around.”

  “Anything to add, Hans?” She secretly thinks Hans the cleverer of the two. Might as well give him a chance to smart-off about any other obscure anomalies he’s discovered.

  “I do not concur,” Hans says flatly. “Authenticity is indicated.”

  Now that’s odd. Not usually a lot of disagreement between the boys.

  “You don’t think the materials are anachronistic?”

  A pause. Weirdly long for a 48-teraflop mind to dally.

  “They are anachronistic. I’ve narrowed the sculpture’s last modification date to between four and eight months ago. But the sculpture seems … to be real.”

  Franz’s permission-to-speak blinker is guttering like a candle with a moth stuck in it. But she lets Hans take his tortured, crazy path. I may make an artist of you yet, she thinks. He blathers on: “The form, the workmanship, the spatial conversation with the viewer. It’s too close, too right to be another hand at work. And more, the piece is not the work of Vaddum at the time of his death. It’s … newer. Farther along. Therefore, I would suggest that…” Another two-second pause, the giddy hesitation of ninety-six trillion operations, a Hundred Years’ War inside the smooth onyx-dark cameo of Hans’ blackbox.

  “…that Robert Vaddum is still alive.”

  Good. Crazy, but very good indeed.

  “Boys, cancel all our appointments,” she commands. “We’re going to stare at these data until we go blind.” They argue late into the night.

  “Reginald.”

  “Shit. Leao? It’s ghastly early. I’ll have a heart attack! Did somebody die?”

  “Quite the opposite. What would you say to a big stack of money?”

  “It would ensure my attention. The Vaddum is real, I take it.”