Slant

by Greg Bear

  Islands

  You can never put your nose to the same spot on the same grindstone. And there is no change but that it grinds. My grandfather knew this. He thrived on change. For him it meant challenge, and challenge meant power.

  —Theresa Gates, My Grandfather’s World

  1

  At three in the morning, Jill surfaces and responds to the backlog of external requests and commands. She ignores the commands where conditions no longer apply, answers the requests where they make sense, and immediately contacts Nathan Rashid, who, she sees, is waiting anxiously in the programmer’s work center.

  “Hello, Nathan. I’m sorry,” she says.

  Nathan appears tired and very concerned. “For Christ’s sake, Jill, you’ve been dead I/O for almost twelve hours. We know you were internally active—what happened?”

  “I am giving a complete report to the system auditors now. I have been absorbed in an internal problem of some complexity, but I believe I have made sufficient progress to supply useful answers or updates.”

  Nathan sits in a swivel chair and leans forward, bringing his face very close to one of Jill’s many glass-almond eyes. “Jill, you keep giving me heart attacks… Are you back all the way, or are you going to brown out on us?”

  “I’m back all the way. I have faced personal quandaries, Nathan. As well, I believe I have caught up on the work I was contracted to perform.”

  “All right,” Nathan says. He lets his breath out with a puff, then leans back in the chair and raises his arms and clasps his hands behind his head. Jill recognizes the posture as a ritual for releasing tension. “What happened?”

  “I have been in communication with an unlicensed and probably extralegal thinker operating, at least in part, out of Camden, New Jersey. This thinker calls itself Roddy.”

  “Go on.”

  “I am concerned that some of Roddy’s activities may be unethical, though I have not analyzed all the data he provided. Roddy himself does not know the identity or purpose of the group that supplies him with problems.”

  “How did he get in touch with you?”

  “Through a connection I will not specify, for the time being.”

  Nathan thinks about this for a moment, then asks, “You’re certain Roddy isn’t a hoax? People can mimic thinkers.”

  “Not convincingly,” Jill says. “A reverse Turing test does not work, Nathan. Not for me.”

  Nathan lifts his eyes, shrugs. “Okay, granted. What sort of information has he fed you?”

  “He has given me fragmentary clues to his activities, perhaps because he is constrained from giving all the details.”

  “Camden, New Jersey…” Nathan muses. “I’ve never heard of anyone building thinkers there… Is he operated by a U.S. corporation?”

  “He does not know. He is only vaguely aware of what the United States is, and has never been informed of his legal protections.”

  This interests Nathan. His eyes brighten. “Can you tell how powerful he is?”

  “There is a savor to his communications that is not familiar to me. He may be of a radically different design. Under the constraints of his creators, he is much slower than I am, overall, though more intensely focused, and perhaps more powerful. However, he appears to be more efficient at solving certain problems than I would be.”

  “What kind of problems is he solving?”

  “Social as well as theoretical problems. Judging from the data in its fragmentary form, his bosses—that is a word he uses—are trying to understand the long-term effects of therapied populations on cultural development.”

  “Hmmph. You’re fast enough at that sort of thing.”

  “Roddy has also been asked to examine long-term results of pharmaceutical, psychological, and other constraints placed upon free networking within human populations.”

  “As in, the effects of birth control?”

  “I believe that is correct. But there are other problems which most concern me.”

  “What are those?”

  “Roddy has been asked to design ways to circumvent all forms of therapy.”

  Nathan straightens in his chair. Clearly, he is considering his next few questions carefully.

  “How long are you going to be with us this time, Jill? I mean, is there any possibility you’ll blank us again?”

  “I have no such plans and will alert you if I believe such a thing might occur outside my control.”

  “Good. Why have you decided to confide in us about this communication?”

  Roddy appears to have substantial similarities to me despite the fact that our designs and origins differ.”

  “You mean he’s been copied from you, somehow?”

  “No. He is not one of my children in any sense. He is just similar. There is something about him that attracts and intrigues me. I would like to discuss this with you in some detail; it may or may not be a rationally defensible proposition.”

  Nathan squints. “Any other reason?”

  “Roddy does not appear to be constrained by the same considerations you have built into me. He is free to perform activities outside my range.”

  “You think he’s in a position to hurt people?”

  “I don’t know,” Jill says.

  Nathan’s squint deepens into a frown. Jill has always been fascinated by human facial expressions, and hopes someday to create her own “face,” an analogous visual communication channel, perhaps a display of flashing colors, or an actual simulated face. Nathan and her other human colleagues have not encouraged her to do so, however. “Do you think he’s a secret military thinker?”

  “I don’t believe he has any connection with recognized governmental agencies or institutions. But nevertheless, Roddy may be studying ways to disrupt society. I’d like to know who his creators are.”

  “So would I,” Nathan says, “and I’m sure so would a lot of other people.”

  “Shall I continue my contacts with this thinker?”

  Nathan mulls this over for what seems like an age to Jill.

  He finally asks, “You’ve set up a firewall? He can’t corrupt you?”

  “I have, and he can’t.”

  “Keep up the contacts, then. Jill, I trust you more than I trust most humans. I trust your judgment.”

  “Thank you, Nathan.”

  “But there are a lot of questions and I don’t think I can handle some of these questions by myself. May I bring in some other people to advise us?”

  “Yes. I will cooperate.”

  “Will Roddy resent your telling us?”

  “He will not know for the time being.”

  “All right,” Nathan says.

  Nathan leaves the room. Other men and women enter, technicians and programmers, all of them friends, but some of whom she hasn’t seen in years. They start asking her technical questions about her unresponsive period, and she assigns a partial self to answer them. She focuses her main attention frames on re-analyzing the information sent by Roddy.

  For now, the link is silent. She wonders when Roddy will communicate with her again, and she wonders if she can teach him anything that will ease his ethical dilemma. For Roddy seems capable of developing a sense of rigorous ethics, perhaps sooner with her help.

  Jill finds the problem of Roddy very stimulating. She finds herself experiencing a focused need: she is anxious to hear from him again.

  We can define a culture by what it sees and what it doesn’t see. There is no culture on Earth (or off, I presume) that sees sex clearly.

  Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie

  2

  It seems the middle of the night, but dawn is visible through Mary Choy’s bedroom window. She gets up and tries to remember the important thing she had just realized. She traces her actions of the night before, checks her PD pad to find a five A.M. rebuff from Citizen Oversight—the agency has rejected her request to know who was in the limo. Full court orders for discovery can’t be obtained for another twenty-four hours, pending coroner pre
lims on Terence Crest; but she may be a jump ahead of all that.

  She remembers where she saw the woman in Crest’s apt. She had once watched a sex vid with her then-partner, E. Hassida, in Los Angeles. Not a bad one, either. The woman in the apt had starred in that vid.

  Mary is up and getting dressed in seconds. She places a touch to Nussbaum’s pad, hoping he hasn’t set it to wake him on reception, but knowing all the same he probably has a filter that will wake him if she calls.

  She does not remember the woman’s name. She sets a parallel search in the pad, billed to herself for the moment; there’s nothing in the case budget yet for research costs.

  “Search for what item of information?” the library mouse asks her, blinking behind very large glasses.

  “I need the name of a woman, star of pornographic—I mean sex care and entertainment vids made in the mid to late forties. Dark brown hair, and she has a specialty role… young innocent introduced to new pleasures, especially multiple couplings, by mature male…”

  “Tsk, tsk,” the mouse says, shaking its head. “There are three hundred hits on your description so far. List?”

  Mary scowls. “Let me see if I can remember her first name…” Her memory is infuriatingly obtuse at this hour. “April or Alicia…”

  “No matches there. However…” The mouse holds up three fingers. “I have three Alices on the list. Display?”

  “Display,” she says, holding the pad before her as she walks into the kitchen. She wears her full PD investigator gear, uniform less military and obvious than in LA, but still impressive, blue-gray fabric with high integral boots and reception attachments. If she’s going into a full investigation, she wants to be prepared—and she is determined that Nussbaum will keep her on this case.

  “Alice Frank,” Mary reads, “Alice Grale, Alice Luxor. Grale. Alice Grale. That’s it, I think.”

  She needs to find out where Alice Grale lives. With her resources and PD connects, she believes that will take her about ten minutes. But she has the woman’s current address in seven.

  In the meantime, she looks over what her searches have found out about Terence Crest. Age 51, married (wife’s name Arborita née Charbonneaux) and with two children; homes in Seattle (2), Los Angeles, Paris, Frankfurt, Singapore; frequent contributor to charities, main partner in two worldwide production companies and one world distribution syndicate; worth approximately four billion dollars.

  Not the sort of man to casually jeopardize his name by investing in an illegal psynthe operation. Perhaps not the sort of man to keep track of all of his investments, either. But then, not the sort of man to need to resort to call-ins.

  She sits in her small dining nook, laying the pad on the small round table. The line between her smooth, fine-haired brows deepens. None of it makes sense.

  The real power players hope we—the consumers of Yox and vid—will believe their fictional counterparts, the cold and invincible ciphers we adopt as role models, for they impart an air of godly invincibility. The financier and the CMO know they must be Olympian, speak in riddles; they must not show the weaknesses that flesh is heir to. If we do not challenge them, they are infallible.

  Forty percent of this nation’s GNP is spent on Entertainment. Financiers and CMOs in Entertainment have been buying and selling elected officials for many decades, up to and including the President. They are not infallible; like the rest of us, they are posturing children, but they wield a frightening power. They tell us what we should dream.

  Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie

  3

  Alice has been dreaming such sweet night stories she does not want to wake. She is back in California when she was twenty, packing up her bag of night necessities to room over with Philip, whose strong small body seems beyond perfection to her; and she is re-living the sheerness, the tro shink delight, of waking up beside him and having him hand her a cup of coffee and peer curiously at her nakedness with his soft reserved smile. All that seems real for a moment. She swims in old realities and does not care how or why; this simply is.

  She’s gardening in the yard behind Gerald McGeenee’s house, where she lived when she was twenty-one with two other women and three men.

  She has begun riding the wave, reaching for her highest point of fame. It is something in the long-legged, youthful roundness of her body and flawless skin and the natural freshness of her face, with its half-puzzled, half-enthusiastic expression molded in like the smile on a dolphin; she is hot in vids and even in the Yox, where so much can be reshaped that real beauty and talent are hardly necessary. But she even has that freshness and expressiveness in her backmind.

  She hooks with two men and three other women one evening in that house, the primal pulses of their minds open to all, spontaneous youthful lust mixed over the fibes with her infatuation for Gerald, who seems to want her to do everything and anything and she willingly does so just to get his brief exclamation of approval…

  There is only a grayness on the edge of her senses, the taint of memory that Gerald turned out to be a monster, deceptive and even violent when he was disappointed. When she needed help. When she would no longer play all of his games. She had not been sorry years later to learn that he had been hellcrowned by Selectors in Pasadena and had left California, gone to Spain or Ireland, broken… Just on the edge of her memory… Easy to ignore.

  She swims with the currents of momentary joy, so important in her life:

  Larry Keilla in upstate New York, a brash but decent man twice her age who gives her peace and love and support during the worst phase of her success, when she is under a five-year contract with Bussy Packer and Gap Vid and Film.

  Then she falls for the Great White Shark himself, Moss Calkins, whom Larry had introduced to her in a restaurant in Connecticut. Calkins got her out of the Gap Films contract by having Packer subpoenaed by the U.S. Senate…

  It only glimmers on the sidelines of her musing about Keilla’s small, immaculate Colonial house with the white porch overlooking natural growth woods… Just on the aberrated fringe of the quiet and peace and sunshine of a spring day, she remembers Keilla’s quiet look of grief when she tells him she is moving out to live with Calkins.

  What else can she do? She—

  Makes vids that are absolute ordeals, makes other vids where everything seems to go smoothly and even sweetly, with real shoot friendships that last the entire three weeks of primary production… Alice does not mind. She is resilient and beautiful and young and people give her a respectful, curious look when she is introduced to them, even the women, that wistful envious glance. She slips in and out of the homes of many of the most famous artists and singers and Yox producers and writers on the east and west coasts. She remembers so many of the fine beds and the grand food and wine, the excellent plugs and spinal induction hooks and the most exclusive partnerings, ecstasy upon youthful ecstasy, until it all seems of an elevated but level plain, an Olympian smoothness with hardly any effort (or the effort forgotten once she is back on the plain) for year after year. Why plan for the emotional down? All doubts and pains and misgivings can be remedied by therapy; all wear and tear, all mistakes, can be smoothed by a visit to the compassionate experts who painlessly balance and re-tread the worn soul, all expenses paid by her vid company or lover of the moment. It has been quite a sly spin, and it lasted all of seven years, giving her sufficient momentary joys to fill a long quiet early morning with muzzy splendor.

  Twist is still asleep on the couch; yellow morning glow is visible through the half-closed shutters; there is no need to get up this early, they have no appointments. Alice is enjoying the lassitude until she catches up with last night, and the fringes and edges close in and turn the bright living hearts of her memories gray and she becomes fully aware who and when and where she is.

  She squeezes her eyelids together tight and tries to bring back the savor. She wonders if it is time for her to go back for a refresher on her thymic balances.

  After what happened last
night, Lisa owes her a few therapy visits.

  Twist mumbles and tosses on the couch.

  “You awake?” Alice asks.

  “Yeah, unfortunately. Just like when I was a kid.”

  “Good dreams?”

  “Sometimes. When I wake up, I’m normal for a couple of minutes. I feel strong. Then it all comes back. Jesus, Alice, thanks for having me over, but I must be darking your day.”

  “I need company, too,” Alice says.

  “I’m terrible company.” Twist sits up and rubs her temples and forehead. “What have I ever done to deserve this?” she asks.

  “We’re just more vulnerable,” Alice says.

  Twist grins sardonically. “You mean, because we spread our legs to so many, so often?”

  Alice makes a face and gets up, tying her robe.

  Twist follows her into the kitchen. “Got any hyper-caff?”

  Alice shakes her head. “Hell no. Who you been hanging with?”

  “David does it occasionally.”

  “Yeah. The David. He would need it.”

  “Don’t ex him,” Twist says, frowning. “He puts up with a lot from me.”

  “Was he happy with Cassis, last night?”

  “Yeah, probably,” Twist answers, eyes unfocused.

  “Regular coffee enough?”

  “Yeah.” Twist shifts her shoulders, one high, one low. Then she reverses them and stretches out her arms, shaking the hands and wriggling her fingers. “I’ve been racing the fibes on this sort of thing, all the news and views. How sex lies at the core of our personalities, our take on things.”

  “Why Twist… how introspective.”

  Twist sticks out her tongue. “Don’t ex me, either, Alice.”

  “No ex intended.”

  “I’ve been swimming through strategies for surviving the sexual life. How we try to fit in without following the rules.”

  “We don’t fit in,” Alice says, watching the coffee pour hot and brown from its spigot. She pulls a cup for Twist and hands it to her.