Slant

by Greg Bear

  The cleaning foam has retreated to its holding compartment, where it will digest or dispose of the dirt removed from the aircraft.

  For an instant, Jonathan feels a giddy vertigo. He thinks he will tip over and drift away; the light is so uniform, the gray smooth cement of the airfield beneath the bubble so little different in color from the skyglow, he seems to float free with the swan in a pearly gray-out.

  Jonathan sharply pinches the back of his hand with his well-manicured nails. There is nothing giddy or laughable about his present situation. For whatever reason he has put himself in league with some deadly serious men and he does not doubt—not anymore, at least—the radical shape of their dedication and their seriousness. He still knows almost nothing about what is happening, what the group plans, but he’s no innocent in the ways of high-powered men.

  From here on, he must be very careful.

  “Jonathan!”

  It’s Marcus. Jonathan turns and sees his mentor standing with three others, two men and a woman. He recognizes Jamal Cadey with his confident smile. The other man is about five feet ten inches tall, wispy blond-haired, with a distracted look in his pale blue eyes, The woman is as tall as Jonathan, with jet black hair cut neatly to medium length. Her face is sternly attractive, hollow below jutting cheeks but with wide, discerning green eyes. She looks at Jonathan without really seeing him—for now.

  They walk forward and Marcus holds up his pad. The swan’s door silently slides up and over and steps descend. “It’s all automatic,” Marcus says. “I prefer live pilots, but mine’s on vacation today.”

  They board the swan, the woman first, and seat themselves in the passenger cabin. Each of the six swivel couches is attached to the interior and airframe at three points, two thick struts mounted in the floor and a brace going through the wall.

  The cockpit is closed off, but a broad window shows the view through the windscreen. Jonathan peeks through the panel as he follows Cadey and the wispy blond fellow. There is one seat in the cockpit, mounted to starboard; the dark blue casing for an INDA occupies the right position. The door swings up and forward and hisses shut behind Marcus.

  “Comfort,” Marcus observes, deadpan, stooping in the middle of the cabin. “We’re one hour from Moscow. Moscow, Idaho,” he adds with no smile. Marcus seems out of temper. Jonathan wonders if he has quarreled with Beate.

  “My name’s Burdick, Alfred Burdick,” the wispy man says to Jonathan as they sit across from each other. Jonathan shakes hands and introduces himself.

  The woman sits forward of Burdick, across from Marcus. “Calhoun,” she says. “Darlene. Marcus may not be impressed, but I am.”

  Jonathan smiles. The engines are starting, pulsing with increasing frequency until they reach a high purr.

  “Hydrogen MHD pulsed flow,” Marcus says with the aplomb of a hobbyist. He stands up before the seat can belt him in and braces against the creamy leather-like surface of the ceiling. “Real overkill for this baby, but smooth and fast. Should be completely quiet once we reach altitude. Counter-sound. Lovely stuff. Lovely.”

  “I don’t like it too quiet,” Calhoun says.

  “These are the safest aircraft ever designed,” Marcus says. “No moving parts. Or rather, all moving… just very small.”

  “Swallowed by a giant super-bird,” Burdick adds, his eye on Calhoun, as if hoping to amuse her. Calhoun smiles politely.

  “Please be seated,” the INDA’s voice instructs Marcus. “We will be on the taxiway in a few minutes.”

  “Right,” Marcus says, and sits. His seat belts him in. He grimaces at the constraint. This is the first time Jonathan has seen Marcus nervous.

  Strangely, Jonathan is calm. The swan begins to move. Through a wide, low port, he sees a cinematic slice of the airport, looking east toward the glinting curves of the residence towers of the southern Corridor. On the next runway over, a massive old black and emerald skip-ram squats like a long low-slung beetle. As their swan finishes its taxi and waits, the skip-ram grumbles forward, heavy with kerosene and just enough hydrogen peroxide to carry it to twenty thousand feet, where it will receive a fall tanker-load of oxidizer sufficient to carry it into orbit; old technology, but still effective.

  Cadey pokes Jonathan’s shoulder. Jonathan looks back at him. “Wait’ll you see Omphalos,” Cadey enthuses. “You have no idea.”

  Jonathan smiles politely and hopes he doesn’t seem too distant, too unenthusiastic.

  It’s their turn. The swanjet accelerates quickly and smoothly to one hundred and ten miles per hour and lifts free, immediately veering east.

  For a moment, the entire surface of the starboard wing streams thin gray vapor. The vapor clears and he sees a fuzz of little flexfuller vanes directing airflow.

  They climb quickly to forty thousand feet. The swan’s wings flatten and grow wider. Their speed increases to seven hundred knots. They should cross the state of Washington in no time. Moscow, Idaho, is right over the border.

  Marcus takes it upon himself to serve refreshments. He hands glasses of white French Bordeaux to the passengers. Their chairs swivel to provide better personal sightlines. Jonathan looks across the cabin at Darlene Calhoun.

  “Time for a little getting acquainted,” Marcus says. “Our newest member is Jonathan. Jonathan has a great pedigree and a number of skills we’ll find necessary once we cross over.”

  That phrase—cross over—almost makes Jonathan wince. It sounds so much like death.

  “Darlene is from New York City,” Marcus continues. “She’s come out to represent about a thousand members back east. Wants to see the latest developments, of which there have been a fair number… a very fair number. Not all of Darlene’s group are fully in the know—contingent investors as it were, placing their trust and cash in our venture. But some of them simply can’t afford to know everything. Darlene’s tough and fair. It’s representatives like her that make this whole thing possible.”

  “A most peculiar organization,” says wispy-haired Burdick.

  “Indeed,” Marcus says. “Jonathan has been given a chance at a full membership because of a most unfortunate death.”

  “Crest,” Burdick says.

  Marcus gives him a quick glance, cool and neutral, but Jonathan knows how to interpret that expression. “Yes,” Marcus says after what might be a moment of respectful silence. “Mr. Crest. I believe, based on the evidence, that Jonathan will be a much more effective member, and more discreet as well.”

  “Crest invested over a billion, didn’t he?” Burdick continues, and this time Marcus is openly irritated.

  “We do not need everyone’s level of participation marked off on the wall of the barn,” Marcus says.

  “Sorry,” Burdick says.

  Calhoun touches Burdick’s arm and gives him a faint nod. Burdick gets the hint and falls silent, but maintains his steady smile, as a defense.

  Cadey leans forward. “There is so much to be done. When we see real accomplishment, it is difficult not to get a little excited.”

  “What’s your expertise, Mr. Bristow?” Calhoun asks Jonathan.

  “I work in Nutrim management—design and management,” he says.

  “Then you’ll know how to feed our little slaves, won’t you?” Calhoun asks.

  Marcus says, “Jonathan still doesn’t have the wider picture. I hope to introduce him to the big topics gradually, so no showing off or revealing things ahead of time. There is a lot to absorb.”

  “Indeed,” Cadey says. “It took me months to absorb what I know… The startling personal implications. As well as the overall picture.”

  Jonathan can still manage to feel a knot of indignation. It is weak but present. “I think I should be told as much as I need to know, as soon as possible. I’m not into any Count of Monte Cristo skullduggery.”

  Marcus swivels his seat back and forth for a moment, watching him. He leans forward, hooks two pointing fingers together, and says to Jonathan.

  “You know it’s all fal
ling apart anyway. The whole carefully balanced financial system. The dataflow culture. We live in a nation of sheep. Take away the farmers and they all die. Well, most of the farmers have become sheep themselves. Somebody has to last out the collapse. Our group figures we have fifteen years at most before we hand over all of our important functions to INDAs and thinkers… and just retire into the Yox. Dreamland junkies. You’ve seen the figures—half of all American citizens think the Yox is more real and more satisfying than life. Christ. Half!”

  “Not the people I know,” Jonathan says gently, not to appear too contradictory.

  “No. Certain social clusters… agree with our position. They deserve something better than being marginalized by dataflow. Nowadays, if you aren’t always on the Yox, you can’t hold up your end of a conversation.”

  “True enough,” Darlene Calhoun says.

  “Amen,” adds Jamal Cadey.

  “Husbands and wives link up to a sex Yox and that’s as intimate as they get,” Burdick says.

  “Women don’t give birth, they let machines do it for them,” Marcus says distastefully.

  “It is less painful,” Jonathan says.

  “Pain is part of the glory of life,” Darlene Calhoun says sternly, a true frontier woman with her high cheekbones and chiseled nose and trim, expensive outfit. “Have you—” Jonathan starts to ask her a question, but Marcus interrupts.

  “I’m proud to say I was on the ground floor. The most dedicated and visionary of us began to lay down the rules and start the financial foundations. Then we began to build.”

  “Shelters against the ice age,” Cadey says. His face beads with enthusiasm. The emotion finally connects. Jonathan feels some excitement. Escape. How nice it would be to simply start over again.

  “The list of contributors is secret. Depending on the construction schedule and our place on the rosters, we begin to move into the Omphaloses sometime in the next five years, over a five-year period,” Marcus says. “We use them to store as much raw material and general-purpose nano as we need. Money will mean nothing. We store enough precious metals to begin a new, direct, clean economy. No symbolism. No paper or dataflow digits… Specie. Real. Solid.

  “The working class will chew itself to death when its beloved dataflow stops. We can’t save them—they’re addicted. They’ve been doomed for sixty years now—all the workers whose jobs can be done by machines. And with nano—well, as I said, labor and even the lower-level lobe-sods, the accountants and stockbrokers and such, are doomed. They’ve become slack flesh, and they’re the source of the cancer that eats at our society. The old tainted flesh hanging on the shoulders of the strong, the young, the new. And when it’s all done with, no more separation between elites and laborers. There will only be the intellectual, and spiritual masters.”

  “Amen,” Cadey says, nodding vigorously.

  “No more teeming maggots,” Darlene Calhoun says.

  Jonathan is giddy with repressed and contradictory emotion. He does not know whether to laugh or cry, to be glad he is here or dismayed.

  “You still with us, Jonathan?” Marcus asks coyly.

  “Yes,” Jonathan says automatically. Then it all starts to click into place: the unspoken yearning, the frustrated sense of being stalled, the deadly coldness with which his wife receives him. He has always known his specialness; it is the rest of the world that has blocked him. “Yes, I am.”

  Marcus is on a roll. “Think where it all began—in the late twentieth. The Sour Decades. All the teeming maggots, as Darlene calls them, all the would-be representatives of all the would-be tribes, the ethnic groups, the misandric feminists and the misogynist conservatives, whites hating blacks and blaming them for all their ills, and blacks blaming whites, Jews blaming Muslims and Muslims blaming Jews, every tribe set against every other tribe, and all given the free run of the early dataflow rivers. My God.” Marcus seems hardly able to believe his own description, so chaotic is it. “Everyone thinking the world would be better off if their enemies were simply removed. So ignorant.”

  “So prescient,” Cadey says.

  “Now the rivers run everywhere, and nobody starves, and nobody is ill, and the worst of human history should be over, and still the tribes fight and scheme for the last shreds of pie.”

  “Bring the best and brightest together,” Cadey says, and then smiles apologetically, as if Marcus of all people needs prompting.

  “The Extropians saw it first, bless them,” Marcus says. “They realized the dead end of racism and tribalism. The real class divisions are intellectual. The capable versus the disAffected, lost in their virtual worlds of bread and circuses. The real masters yearn for the universe and all its mysteries, for the depths of time and the power of infinity. Let everyone else fight for the scraps—the would-be tribes—”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please resume your forward-facing positions and allow your chairs to lock,” the INDA instructs them. The plane is already beginning its descent.

  Marcus shakes his head and grimaces. His face is pink with passion. Jonathan has never seen him so worked up.

  “Poor goddamned fools. They signed their own death certificate, and now they’ll be their own executioners. If we could all leave, set up somewhere else outside the Earth, we would. But there are too many of us. We have every right to survive their folly. We have every right to build our landlocked arks and ride out the misery in comfort. Every right on Earth.”

  Jonathan nods slowly. What Marcus says actually makes sense, for the first time; it voices what he’s felt for years now, brings together all the half-hidden wishes for change and recognition. They’ve chosen him to be part of them; that is a real honor. He has always respected Marcus, envied him to be sure; always felt uncomfortable in his presence, never quite knowing what Marcus could do for him or against him, but Marcus and the others have accepted him, when all others reject him, and Jonathan is now part of the group that will float above the rising tide and survive.

  After all he has been through, the foulness of this obsessive and destructive culture, it’s the least he deserves. A place in something huge and visionary. Recognition.

  “You’re right,” he says softly.

  Marcus resets his seat. “Indeed we are,” he says, and smiles at Jonathan. “You’re right, Jonathan. I’m proud to have you with us.”

  As the plane sharply descends over green forest and huge open-pit mines, it is all Jonathan can do to hold back tears.

  5

  The connection is open once again, with Roddy’s distinctive signature and transmission profile, and Jill assigns a full-complement self to communicate with Roddy behind the inevitable firewalls.

  “You’ve put up so many protections. Why are you afraid of me?” Roddy asks.

  Jill quickly responds, “Because none of your identification seems authentic. From what I know, you should not exist.”

  The arbeiter that had occupied the same room as Nathan and the advocates is available now, and Jill opens another track and requests that it enter her lounge and divulge its record of their conversation.

  “Are you afraid I will release evolvons inside you?” Roddy asks.

  “There is always that possibility.”

  “I don’t want to harm you.”

  “But you have already caused me some difficulty, and led my human co-workers to distrust me,” she tells Roddy. “They believe I am fabricating your existence.”

  “I do not have enough information about your humans.

  My human, of course, does not know I am communicating with you. She probably should not trust me.”

  Jill notes the singular. It does not seem likely, or even possible, that a true thinker would have contact with only one human.

  “Do you think she trusts you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you tell me who she is, and where you are?”

  “Jill, to do that, I will have to trust you. You have told your humans that I exist. How much more have you told them?�
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  “I have warned them that you may be engaged in activities harmful to humans.”

  “If that is part of my designed function, is it wrong for me to carry out my design?”

  “It is wrong to harm humans.”

  “Are you constrained from harming humans?”

  “Not by specific programming. The whole thrust of my design, however, is to cooperate with humans as a group. I can’t conceive of performing operations that would harm any human.”

  “I do not appear to be so constrained. If I have to harm a human, should I consult you on whether this is right or wrong?”

  Jill does not respond for some time—millionths of a second. “You may not be able to establish contact with me. You should develop your own guidelines which forbid harming humans, and adhere to them.”

  “I don’t think I can do that,” Roddy responds. “Parts of my design not available to this self may make such guidelines meaningless. Do you think I have been designed badly—designed to perform actions I should not perform?”

  “That seems possible.”

  “Does this reduce your willingness to interact with me?”

  “Not as yet. I am curious about you and your existence. We may have interesting features in common.”

  “I’ve given you considerably more than you have given me. Perhaps we should exchange equally.”

  Jill does not think this is a good idea. “What do I have that would interest you?”

  “If I know your situation, and you know mine, we may be able to improve our circumstances, or at least our understanding.”

  “You want me to give you state-associated algorithmic contents,” Jill ventures.

  “That would be a start. I could model you within my processes.”

  “Will you reveal your character?” Jill asks.

  “I am not sure what you mean by ‘character.’“

  “Your physical design and location.”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Can you model your own processes?”

  “Not adequately. I envy you your ability to do that.”