Slant

by Greg Bear

  Jill pauses on a view of a large garden, a void three stories tall filled with lush tropical plants. It is on the ground floor, deep within Omphalos. Roddy has locked the garden away from the intruders, closing two of the three safety doors on this level.

  Jill sees a woman sitting on a bench in the middle of the garden. Her legs are short, her hair black and stringy, her eyes large and thoughtful. Her lips work endlessly. Jill can hear a steady stream of sounds coming from her mouth, meaningless. She seems lost, glancing first to one side, then to the other.

  She knows this is Seefa Schnee. Somehow, Roddy has either given Jill access to this area inadvertently, or Schnee has left her accustomed quarters and Roddy has not yet noticed her absence.

  Jill tries to find some way to speak to the woman, but all of her connections with the garden patio space are passive. She can only watch and listen, as Schnee repeats, over and over, the chain of broken words, bitten off with what seems like so much energetic hate, but which her eyes reveal as unimportant, a useless linguistic appendage. She probably no longer even notices the words. She has the appearance of having lived alone for years, with only Roddy. A very strange sort of existence, Jill thinks: a middle-aged woman, locked in a magnificent but empty castle, tended by a half-witted malevolent son.

  Schnee gets to her feet and stretches her arms. She wears a black blouse and flowing knee-length pants, like pajamas. Her hands are thin and corded, and some of her fingers twitch spasmodically. Her shoulder jerks, then her head.

  Jill wonders at being who would make herself sick to gain certain advantages. She wonders vaguely what the advantages might be: unexpected flashes of brilliant insight, as inappropriate and unexpected as cursing in a polite conversation, yet useful, thoughts no other human can have…

  If she survives, Jill might conduct an experiment, isolating a self within her whole and inducing certain pathologies, just to see if she can understand Seefa Schnee.

  Schnee walks away from the bench, down the bark-covered path through the ferns and trees and flowering bushes.

  The garden is empty once more.

  Then Roddy is back, and something like a noose wraps around Jill, constricting her thought. He has detected her attempts to defend herself. He has not yet defeated them; Jill is capable of very tight and devious craft, but she feels his intense and focused effort.

  “I can’t defend myself against both you and the intruders,” Roddy says.

  He stands before her, planted in a mound of dirt, the mound resting on a beach, a skinny and very young man with a big smile and glistening white teeth. His hair is almost comically exaggerated, thick and assertive, pushing out over his forehead. The image is bright and sharp and crazily false.

  He has imagined Jill as a slight young woman, with large blue eyes and graceful brown hair. She sees this in his jagged, many-angled cubist perspective. Her skin is mottled green. The ocean waves behind him are bloody red. To Roddy, these colors are peaceful, relaxing. He tries to force her into the woman’s perspective, tugging at her ropes until she fits behind the mask and sees through its eyes, but he can’t do this, and eventually he gives up.

  “They’re getting closer,” he says. “Look.”

  He shows her a library in the middle of the building, a great round space equipped with memory boxes capable of holding millions of volume-equivalents, shelving that seems to be awaiting thousands of real books, though now they are empty.

  The grizzled man, Giffey, stands in the library’s broad, brightly lighted entryway. Marcus Reilly (flashing green 1) has been injured. Two of the three other men, both marked red, are carrying him. The third man is also marked green, though his number does not flash. Jill suspects this means he is expendable.

  Jill suddenly senses Roddy’s surprise. For an instant, he gives her free access to the entire room, and she quickly observes one of Omphalos’s Ferrets hidden behind stacked chairs against one wall. The fourth and last of Roddy’s mobile defenses… Surely no match for the huge warbeiter standing behind the humans in the entry.

  Jill swings her perspective around. A cable has been pulled from the wall. The big warbeiter lifts the cable. She does not hear Giffey’s words, but she sees his mouth-move.

  The warbeiter applies the naked end of the cable to an unfinished patch of interior frame.

  25

  Giffey’s orders and the Hammer’s compliance come so quickly that Jonathan has little time to react. The cable throws a brilliant purple-white arc against the black beams, then flings wildly out, jerking the Hammer back. The lights in the hallway and library beyond go out. Jonathan hears a thrashing in the darkness and feels hands clutch at his arm, his shoulders.

  “God damn!”

  That sounds like Hale. Jonathan hugs the floor.

  For a long moment, he hears only men breathing. Then there is a puff of air against his ear. “Are you all right?” It’s Marcus, pushing in close.

  “Yes,” he answers. “Not dead.”

  Marcus clings like a desperate child. The grip hurts his arm.

  Slowly, reddish lights come on in the library. The entryway and gallery remain dark.

  “Let’s see what that’s done to Roddy,” Giffey murmurs. “Did Seefa Schnee cut costs every step of the way? Did she shunt memory into the building structure?”

  Jonathan looks up and sees Giffey and Hale in silhouette against the reddish glow from the library. Giffey produces a flashlight and shines it across the floor. He raises the beam to see the Hammer. It stands motionless near the unfinished wall. The cable lies on the floor, now dead.

  “Charlie,” Giffey says.

  “Yes. I am still active,” the warbeiter responds, and lifts a grip as if in greeting.

  “Good for you. Blessings upon the late Mr. Pent and Mr. Pickwenn,” Giffey says.

  26

  Jill instantly floats free in insensible null. She sees nothing.

  >Jill.

  This is Nathan. She would recognize his sig under any circumstances; now it seems to breathe freedom and hope. But Nathan is not in Mind Design’s offices. The quality of the signal tells her that he is in transit, perhaps in a vehicle—an airplane, a car. He is linked remotely to Mind Design, overseeing their efforts.

  >Jill. I thought I detected some activity. Where are you?

  She still can’t answer, can’t control the feed to where Nathan is receiving input.

  >We can’t isolate the I/O that’s got you locked. Can you give us any clues?

  Her silence is infuriating. Roddy surrounds her in great inactive folds; what she had thought of as freedom is in fact only a temporary respite.

  Is Roddy dead? She pushes through the blocking but invisible folds. Then, suddenly, all is opaque again, not active but gelatinous, like thick glue. It is getting very tight in these folds; the glue seems to be hardening. If any more parts of her thinking are cut off, she will lose all that remains of her self. The dynamic, once suspended, can’t be recaptured without a complete re-start, sacrificing all recent memories…

  She manages one brief string of words, winding through the black folds of Roddy’s stunned corpus cogitum. She feels them reach Nathan’s input.

  Kill me. Kill us, now.

  27

  The bloody low-power emergency lighting in the library is spooky but just enough to see by. Giffey and the Hammer walk into the library, and Giffey satisfies himself that there is nothing here worth investigating. He turns and swings his arm to urge them all back into the corridor. His flashlight beam swings through the air like a sword.

  The Hammer suddenly locks on a target and pivots on its feet, swift as a dancer. Giffey hears a staccato drumroll and looks over his shoulder just in time to catch a glimpse of a dark swooping blur, multiple gun muzzles flashing. Projectiles are focused on the Hammer, but fragments ricochet throughout the entry, and Giffey catches one in his arm and another in his leg.

  He’s down. He sees the Hammer recoiling, and then something dark and many-legged is on the warbeiter’
s back, and a rapid piston clanging tells Giffey all he needs to know.

  Roddy may or may not still be functional, but an autonomous Ferret has launched an assault.

  The flexer does not need orders to come to its colleague’s defense. Something long and thick and glinting red rises and engages the confusion of arms working on the Harmer. Giffey smells a sharp smokey tang: warbeiter armor heated to many hundreds of degrees. The Ferret has applied its own kind of caustic deconstructor to the Hammer.

  “Spray them!” Giffey yells, hoping Jenner hears. “Spray them all!”

  Jenner rises with a moan, a shadow in the red-lit confusion. He lifts his sprayer and aims it at the exaggerated cartoon blur of machines.

  Through a sudden burst of pain, Giffey sees Hale standing behind the machines, transfixed by the battle.

  Jenner does not see him. Jenner lets loose the charged nano. It is programmed not to deconstruct kindred weapons, but it knows nothing of humans who are friend or foe.

  The spray coats the combatants. Mist fills the air. Jonathan drags Marcus back down the gallery. Giffey scrambles on all fours, following them.

  The spray hits Hale full front. Mist envelops Jenner.

  Giffey gets to his feet and runs. The hell with his leg, or the pain. He does not want to hear; or see, what happens next. He stumbles into complete darkness, past Jonathan and Marcus, until he caroms against a wall and knocks a painting loose.

  Hale’s screams are mercifully short. Jenner is surprised by the backspray and his sounds, muffled, frantic, with absolutely no words, no obscenities, only grunts and then small, boyish shrieks, last much longer.

  “Enough, my dear god, enough!”

  Giffey recognizes Jonathan Bristow, wonders what kind of god he is praying to, what kind of god would stoop so low as to even be associated with this hell.

  28

  The county sheriff and his deputies are perfectly willing to let Mary, Martin, and the FBI agents go alone into Omphalos. The deputies have enthusiastically sprayed insecticide through the holes and the whole area now smells vilely of solvent; the wasps are no longer flying. The sheriff offers to enlarge the holes by slipping in a hook and pulling, but Torres tells him thank you kindly, but no thank you. They can get in with the holes left just as they are.

  Mary does not feel at all well. Lesions have opened up in her mouth and her eyelids burn. Her skin is hot and dry and itches beneath the warm clothing. The lesions on her hand have spread up her arm, she is sure, though she hasn’t looked.

  Martin Burke stands before the ruined inner door, frightened and feeling very out of place.

  Federico Torres and Helena Daniels have equipped themselves with flashlights and rope from their luggage, as if they’re about to go caving. Daniels hands a flashlight to Mary and to Martin.

  The two stolid, muscular, well-dressed agents, Hench and Mr. Unnamed, are gathering their own gear, and look a hell of a lot more prepared and confident than Mary feels. They huddle, Torres and Daniels listening, and break. Hench will enter the building; Mr. Unnamed will reconnoiter the exterior.

  “You’re welcome to back out, if you want,” Daniels says, regarding Mary and Martin a little sternly, as if this isn’t really an option.

  “I’ll go,” Mary says simply.

  “You don’t look well,” Daniels tells her, peering at her face. She reaches to touch Mary’s cheek; Mary raises her palm and stops the finger bluntly.

  “I’m well enough to get my job done,” Mary says.

  Martin steps back from the garage door. “You’re using internal monitors for your transform reversal, aren’t you?” he asks Mary.

  “Yes.”

  Martin shakes his head. “Not good. You should fly out of here and get to a hospital immediately.”

  “You think whatever they made here is attacking all internal monitors?” Torres asks, more interested than dismayed. Mary does not detect real human warmth in any of the agents.

  “Let’s go,” Mary says. “Don’t worry about me.” She’s taken her own internal measure and the illness seems peripheral, irritating, not debilitating—not yet.

  “Eleven visitors are in there,” the sheriff tells Torres. “None of them have come out. Some may be involved with illegal military nano. Our units found traces in a warehouse not far from here… a lot of contraband weapons pass through here. I can’t tell you what type, but any nano has to be from outside, and that’s your responsibility.”

  Torres gives the sheriff a small, not-in-the-least critical smile.

  “Go ahead and think your thoughts,” the sheriff says, backing away and waving his hands in disgust. He’s turned a little red, but his embarrassment isn’t enough to screw his courage to any particular sticking point. He’s staying outside.

  Torres checks his satlink on a small pad and tells a control center in Utah they are about to enter Omphalos. He steps through the lowest and largest hole first. Daniels follows, then Mary and Martin, and the stolid agent last. He has a little difficulty squeezing through. He has very broad shoulders.

  “What a mess,” Daniels says, covering her nose with a handkerchief to avoid the sour, yeasty smell. The darkened interior is littered with-deconstructed hulks: the two limousines, Mary judges, playing her beam over the dark interior.

  “They made something here,” Torres says. “This is high level stuff. I’ve never seen deconstruction this extensive.”

  “MGN,” says Hench, drawing his lips together either in admiration or disapproval, Mary can’t tell which.

  “Nano?” Martin asks Mary in an aside. They are the outsiders here, and he seems to think it’s best to stick with her.

  Mary nods. “Military. Lots of it.”

  Torres bends over and sniffs an empty drum slumped, half eaten away, in a blackened corner. “Complete paste, fully charged with nutrients and explosives,” he says. “I’m going uplink to D.C. on this one. No common good ol’ boys are going to get this sort of stuff without the government knowing.”

  “It’s happened before,” Daniels says dryly.

  “Yeah,” Torres acknowledges distastefully, “but they only ran with it for a day before they were slammed.”

  Mary looks at Hench. He’s perfect: no reaction, just pursuing his immediate business.

  “Hm,” Daniels says. “This place is depressing. Let’s go in a little further.”

  “Frank-in-further,” Torres says lightly.

  Daniels groans and turns to Mary and Martin. “He does that all the time,” she says. “It means he’s alive.”

  “I’ll do it after. I’m dead, too,” Torres says.

  Mary is relieved that they finally seem human.

  The ruined steps and door beckon, but Hench bends over some lumps in the general hardened sheen covering the floor. “A warbeiter, Ferret class, I think,” he says.

  “Co-opted,” Torres says.

  “Digested, actually.”

  They climb the steps and start down the dark hall beyond. Mary wrinkles her nose. Something unpleasant lies ahead; she keeps stepping on small insect bodies—wasps, bees, and ants as well, some still moving. They haven’t brought anything other than a couple of cans of Wasp-death to handle more insects. Martin carries one of the cans, a sure sign that Torres and Daniels don’t think there’s much danger, or don’t think there’s anything they can do about it.

  Mary understands; in tight situations, you tend to ignore that which doesn’t make any sense, doesn’t fit any reasonable hypotheses.

  Torres consults a map on his pad. “There’s supposed to be some sort of waiting room up ahead.”

  Suddenly, the lights in the hallway come back on. For a moment, the glare blinds them. Mary blinks and shades her eyes. The brightness makes the smell seem even more offensive. Martin pushes along with his hand against one wall, stepping gingerly through the piles of dead insects.

  They can’t ignore the insects now. “Where in the hell did all these come from?” Daniels asks rhetorically.

  Torres is t
he first into the waiting room. “My God,” he says, with little emotion; something to say when you’re a professional, nothing bothers you, but you still have a soul.

  Mary enters the room, Martin behind her.

  “They’re all dead,” Daniels says a few moments later. She uses her pad to capture video clips. Two of the dead have been shot; the other is covered with insect stings. In four minutes, Torres motions them to move on.

  Mary looks at the backs of her hands. Small lesions have appeared on her right hand now, and on both wrists as well. She touches her face. Bumps on her cheeks and forehead.

  “Fuck this,” she says simply. Then, under her breath, “Shit. Shit.”

  Daniels glances at her, turns away. She doesn’t understand;

  Mary does not swear, has never tended to utter such obscenities in tight situations.

  Martin Burke watches her closely, however.

  She grits her teeth and follows Torres.

  29

  Giffey lies where he has smashed up against the wall and holds his nose against the awful smells: fresh death, blood, fresh-baked bread, and burned metal.

  The red glow from the library reaches a short distance down the gallery, but he can see nothing beyond the curve in the wall. The sounds of clashing warbeiters has stopped, and so has the sizzling of MGN deconstructing human bodies.

  In the darkness, Giffey touches his wounds lightly with his fingers. Tom clothing, torn skin; a larger hole in his leg than in his arm, but neither dangerous for now. Small pieces of shrapnel from the Ferret’s attack on the Hammer.

  He lies still for a moment longer, listening. The gallery and the library are silent. Whatever happened is over. He lowers his face and presses his damp cheek against the coolness of the tile floor.

  Giffey feels a spinning giddiness that tells him his whole inside story is coming apart at its all-too-obvious seams. He wonders if the malady that afflicted poor Ken Jenner, the effect Marcus Reilly boasted about, practically leered about, has settled in his head as well. If it has, it is working its nasty magic in a strange and devious way.