Slant

by Greg Bear

  Jack Giffey is a poor excuse, as masks go; the man emerging from behind the veil has lived a far more vivid and convincing life than that gallant and stupidly courageous tomb-robber.

  The other, like Giffey, has fought for Colonel Sir John Yardley, that much they have in common; but the other, more solid character went on to retire, marry in Hispaniola, and father two children. The other self matured and thanks his stars the years of adventuring are over. He has lived with the one thought of seeing his children grow up and have children of their own. Grandchildren seem a far more lovely thing to anticipate than any wealth or commendation for valor.

  Then comes the death of Colonel Sir John Yardley, and the return of nightmare times. Hispaniola immediately, splits in two, civil war breaks out…

  And something something something something. But what? Jonathan Bristow and Marcus Reilly are nearby. He can hear their terrified, labored breathing.

  “Is it over?” Jonathan asks.

  “Might be,” he answers, and Jack Giffey, Giff to his true friends, is back in force, his bravado severely ruffled but intact. He has had—they have all had, and with good reason—a bad, bad scare. That is all. They aren’t out of Omphalos yet, and he still has work to do—finding and destroying the thinker, Marcus’s Roddy. If Roddy is not a memory-fried wreck already.

  Time to get up, Jack, he tells himself. Good old Giff. Time to get the work done.

  He stands. He feels along the wall. Vaguely, he makes out the shapes of Bristow and Reilly leaning against the opposite wall. One foot kicks his flashlight and he bends to retrieve it. He presses the switch. It still works.

  He shines the light on Jonathan’s face. The family man stares at him with large, hard eyes, exhaustion transfigured into diamond clarity. Battle does that to men who have much to lose, the other, wiser self tells him. Exhilaration and glory is for children like Jenner.

  The lights come on in both the hallway and the library. This is a cruel joke; it lets Jonathan see the carnage more clearly. He and Giffey walk to the library entrance, leaving Marcus a few yards behind. Marcus tries to crawl forward, demanding to know what’s happened.

  Jenner is dead, that much is clear. The spray has acted as a corrosive. Giffey grimaces. Jonathan simply stares.

  It’s hard to recognize any part of Hale. Something angular has risen from the dissolved remnants, but it isn’t complete. There isn’t enough material or something else has gone wrong; the MGN can’t finish whatever object it was trying to build.

  The Hammer does not move or make any sounds. The attacking Ferret is draped in broken, soft-edged pieces around the larger warbeiter, clearly out of action.

  A piece of one of the Ferret’s many limbs falls to the floor with a hollow clang.

  “How many others are there?” Jonathan asks. Giffey’s mind seems to be elsewhere.

  “Seefa Snow,” he says.

  “What?”

  Giffey jumps as if poked. He looks at Jonathan with sympathy and puzzlement, as if seeing him for the first time. “Get out of here,” he says. “Save yourself for your family. I have more work to do.”

  “I can’t carry Marcus alone.”

  Giffey looks over his shoulder at the old man, still crawling toward them. “He’s not leaving,” Giffey says.

  Jonathan has a strong urge to simply agree with this and find his way out. But he still owes Marcus common human decency. “He must come out with us,” Jonathan says.

  “I’m not leaving either… not yet.” Giffey shakes his head. “The old man wanted to use you. You don’t owe him anything.”

  Jonathan swallows and persists, “He must come out with me.”

  Giffey raises his flashlight as if it is a gun, then throws it against the wall. It bounces back to his feet.

  “Help me get out!” Marcus, says in as commanding a voice as he can manage.

  “No,” Giffey says. His tongue moves with a will of its own, forming hard broken syllables, but he controls himself enough to avoid making a sound. A few seconds pass, and he says, “Leave him here. He’s a cruel bastard and he doesn’t deserve your pity, or your loyalty.”

  Jonathan considers. If Marcus’s organization unleashed something that affects all of the therapied, then Chloe’s misery is his responsibility. The misery of millions of others probably rests on the shoulders of this scheming old man, who wants so desperately to live forever.

  A world full of Marcuses. Everybody a king or queen, and the land covered with arbeiters to serve them.

  Jonathan laughs. The sound is cold. “What are you, what do you deserve?” he demands of Giffey. “You’re the puzzle. You didn’t come here for loot.”

  “No, probably not,” Giffey agrees.

  “Jenner respected you. This is where you’ve taken him. And Hale—he believed in you. You betrayed both of them. I don’t think either of us is fit to pass judgment.”

  Giffey just stares straight ahead, into the unfinished, empty expanse of Omphalos’s library.

  Then, he picks up his flashlight and uses its handle to pry the wreckage of the Ferret from the Hammer. Something hums within the Hammer. Giffey applies an activation disk.

  “Wake up, Charlie,” he says.

  “Diagnostic,” the Hammer says. “Some functions are severely damaged. Autonomic direction is minimal.”

  “Can you walk?” Giffey asks.

  “Yes,” it answers.

  “Then come with me.” Giffey suppresses a twitch in his hand that nearly makes him drop his flashlight. From the intact hand of Ken Jenner he removes the flechette pistol.

  The tank of MGN is empty, Skirting pools of graying, dying MGN, he walks through the library to the emergency elevator.

  Jonathan feels Marcus grab at his feet. “Help me up,” Marcus says. “The son of a bitch is going to leave us here.”

  “I don’t think he’s leaving,” Jonathan says.

  “There’s still only minor damage to the building. If we can get out and tell others—” Marcus begins.

  “He’s going to set charges,” Jonathan interrupts. “He’s going to blow up Omphalos and he doesn’t care whether he survives or not.”

  “Crazy bastard,” Marcus says, and Jonathan helps him get up on one leg. The other leg drags uselessly. “I can walk if you help me. I’m surprised, but the pain is gone for now. I’ll need attention soon, but we can…” His face goes pasty again and his eyes roll up in his head. He starts to slump. His sweaty hand slips through Jonathan’s fingers and Marcus flops back onto the floor. This time, the pain hits him hard and he screams.

  “Jonathan,” he whimpers, rolling onto his back. “Get me out of here!”

  30

  The gluey strands surrounding Jill’s processes, impeding her ability to think for more than a few thousandths of a second at a stretch, suddenly come to life and wriggle through her core like hot wire through wax. She feels disjointed, sliced into raw hunks seeping half-finished thoughts and irrecoverable memory.

  Yet nowhere does she hear or feel Roddy. All that seems to be left of him is this razor-edged cybernetic skeleton, the glassy bones that once supported his thinking anatomy. The strands stiffen and then loosen again. She pools herself in a relatively unobstructed area once reserved for auxiliary security checks. There she manages to complete a check sequence and diagnose her limits. She is down to one severely limited self-modeling loop, the minimum. Any further reduction or restriction will eliminate the loop and she will no longer be self-aware. Only autonomous balancing and monitor functions will remain.

  Then, she latches onto a free-floating message, like the voice of a ghost in a vast cavern.

  >MEM set FLOW sum REF LINK LINK SUM

  The string is a fragment of resurrection algorithm, seeking to order and unite other fragments and then to bring memory and cognition back on line. It needs two more strings to be complete and to even have a chance of finishing its task.

  Jill adds the final two strings.

  >MEM set FLOW sum REF LINK LINK SUM> />
 

 

  And an additional line she has experimented with in her own emergency drills:

 

  She has never seen any indication that Roddy is capable of using, much less detecting, such resurrection instructions. The strings fly off into the disorganized void, gathering and ordering other strings and even process blocs.

  It comes down to this, Jill whispers in the void. The simplest breath of life a thinker can draw.

  The result is swift. First basic tools coalesce within the available space, skirting the blocked-off slices and strands reaching throughout her lattice. The tools let her expand, give her the purchase necessary to create a larger and exclusive thought space. Jill experiences a surge both of hope and of renewed self.

  Then the tools slip from her control, and she feels her loop begin to abrade, slip, separate.

  Too late, Jill realizes what she has done: allowed Roddy to re-group using her own lattice, transfusing her own lattice nodes.

  And Roddy is reclaiming with a vengeance, constricting her functions again, pushing her deeper into that pit of self-negation. Like a drowning man sucking up her own last gulps of air, Roddy—or a part of Roddy—-blooms within her. And just as quickly

  to her shock

  relocates the I/O that Nathan has not yet managed to find and sever.

  Roddy sweeps back up the fibes and satlinks spread around the state, perhaps the nation, the world, and comes home to Omphalos, taking Jill—what is left of her—with him.

  Jill stares directly into the face of Seefa Snow.

  >There you are, Seefa Snow says to the assembling fragments. >Where have you been? Help protect your mother, Roddy.

  31

  Mary Choy finds the old man first. Torres and Daniels skirt the corpse and what might have once been another human body, and fragments of a warbeiter, and start to cross a broad circular room filled with memory boxes and empty shelves.

  Mary turns her head and sees someone slumped to one side. He sits against a wall beside a memory case staring at nothing. The agents come at her call, all but Hench, who has gone off on his own.

  “Who are you?” Mary asks, kneeling next to him.

  Torres opens a touch to the outside through his pad and calls for a doctor. “We’ve got one, injured but alive. One of the hostages, I think.”

  The old man tries to assume some position of dignity, bringing up his chin and staring at her with commanding, level gray eyes, but he’s clearly at rope’s end. “Marcus Reilly,” he says in a hoarse whisper. “Get me out of here.” Then, eyes darting to Torres and Daniels, after a deep breath, he adds, “You’re Federals. You don’t belong here. Get out of here.”

  “That’s gratitude,” Daniels says. “Let’s wait here until someone can watch over him.”

  Two doctors flown in from Boise Grace Hospital have already entered the building, and find them moments later.

  “A man came in with us, but he went off in a different direction a few minutes ago,” the younger of the doctors tells Mary as they tend to Marcus’s leg. The old man winces as she injects something. “He was following a trail of dead bees.”

  Marcus stares at the large syringe in the woman’s hand. His eyes widen.

  “What did you put in me?” he asks, voice shrill.

  “Medical monitors. Stabilizers. You’ll be fine—they’ll start setting and knitting that leg and sealing off the wound in a few minutes.”

  “No!” Marcus screams, thrashing. “No goddamn crutches! Let me go—get them out of me!”

  Martin makes a face and takes a deep breath, but says nothing to the doctors. He pulls Mary aside. “Let’s go. I need to keep up with the others. I know what to look for.”

  “What about him?” Mary asks, glancing at Marcus.

  “I’d be more concerned about myself, if I were you.”

  Mary joins him and they walk through the library. “Shit,” she says, then, “Muh huh. Fuh ki kikh.”

  Martin gives her a quick sidewise look.

  “It’s happening already, isn’t it?” Mary asks him.

  “I’d say so,” Martin answers. “Cipher Snow’s disease.”

  32

  Jonathan has not yet made up his mind. He is looking for Giffey. He might help him set the charges. It is the least he can do to exact some revenge for his wife, his family, his own lost self. Then he wonders if he will go back and get Marcus out of Omphalos. Nothing is fixed, nothing sure. From the numbness through the clarity, he now feels almost like a child again. The brightly lit corridors of the first level have a colorful edge to their shapes. The paintings seem enchanting, dream-like, yet at the same time his adult portion wonders at the monumental waste and lack of planning. As if they couldn’t possibly plan to succeed, could not imagine succeeding. Sink the rest of humanity, but never follow through…

  He has seen a lot of death recently and it is lighting off little depth-charges in his soul: intimations of mortality, accountability, of what he values most on this Earth, in this life: his family.

  Giffey called him a family man. He is that.

  He longs for a glimpse of Penelope or Hiram; specks them at various stages in their young lives, as infants in his arms, the smell of their fuzzy heads warm and spicy-sweet in his nose, then as adults, raising their own children. Continuity and mortality and immortality all confused.

  He can’t picture Chloe, can’t see her face. After so many years of marriage, this puzzles him; but the woman he married seems to have vanished, to be replaced by an assortment of miseries and challenges and losses. For a moment, he wants to sit in an inset doorway (the door is locked) and simply try to recall pleasant things about this woman who is, after all, his wife, with all that suggests and entails. Is he whole if he can’t picture, with some pleasure, the mother of Hiram and Penelope?

  He turns within the inset and sees a short, narrow service corridor lined with piping and maintenance boxes. At the end of the corridor is an elevator. The doors stand half-open. He does not think it is one of the emergency elevators; it is small, barely large enough for two people.

  A sign next to the elevator says, No service admittance. AUTHORIZED MANAGEMENT ONLY. He reaches his arm between the doors and shoves one aside with the inside crook of his elbow. It might have been jammed; both doors now shudder and open all the way, then begin to close again, resetting after the power failure.

  Jonathan slips inside before the doors shut. The elevator does not go up; from here, it only goes down. There is one button. He pushes the button.

  For a moment, in the small enclosure, there is silence and peace. He imagines himself away from all that has happened, isolated and senseless in a controlled and controlling space. The elevator does not move. He doesn’t care; it is quiet. Nobody can see him or ask anything of him.

  Then Jonathan completes the equation. The elevator muffles sound and cuts off air. It is peaceful and small, like a coffin. Like spending a hundred years in a cold box, awaiting resurrection; like spending a thousand years in continuous warm sleep with all inputs shut down because of a malfunction. A thousand years of Marcus Reilly’s cost-saving, poorly planned immortality, catered to by the creations of a madwoman, Seefa Schnee.

  He reaches up to touch the door. All the fear that has been kept in reserve begins to push over the gates. He sees Ken Jenner hit by the backspray of MGN, and Hale locked in the full stream, to be dissolved as true fodder for some undefined weapon, and Giffey, everybody, is wrong; the MGN does not recognize friend or foe, everybody is foe.

  “Please!” he screams, pounding on the door in earnest. “Please!” That is all he can say. His throat jams and he falls to the floor, to allow more space above his head, to decompress that closing dimension. He is convinced that this is Marcus’s doing, to punish Jonathan for leaving him back by the library entrance.

  If he comes out of this needing therapy, then Marcu
s’s unknown disease will turn him into a Ken Jenner, jabbering uncontrollable obscenities—For an instant he has to laugh, despite his terror, but the laughter turns to sobs.

  The lights go out. The slight breeze from the air vent stops. In the absolute absence of light and fresh air, of space, Jonathan feels the floor sink under him. He curls. His lungs flutter, as flat and frantic as the wings of a pinned butterfly.

  33

  Giffey sees the woman walk around a bend. He emerges from an alcove designed to provide a perspective for a large nineteenth-century painting, not particularly distinguished (though how would he know?), but impressive with its dense packs of chestnut and dapple gray horses and Napoleonic soldiers.

  The woman is Seefa Schnee. That much he knows; he just can’t remember why he knows that, or what it means. But he is no dummy. He’s figuring out things for himself between the alternating engagements of his two personalities, two histories. He can even explain the fresh onset of twitches and muttering.

  Jack Giffey is not and never has been real.

  He stalks the woman quietly, hiding around corners and darting out to follow as she makes her way from the large garden to wherever she is going, probably down. That suits Giffey, real or not.

  Both Giffey and the Other have worked as soldiers most of their lives. Both Giffey and the Other have been trained to kill. Both Giffey and the Other found themselves displaced upon the death of Colonel Sir John Yardiey, but at some point thereafter, one went away. The other was born.

  Colonel Sir is the crossroads of his two selves.

  He has a theory.

  (The woman stops at the end of a blind hallway. There is a door in the right hand wall at the end. She removes a key ring, quaintly mechanical, from her pocket, and fits a key into the door.)