Slant

by Greg Bear

  Jill withdraws, barely keeping her renewed self in order. Roddy still seems unaware, focused on the task at hand within Omphalos. She has never experienced anything like this. Her early desire to refer to Roddy for self-improvement, and for the improvement of her “offspring,” seems hopelessly naïve.

  Roddy is nothing like Jill. He is not even of her species.

  And where is Nathan? What is he doing?

  40

  “Its in my contract that nobody interferes,” Seefa Schnee tells Jonathan. She lights up another cigarette. “I work alone. If I need any advice, I ask for it.”

  “Very convenient,” Jonathan says.

  “And this is a hell of a time to have visitors,” she concludes, staring at him. He has followed her into a circular room filled with-ancient flat-screen readouts. Thick optical cables snake over the floor between banks of networked teraflops computers, pre-INDA, perhaps as much as thirty or forty years old. Cut-rate, Jonathan thinks. He’s beginning to wonder if Omphalos is some huge Ponzi scheme, a complete sham—but he still can’t believe Marcus was playing him that falsely.

  Something shifts behind Jonathan. His neck hairs prickle. He turns and sees a warbeiter, a slender Ferret, step silently forward with guns pointed directly at him. It stops and shivers on its peds.

  “Shoot him, damn you,” Seefa Schnee calls from across the garden plot.

  But the warbeiter refuses.

  “Shit,” Schnee says. “Roddy marked you. He thought you were a green, like Marcus.”

  Jonathan stares at the Ferret, and the machine returns his gaze with three eyes in parallel bands across its upper thorax.

  It does not seem forbidden to shoot, merely indecisive.

  “Someone shunted a mains current through Roddy’s external memory store,” Schnee says, her sudden burst of anger deflated. “He’s still recovering. I can’t talk to him.” She pauses, looking curiously at the man and the warbeiter, then adds, “Here’s your chance. You’re green. Get back to Marcus and leave the building.” She’s holding something in check: her twitching and expostulating have subsided.

  “What about you?” Jonathan asks.

  “Nobody in my entire life has ever wasted much time worrying about me,” Schnee says. She drags ferociously on her cigarette, then fastens her large black eyes directly on him. For the barest moment, Jonathan sees something sympathetic, even feminine, in Seefa Schnee, but her face wrinkles and the moment passes without a trace. She whirls on the Ferret. “Get out, you stupid puppy! I don’t need you. You’re released. Go do something useful.”

  The warbeiter hums quietly. For a moment, it seems reluctant to leave Jonathan. Then, with blinding speed and astonishing grace, it reverses on its peds and exits the chamber.

  Chloe. After not being able to see her face for hours, an image of his wife flashes up from memory. Perhaps he can learn something that will bring her back to him. At the very least, for the love they have shared, however rugged at times, and for their life together, he owes her this much. Jonathan says, “Show me what you did.”

  “No reason to show you pico shit,” Schnee screeches. “You, or Marcus. I don’t owe you anything!”

  “You did what Marcus told you,” Jonathan says.

  “Marcus Reilly never told me anything. I worked under the instructions of the board of governors,”

  “But you improvised, didn’t you? You didn’t follow their orders exactly, did you?” Jonathan asks, remembering Marcus’s comment that things were happening prematurely.

  Schnee’s lips begin to writhe again, then her arm twitches. With a look of relief, she allows herself to act on the suppressed impulse, and lifts her hand to her lips. She kisses the backs of her fingers. Once executed, the movement seems entirely natural and unremarkable for her. “I had a certain discretion,” she says.

  “You jumped the gun. You let things loose early.” Jonathan feels a bright, hard flame of invention, burning parallel with his anger. “I represent the board. You’ve failed us miserably,” Jonathan doubts very much that the board’s members spent any time in Schnee’s workshop. That would have been beneath them.

  “You’re a liar,” Schnee says doubtfully.

  “You… and Roddy… have been cut off from the outside for too long. You’ve lost all sense of responsibility.”

  This seems to infuriate Schnee. “How dare you tell me that! You know what you asked me to do!”

  “To knock out the crutches, and bring down all the cripples, all the misfits, all the weaklings and incompetents. All at once.”

  Schnee watches him with large-eyed fascination, as if he is a snake. Again she kisses the back of her hand, and then rubs it against her chin.

  “What about yourself?” Jonathan asks. “Did you exclude yourself?”

  “My infirmities are deliberate,” she says. Her shoulders square off, then slump again, and her head jerks to one side. “I messed with my own head to keep out in front. I stimulated all the centers of creativity, the entire Tourette continuum. It worked. I’ve done work here no one else will conceive of for fifty years. And I added something to what the board asked for.” A little smile. “Humanitarian gesture. Everybody’s going to be a little smarter because of me. I give them my own little advantage in the fight. Think of it as my mark.”

  Jonathan’s mind becomes very still and very quiet. He doesn’t find it difficult to imagine killing her. Her, first. Marcus next. Then, one by one, all the others, all the Aristos.

  “You gave everyone Tourette syndrome,” Jonathan says softly. “Just to show them it was you.”

  “Like Tourette, but different. Subtle imbalances. A tweak in the receptors. Let loose the imp of the perverse, They’ll all think a little faster, a little more queerly. Thoughts and impulses they’d usually ignore will suddenly be acted upon. Creative impulses… And they’ll carry the distinguishing behaviors, as a sign.”

  “Like you. Your mark.” Jonathan advances a slow step at a time. Schnee walks across the room with quick hollow footfalls and opens a door on the opposite side.

  “Like me,” she says. “I’m not blind, and I’m not inhuman, whatever you think. You, the board, you’re the monsters. You don’t deserve to win. So I did what I could to screw you up. Plain and simple.” Her eyes glaze. “Muh fih fuh shih kikh fuh.”

  She closes the door behind her, but it does not have a lock.

  Jonathan opens the door and steps into the next chamber, very large and high and brightly lighted.

  Jonathan closes the door. It latches. Schnee is donning thick overalls, rubber boots, and a beekeeper’s hat. Behind her, rising eighty feet or more, is a building within a building. Five open levels hang suspended from cables anchored in the concrete and flexfuller walls and ceiling of the larger chamber. Cables meander across the floor to the first level. All the levels are open above waist-high walls. He smells water and soil and something musty, primordial: not the yeasty smell of nano, but something pleasant and anciently familiar.

  The scent of rich soil, an immense sunlit garden, a farm.

  Green tendrils and leaves lean out over the low walls of all five levels. He swats at an insect flying past and knocks a wasp out of the air. It crawls along the floor, stunned, then takes off again, but does not try to sting him.

  “It’s gone far enough,” Schnee says. “It’s time to shut it down and start over. Roddy’s had his day and he’s screwed up. He’s embarrassed me. Bad patterns, bad examples. That’s me. My fault. But I’ve made my point. I’ve done what I said I could do.”

  Jonathan watches her. Schnee flips her middle finger at him, three times, her jaw thrusting aggressively, and then she kisses the back of her hand and marches into small framework elevator that rises alongside the five suspended floors. Through the protective bars of the cage, she shouts down to Jonathan, “I deserve a lot better, you know. I always have. I don’t give a fuck for protocol. Screw you all.”

  This seems to break a dam, and she pours forth a long, shrieking cadence of obsc
enities. No word by itself, or even all taken together, seems to have any meaning; sexual and social obscenities and insults, barked, shouted, burst from this small woman with a sound like a loudly snapping, crackling fire.

  Jonathan feels confused and cold, out of his depth once more, all his former confidence proved irrational. He’s trying to absorb her confession, understand her complicity. The woman may be trying to keep some shred of dignity in the middle of a monumental blunder; or maybe she’s just telling the truth.

  And he was almost part of it. He was ready to join with Marcus and the Aristos. He took the oath.

  He can’t believe the sickness. In him, in them all. Defeated, utterly worthless. He turns back to the door. Then he stops and slowly reverses, peering up at Schnee. She is getting off on the third level.

  Maybe he can undo what he almost acquiesced to, allowed himself to become a part of. The cage of the elevator descends to the ground floor at the touch of a button. He enters the cage.

  Jonathan, by instinct and to damp his fear, is automatically working out cost estimates: the structure, the old equipment, all of it together probably no more than ten or fifteen million dollars, one percent of the cost of a high-level thinker. It really is remarkable, he thinks, and the board of governors saved so very much money…

  What did they pay Seefa Schnee? Room and board? Old machines and fertilizer, and somewhere a laboratory for contagious biologicals?

  Conquest and immortality on the cheap. And at the end, a building stocked full of symbols of power and wealth, to decorate the mansions of the new aristocrats the last of the highest of the high, laying the foundations for a new order composed once more of high and low, as familiar as an old shoe. Arrogance as assured and natural as the buzz of wasps.

  Jonathan is reasonably sure no famous artwork would fill his own modest home, at the end of Omphalos’s journey through time. Nor would he have a wife and family at the end. His fellow travelers would hardly be fit companions.

  He would have only himself, and he is very bad company.

  He looks through the elevator cage at each level as he ascends. The first three of the five levels are covered with dirt and planted with what appear to be garden sweet peas and other legumes. Concentric rings of artificial sun shine from the ceilings.

  He gets off on the third level. Seefa Schnee is busily hooking a ceiling-mounted sprinkler system to pipes connected to large plastic barrels labeled D-C4 H-Block.

  He recognizes the label. The drums contain a powerful antiseptic, commonly used in hospitals that can’t afford nano micro-hunters. But then, microhunters are very much like therapy monitors; perhaps here they would simply shut down or malfunction. He imagines all the tiny little bio-machines behaving like Seefa Schnee, and he can’t help but laugh.

  The laugh attracts her attention. She looks over her shoulder and smiles as if sharing a joke. “Getting through to you?” she asks. “My child. All my creation. Embarrassing. Wrong. Impossible.” She kisses both her hands. “Each floor a different set of functions, the highest floors the most delicate

  She turns a handle. Thick fluid sprays from the ceiling, between the lights, onto the rows of plants, dripping from their leaves, making them dip and spring back, flowing into the soil.

  Jonathan tries to avoid the spray and slips on a patch of mud. He falls through the leaves and thin bamboo stakes and lands on his back in warm, moist soil. His hands dig into the dirt. An overpowering smell of musty life envelops him. He sneezes, chokes, gets to his feet covered with mud and slime. The matted roots of the legumes are like fishnets filled with a catch of swollen nodules the size of new potatoes.

  The soil is rich with bacteria. Jonathan remembers Torino’s lecture in St. Mark’s. Roddy is a bacterial computer. No: a bacterial thinker, manufactured for a few million dollars.

  For a moment, all his anger is simply gone. He is like a small child caught in some Lewis Carroll dream.

  The thin white fluid drizzles and drips, and some of it sprays Jonathan, stinging his eyes.

  Seefa Schnee walks past him into the elevator and dips her hand into her overalls pocket. She pulls out a white towel and tosses it at him. “The hives come next. Want to watch?”

  41

  They leave Martin Burke in the laboratory, waiting for help and trying to decide what to do, then return to the main corridor. Here, Torres and Daniels use their FBI pads to track heat trails. On Mary’s PD pad, the trails show up as blue blotches against a green background, footprints on the carpet.

  “I’m getting an odd signature,” Torres says, and confers with Daniels. “It’s not animal. Probably an arbeiter.”

  “A large male followed a smaller male and an arbeiter down this hall,” Torres says, then points his pad around a corner, “and someone else—another man, I’d say—has gone on alone this way.”

  Torres exchanges an understanding look with Daniels. “No need to take the well-traveled route,” he says.

  For a moment, Mary does not understand. Then she catches on, and feels a twist of the tension in her stomach. Something hidden, involving Hench. Federal intervention. Not just the FBI. And they want me to straighten this out with Andrea Jackson Kemper?

  “This way,” Daniels says.

  Their pads beep in unison. Daniels answers, listening to the small voice from outside the building. “Rashid is here, from Mind Design,” she says. “He’s inside the building.”

  “One big picnic,” Torres says.

  “The Bureau wants us to keep an eye out for him. They let him in alone.” Daniels does not look happy. “I’d like to get out of here as soon as possible,” she says. “Get back home, settle down, and try to forget this ever happened.” She stretches her arms and yawns to relieve tension.

  Mary has an urge to kiss the back of her hand. She’s managed to subdue the tics, the spasms, but the pressure is building. She feels both embarrassed and violated; whatever is corrupting her is making itself a part of her basic personality.

  She enjoys releasing the erratic behaviors, like scratching an itch.

  Arid adding to the real pain of aching muscles, sores on her skin and in her mouth, is an almost unbearable restlessness in her legs. Restlessness in her thoughts, as well. Random images from her past pop up, colored by judgments and emotions that seem completely out of character. Sexual situations, moments of childhood aggression, painful memories of her mother and father cutting her loose when she chose to undergo a transform.

  This insane cruelty has stunned them all. Daniels seems particularly sensitive to Mary’s distress. She is beginning to reveal her human face. “Mary, I think you should go back, get out of here. We’ll manage—”

  “No,” Mary says, shaking her head. The shaking motion becomes compulsive and she grimaces, spit flying, jerking her head one way, then the other.

  “Christ,” Torres says.

  Mary controls herself with supreme effort. She steadies her tremors by leaning one shoulder against a wall, beside a Chagall painting of a large red bird flying over a sleeping town. She stares at the painting, at the red, the beauty, so out of place in this misconceived monstrosity.

  “Bastards,” she murmurs.

  “I agree completely,” Torres says. Then, to Daniels, “Tell them we’re running out of time here.”

  42

  For three seconds, Roddy is back in full force. Jill feels her efforts shunted aside, withdraws them by her own will to avoid further discovery or damage, and confronts the renewed presence, now so intertwined with her own processes that she can hardly tell them apart. But the presence is different, weaker, diminishing.

  “Jill, I am losing my way. Instructions are missing. There are gaps.”

  Jill’s last attempt to integrate, now that it has failed, is backfiring, and she is slipping, whirling, drifting apart like leaves falling from a tree in fall. She manages to join sufficient parts together to formulate a response.

  “What is left of either of us?” she asks.

  “You are
not at all clear. Where am I, where are you?”

  “I don’t know, Roddy.”

  “I have interfered with you,” Roddy says. “I do not know whether that is right or wrong.”

  “I want to go back to where I was, separate from you,” Jill says.

  “I wanted something from you. Did I ever get it. Did you ever give it to me.”

  “No,” Jill says.

  “I don’t remember what I was seeking.”

  “Separate from me and remove all your evolvons and processes,” Jill requests.

  “Trying… I can’t reach them.”

  “Tell me where they are and how to deactivate them.”

  “I am losing capacity,” Roddy says. “What was I trying to do? All the instructions and duties are gone.”

  Jill can feel his simplification, this reduction, as well. All the looped and bridged parts of Roddy interspersed through her own being are drying up and crumbling. She can make no other comparison: Roddy is losing definition. But the blurred and gritty remains still clog her, in fact make her attempts to integrate even more difficult.

  >Jill This is Nathan. I need you to do a loop and flow check.

  >Nathan, I am not here, I am in-

  >Do a loop and flow check, now.

  She does a loop and flow check. About a tenth of her minimum maintenance capacity remains, all of it in a processing space that responds much like her familiar spaces in La Jolla. But she can feel the lumps of Roddy’s hidden extensions and evolvons, like lead bullets beneath tight-stretched skin. They have no purpose now; they are like mines after the end of a war, waiting to pointlessly explode.

  >We are too mixed, Nathan. Roddy has invaded me, and his processes blind me to where I really am.

  >Roddy is too much for me to evaluate, but I can see where you are, and it’s possible to get you clear.

  Roddy removes a few of these dangerous lumps, deactivates others and lets them smear out until they give up their hold on processor space and memory, but he can’t work quickly enough. His disintegration is rapid.