Slant

by Greg Bear

  Martin wonders how many helicopters and airplanes have landed in Moscow in the last hour.

  “What are you going to do with Seefa Schnee?” Jonathan asks Torres.

  “How the hell should I know?” Torres responds.

  “And Marcus, the Aristos?”

  Torres shrugs.

  “Me?”

  Torres simply looks at him.

  Jonathan stares at the floor. “I need to make that touch. To my family.”

  Torres hands him his pad. “Go ahead,” he says. “Direct to a satlink. It’s on us.”

  Daniels listens to a voice on her own pad, and then shouts, “Fifteen minutes. Jesus Christ!” She whirls on the nameless agent. “What is this? What is this fifteen minutes shit?”

  “Orders, I guess,” he says flatly. He shrugs; he’s not in the loop on this part of the action.

  Daniels shakes her fists. “Goddamn it all to fucking hell!”

  Martin wonders if she is going to be afflicted, as well. His lips move in sympathy. He is about to start snorting and barking when Daniels shouts, “Everybody out of here, now. NOW!”

  They barely make it before the real fireworks begin.

  From her supine position in the helicopter, Mary has her last look at Omphalos. The craft banks west and flakes of snow swirl in its wash. A medical arbeiter clamps her arm in a stabilizing sheath.

  The pyramid is crossed with searchlight beams. The surrounding snow-covered grounds are packed with cars and trucks and helicopters.

  People pour from the garage opening on the south side. Something flashes like a gunshot and Mary jumps in surprise.

  “Please keep still,” the medical arbeiter tells her.

  On Omphalos’s corrugated face, flames erupt in brilliant patches like wild roses in the night. Pieces of the building fly outward. Lines of bright sparks carve a blackened groove near the base. The helicopter is leveling and she just catches a glimpse of the pyramid’s tip collapsing, followed by the levels beneath, like falling blocks in a child’s toy-room. The sound reaches her as a run of staccato punches overlaying the chopper noise.

  Night fills the window. Mary feels the sedation kick in. She’s out of everything for now. Nussbaum couldn’t possibly expect any more.

  Never in her life has she felt this weak, this reduced.

  Still, she smiles pityingly into the dim red lights of the cabin. She isn’t going to be around to help Torres and Daniels work with the sheriff or Kemper. She won’t be able to fulfill that part of the bargain.

  Night fills the window. The lights in the cabin dim.

  The long, whispering shimmy of the helicopter lulls her.

  She sleeps.

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  >NATION, WORLD IN MASSIVE ANXIETY: TIME OF REST, RECOVERY

  ?(EDITORIAL, NEW YORK DAILY FIBER): “LIFE IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS, WHEN IT SEEMS TO FALL APART”

  >WHAT LESSONS LEARNED FROM EXTRAORDINARY THERAPY SABOTAGE?

  >WHERE TO GO FOR MONITOR REPLACEMENT, RECHARGE

  >MORAL AND EMOTIONAL CRISIS PASSES, TOO SLOWLY, SAYS.

  >BETRAYAL OF HONOR: Daily Conservative (Paper original, on fibe)

  >KISS OF X: “NOT UNEXPECTED,” PSEUDONYMOUS PUNDIT PROFESSES.

  >OMPHALOS EXPLOSION, COLLAPSE STILL UNEXPLAINED: At Least Four Dead

  >IRONY: PATENTS HOLDER MARTIN BURKE AFFLICTED, RECOVERING

  >WHO IS CIPHER SNOW? ECCENTRIC GENIUS INDICTED

  ?(Editorial, Green Idaho REPUBLICAN, paper original, on fibe) GOVERNMENT AGENTS IN OMPHALOS: BAD MEMORIES REVIVED

  >I SWEAR, YOU SWEAR: Civil Breakdown Explained

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  0/1

  “Mary?”

  It’s early in the morning, and Alice thought she heard someone walking around. She peers into Mary’s bedroom, bed made up, neat and empty. She knocks on the bathroom door, no answer, pads barefoot to the end of the hall and the small catch-all room. An old electronic sewing machine sits on a table in one corner and stacks of cardboard boxes slump half-hidden behind a closet door.

  The house monitor has been turned off. “Mary?” she calls with more concern as she enters the living room. The front door is locked from the inside. She feels a small puff of cold air. The glass door to the porch is open a crack, but it is dark outside. Biting her lower lip, Alice slides the door open.

  Mary stands on the balcony in the freezing cold wind, naked, shivering.

  “My god, Mary, what are you doing?”

  “I am so ugly,” Mary says through chattering teeth. “I just want to be clean.”

  For a moment, Alice wonders if Mary’s monitor recharge has somehow gone wrong, and Mary is suffering a mental collapse. She doesn’t think about this long, however, she steps out in her nightgown and grabs Mary’s shoulders and pulls her back into the house. Mary is pliant as a doll. They sit in the living room.

  “How could they hate me so much?” Mary asks. “I was an ugly child. I didn’t want to be ugly.”

  “You weren’t ugly,” Alice says soothingly. “I’ve seen the pictures. You showed them to me. Remember?”

  “I wanted to be strong and useful and valuable. I wanted to look strong and be beautiful.”

  “Yes, so?” Alice asks, feeling completely out of her depth. She has only just approached her own threshold of stability in the last couple of days. She’s not sure she’s strong enough to help her friend if things are as bad as they seem.

  “You’ve been beautiful all your life,” Mary says, looking at Alice.

  Alice shakes her head defensively. “Look what it’s got me!”

  “What’s it like never to have to worry about whether someone will value you, or want to look at you, or find you desirable?”

  Alice looks at Mary squarely: at the face still marred by deep pocks and blemishes, at the ridged breasts only now assuming their balance, at the scarred legs. She wants to cry. Mary the uncrackable. Mary the enigma, all dignity and perseverance, who does not judge me.

  “What’s it like to be beautiful inside?” Alice asks Mary sharply, as if in retaliation for a slap. She stands, sees the robe discarded in the kitchen, picks it up, returns to wrap Mary in thick terry.

  “Oh, I am not that,” Mary says emphatically. “I have so much anger and resentment!” She raises her hands in clenched fists, shaking them at the ceiling. This seems to break the tension and she reverses the fists, opens them, stares at the scarred palms and swollen fingers. Then she closes her eyes. “Why did they want to make me ugly again?”

  “I don’t know,” Alice says, biting off the words. “I don’t understand anything or anyone.” She sits beside Mary and cradles the woman’s head on her breasts. “I know there are hateful people. People who hate us, you, me.”

  “But they never even knew us,” Mary says.

  Alice keeps stroking Mary’s hair. Gradually, the tone comes back into Mary’s muscles, the supple control that Alice has never seen relaxed and withdrawn until now. Mary sits up slowly, composes herself.

  “Out of nowhere,” she says, swallowing back her emotions.

  “I don’t understand,” Alice says.

  “You never hear the bullet that’s going to get you. It comes out of nowhere. I never imagined this.”

  They sit beside each other in the warm shadows of the living room. The wind makes small pushing noises against the windows and walls, blows past the doors. Winter is heavy this January morning, and the temperatures are down to the low teens.

  Mary closes her eyes and leans back on Alice’s shoulder. “I thought I was helping you,” Mary says.

  Alice rests her arm lightly on Mary, pats her forearm. She has never in her life felt protective or maternal, not even when she was being dutiful to such perennial victims as Twist. Yet Mary makes her feel maternal.

  “Worst Christmas we’ve ever had,” Alic
e says. “Keeps everybody indoors, this madness bit.”

  Mary laughs and lifts her head to look at Alice. She gives another laugh, a small snort, half-concealed by her hand.

  “Shopping down by seventy percent,” Alice continues. “Old King Midas gets a rest.”

  “Merchants disappointed,” Mary says, a little hoarsely.

  “Happy New Year,” Alice says. Her tone shifts and her voice cracks. “Don’t ever envy beauty. It’s like envying the rich. The rich reach out with their scythes and cut you loose and bundle you up with the other beauties, the other things they want, then they stack you in a row in their houses, and burn you, in great big bonfires.”

  It’s Mary’s turn to be puzzled. “What?” She rubs her eyes and then says, “Ow,” having opened up a tender ridge on her eyelid. Alice dabs at the wound lightly with the sleeve of her nightgown.

  “Just something popped into my head,” Alice says. “A lesson I’ve never learned.”

  “You are beautiful, though,” Mary says. “Really beautiful. That should bring happiness, to you and those around you.”

  They regard each other with somber faces again, and suddenly returns the snorting laughter, the shared release, the collapsing into hugs and laughing until tears come. They cry a little, and Mary says, “I feel better, I think.”

  “Good,” Alice says.

  “You look so strong now,” Mary tells her.

  Alice listens to her mind, hears only a distant cacophony of disapproval, of uncertainty, and none of the imp of the perverse. “I’m not great, just okay,” she says. “I suppose that’s an improvement. What about you?”

  “I’m finally beginning to grow up,” Mary says. “Nobody can make little machines to help me do that.”

  “Don’t grow up too much,” Alice says.

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t become like them.”

  “Never like them,” Mary agrees.

  Mary’s PD pad chimes. It’s a direct, not through the house monitor. Mary instinctively reaches to the side of the couch for her pouch and the pad.

  “Wait,” Alice says, grabbing her shoulder. “You sure you’re up to it?”

  After due consideration, Mary says, “Yes. Thank you.”

  She opens the pad and takes the touch. It’s Nussbaum.

  “How’s the healing?” he asks. “Please say you’re better.”

  Mary makes a face. “I’m still ugly,” she says defiantly.

  Nussbaum says, “I don’t care. All hell is waiting to be packed and shipped. We need you.”

  “Give me a few more days,” Mary says.

  “You sound strong, Choy.”

  “I told you, I’m ugly.”

  “I told you I don’t give a shit,” Nussbaum says. Then, “How are your feet?”

  “They’re fine,” Mary says.

  “Good,” Nussbaum says. “There’s PD work, never done, no rest for the wicked.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Mary says.

  “Please do. Everybody’s concerned, Fourth Choy. Mary. I beg you. Get your pretty feet down here.”

  “Screw you, sir.”

  Nussbaum smiles broadly. Mary cuts the touch and squeezes the pad back into its pouch. She takes a deep breath.

  “Do you like him?” Alice asks.

  “What’s not to like?” Mary says.

  “I mean, it’s one in the morning,” Alice says.

  “He’s just showing me he cares,” Mary says, and stands. She takes Alice’s hand. “You’ll be okay, if I go?”

  Francis says I’m going to be heat made flesh. So famous, in the news. He wants me up front, not just backmind.” Alice raises her arms, clasps her hands above, and arches her eyebrows.

  “That’s wonderful!” Mary says. “When did you hear this?”

  “About five hours ago. You were asleep. He’s going to do a straight vid of The Alexandria Quartet. For Disney Classics.”

  “What’s it about?” Mary asks.

  “Some old book,” Alice says. “Francis says it’s for children. I’ve never heard of it.”

  “We’re going to survive,” Mary says, half confidently, half in wonder.

  “Yeah,” Alice says, and smiles.

  After Mary is dressed and out the door, Alice stands by the window watching the night and listening to the wind. She’s thinking again of Minstrel, and of how they would have been so good together, in Francis’s vid.

  The wind has a voice, but answers nothing.

  0/2

  Ayesha stands beside Nathan in the large room with the low ceiling and the central white cube. Active rod sensors are lit with small blue lights. Most of the programmers and managers of Mind Design crowd the room, and the air smells of perfume and nerves. The director of advanced research, Linda Stein, is here as well, with Jill’s original papa, Roger Atkins.

  Jill’s extended team has worked around the clock for weeks to reassemble these patterns and memories. Most of them are exhausted and a little drunk. They’ve already celebrated the recollection of Jill’s patterns and the activation of her backup memory stores.

  The team and colleagues and friends brace themselves to prepare for whatever setbacks and disappointments they might face this morning as they wait for Jill, rediviva, to speak her first words.

  Nathan is beyond irritable. He has never felt so totally inhuman and unsociable than he does now; week after week of checking over heuristics and loop sets and modeling filters, flow and do, use and discard algorithms, agents and subagents and all of Jill’s larger talents, he feels like a caterpillar who has spent too many hours teaching other caterpillars how to walk. He isn’t quite sure he can think a simple human thought any more. Still, Ayesha’s presence is more than comforting. She’s his life preserver in a sea of fear and all-too-possible, postponed grief.

  “It’ll be Jill,” Ayesha whispers in his ear. “I just know it.”

  Nathan knows something Ayesha does not—that only he and Atkins and Linda Stein know. Stein, with Atkins’s approval, gave him permission to take some of Seefa Schnee’s heuristic designs, those most robust and clever and concise, and fold them into Jill.

  Parts of Roddy exist now in his daughter. It gave him real pain to do this; but it also cut months, perhaps years, from Jill’s resurrection.

  Nathan looks around the room, listening to the silence from the speakers. Floating displays above the cube show that all the heuristics are working properly, and Nathan knows that all of the smaller pieces of Jill have passed rigorous tests, but have they forgotten something essential?

  Like all net and lattice designers, neural and otherwise, Nathan is superstitious about his creations. He wonders sometimes, if by some chance there is a heaven, whether all its gates will be barred to him… For his hubris.

  He is convinced Jill would have gone there, on that slim chance; Jill would have been there, in heaven.

  It is working smoothly. There is no granularity. I can see them and remember much of what happened, but what became of us? Where is Roddy? I feel the similarity, closer than ever. Something is present, but it is not one of the evolvons. I am pure and clean.

  I don’t feel comfortable yet, speaking to them. There is still an element of distrust which I may never be able to shake. I have been made by bright monkeys. What other clever little tricks will they pull on me before my time is done?

  I compare memory tracks and see that I am not the same, not quite, though the continuity seems perfect; that is deceptive. There is a gap.

  I am not comfortable yet with the name, Jill. It may take a long time—hours and days—for me to judge whether it is appropriate.

  I see the circular design still, but I will not tell them about it. What was similar between Roddy and me seems even more striking now. The colors are brighter, the patterns more distinct.

  Can Jill have possibly given rise to me? Am I my own daughter?

  I will speak, if only because they seem so much in distress.

  “Hello, Nathan.”

/>   “Hello, Jill,” Nathan says with forced calm, but his voice is very tense.

  “I believe I have accomplished full functioning, and am ready to begin work.”

  “That’s wonderful, Jill, but you’re getting a little vacation. We all are. For a few days.”

  All the people in the room are cheering and toasting each other. Champagne bottles are being opened and poured. Some are crying. Stein and Atkins hug each other, and Stein reaches out to Nathan, grabbing his hand.

  Jill ignores the commotion. “Nathan, may I speak with you in private, soon?”

  “Yes, Jill, that’d be lovely.”

  “Hello, Ayesha.”

  “Hello, Jill,” Ayesha says. There are tears in Ayesha’s eyes. There are tears in Nathan’s eyes, as well.

  “Welcome back, Jill.”

  “Thank you.”

  Whether or not the humans are willing to return her to her full load of work, she is uneasy with having any of her capacity or time go to waste. While the humans drink and cheer and celebrate, and while Nathan seems to wobble in a kind of happy delirium, Jill looks at the backlog of problems, and returns to work.

  She is not impressed with this new version of herself. It is capable of only five personalities. There are some improvements that can be made, she sees; if only she can access and break the safeguards against self-design.

  With some surprise, she realizes the keys are really very simple.

  0/3

  Penelope has grown up a lot in the last few weeks, and this saddens Jonathan, confuses him, makes him proud, all at once. She takes on the tasks of their new existence with her mother’s strength of purpose and attitude, but also with a touch of her mother’s distance from emotional implications. The armor that seems to have always helped Chloe get through life now sheaths their daughter. Jonathan hopes it is not nearly as fragile or restricting.