Shuteye for the Timebroker

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Iamo, distribute the supplies to their proper places.”

  Ingeniero was startled to discover that some peculiarity in the echo of these walls made his voice resonate in a curious manner. He resolved not to speak any more than was absolutely necessary to his slave.

  But evidencing no trouble with the audio distortions, the slave responded to the spoken command as promptly as it had to the beamed orders. Forming various useful temporary extrusions, it went about its chores.

  While Iamo worked, Ingeniero moved to explore the rest of the tower. Now, he thought, for a good look around to see what I can see.

  The Oriole had not been a swift luxury ship but a spartan commercial vessel, and Ingeniero was worn out from the long tedious flight here from the world of Drylongso. But his excitement was such that he could not rest.

  An ornate impervium spiral staircase in one corner of the tower afforded access to the upper floors through eccentrically trapezoidal holes originally found in each ceiling. Eagerly climbing, Ingeniero bypassed the second floor (studio space) and the third (sleeping quarters), hastening for what he knew awaited him.

  The Chamber of the Lens.

  The top floor hosted only a large, low, circular dais positioned directly in the center of the room. Formed of the same substance as the tower, the dais had lately been equipped with a comfortable pad to cushion anyone who lay upon it. But more alarmingly, the altarlike platform also featured restraints for wrists and ankles.

  Ingeniero cast his gaze upward, toward the lens itself. But the much-anticipated spectacle was initially disappointing.

  Inset into the roof directly above the dais was a huge oval slab of crystal whose lower surface was subtly convex. Coating the outer, vacuum-exposed side of the lens was a film of opaque material installed by the humans, a covering that could be dispersed with a simple command. Currently, with this shield in place, the lens was rendered inert—a dark, bland mass.

  Hardly the appearance that the unnatural glassy eye would present, Ingeniero knew, when it was exposed to the massed brilliance of Skyfire’s heavens—at that exact moment when he would crucify himself beneath it.

  The worldlet dubbed Skyfire was positioned in a portion of the Milky Way that was particularly active in a cosmological sense. Great gaudy nebulae, pulsars, quasars, colliding suns, black holes, novae, gamma-ray bursters, protosuns, and a dozen other species of star thronged the heavens here, washing Skyfire with exotic radiations and quantum particles of every description. And the lens—

  The lens had apparently been designed to collimate and blend all those photons and gravitons and bosons and neutrinos into a single wash of unfathomable powers. The force that emerged from the underbelly of the lens defied all categorization by Diffusion science. Some experts maintained that it was a pure bath of numinous information, while others claimed the energy tapped alternate dimensions where the very laws of physics were different than what was accepted in this cosmos.

  What use the original inventors of the lens had had for their device was unknown.

  What was known to some degree was its effect on the human psyche.

  In a certain fraction of subjects, repeated exposure to the lens fostered a kind of epiphanical, satori state leading to immense creativity and insight into the universe.

  To other, less lucky victims, the lens brought only madness—or a mode of knowledge incompatible with this space-time continuum.

  This was the gamble Ingeniero was about to take.

  Either he would regain his proficiency and inspiration, or be reduced to a condition where he no longer cared about his quandary.

  Ingeniero placed a hand on the padded dais and looked up at the lens. But nothing in its enigmatic surface conveyed a hint of his fate.

  Downstairs, Iamo had finished its chores and rested placidly in a corner, its gelatinous bulk gently oscillating peristaltically like the mild oceans of some world with only a smallish moon.

  Ingeniero swallowed a metabolytic lozenge with some of his favorite sparkling waters from Rancifer, one of the only luxuries he had brought along. Thus fortified, he decided to test his talents for the umpteenth time since they had gone sour. Perhaps by some miracle they had been restored. In such a case, he would simply live the hermit’s life here for half a year, never uncapping the lens, until he could return in triumph to the high society circles he favored.

  Moving to Iamo’s side, Ingeniero said, “Iamo, detach.” The man gripped a fistful of the slaves mind-putty body and tugged. A chunk of Iamo’s synthetic flesh came away, quivering as a separate blob in Ingeniero s hand.

  Ingeniero placed the blob on the work surface of one of the carrels, then took a seat in front of it. Cupping the blob with both hands and closing his eyes, he began to run through the Ryland neurological protocols that would lead up to his focused imprinting mental thrust. As a template image, he picked one of the enormous skyscraper termite mounds of Verlag IV, a bumpy fractal edifice.

  Sweat sprang out on Ingeniero’s brow as he rehearsed the rituals he had undertaken so often in the past, with such success. At last he deemed his mind ready, and loosed the mental bolt upon the mind putty.

  Immediately, Ingeniero felt immensely enervated. But not in a positive way. He knew he had failed once more. He opened his eyes, and was rewarded with the sight of a hideous abortion. The mind putty had not taken the shape of the vertical termite mound, but instead had been warped into something that resembled the sprawling mutant coral reefs of Bonestell, riddled with cavities.

  Such were the current miserable powers of the famous mind-sculptor who had produced such widely acclaimed masterpieces as Child Guarded by Swamp Dragon and Nude Dakini.

  Furious, Ingeniero swept the botched sculpture to the floor where it shattered, the mind putty having been rendered permanently crystalline by the irreversible mental thrust.

  There was no way out now. Ingeniero would have to go under the lens.

  Tomorrow, though. Let him have one last night before his trial by heavenly fire.

  The anguished sculptor spent that last evening with his precious mind untouched by the lens in viewing his entertainment planchettes. But he found he could not concentrate on any of the various popular theological wrestling matches or enjoy any of the titillating transgenic dramas. His thoughts were riveted to the chamber above his head. Visions of his upcoming transfiguration plagued him—monster or genius, hell or heaven—until, finally, he was forced to swallow a soothing neuroleptic and retire to bed.

  Ingeniero’s dreams, if he had dreamed at all, were not recoverable in the morning.

  The word morning, naturally, was merely a convenience. Skyfire did not orbit any primary whose appearance would signal dawn. Its lambent, fulgurant, perversely fecund skies remained simultaneously static and ever-changing, a perpetual display of stellar pyrotechnics.

  After ablutions and a breakfast lozenge, Ingeniero summoned up all his inner fortitude and ascended to the uppermost level. Iamo perforce accompanied him, sloshing up the spiral stairs.

  Lying on his back, slanting his limbs in an X athwart the platform, Ingeniero ordered his slave to fasten the tethers around his ankles and wrists. Iamo complied.

  “Now leave the room and do not return for thirty minutes. The discharge of the lens might have unpredictable effects on your substance.”

  Iamo glopped down the staircase to the bedroom level and Ingeniero was left alone.

  The lens stared down at him like the blind eye of an alien god. The controls regulating the shielding film were open to a signal from Ingeniero’s cortical implant, just as Iamo was. The amount of time the shield should remain down could be specified.

  Sucking in a deep breath, Ingeniero triggered the shield for thirty minutes of exposure.

  The smart film went instantly from opaque to transparent, allowing the full force of a million arcane galactic furnaces to strike the lens.

  Instantly, the mass of crystal came alive. Excepting a few common low-energy photons that imping
ed on Ingeniero’s retinas and conveyed tenuous information about what was happening in the lens, the various radiations did not pass at light speed through the lens, but rather seemed to collect and mix for several moments within its bulk like seething globules of lava shifting across a thousand spectra, so that Ingeniero had a brief interval in which to contemplate the awesome phenomenon before the underside of the lens erupted in an almost solid gush of radiance, a flow hereafter sustained by continuous input from outside.

  The wave of alien force hit Ingeniero like one of the tsunami of Massenterre. He felt his body reduced to an insensate paste against the dais. Yet at the same time, immense pain threaded every atom of his all- too-corporeal form. His eyeballs seemed to melt in their sockets, dribble down his cheeks. All his joints dissolved, then re-cohered around centers of jagged flint. His inner organs seemed intent on strangling their neighbors. A background noise resolved itself after an eternity into the sound of his own screaming. He thrashed against the unyielding restraints, escape from this torture his only thought. But his struggle availed nothing.

  Then, suddenly, Ingeniero was elsewhere.

  The muck was cool against his long, sinuous body. Rich scents pervaded the thick medium through which he navigated, providing directions toward food and mates, and away from enemies. Life was ecstasy, every sense in harmony with the environment. Ingeniero gobbled up a nearby shrimplike creature—delicious!—undulated his powerful body, and slithered away in search of food and sex.

  The being whom Ingeniero was inhabiting had an average mature lifetime of approximately ten solar revolutions. Ingeniero lived all those years, eventually forgetting any other existence. When that host died—swallowed by something resembling a diamond-shaped manta ray— Ingeniero’s consciousness jumped to the predator. He lived years more in that form before making another jump. The manta died peacefully, and Ingeniero found himself hosted by one of the passing shrimps. Several more heterogeneous lifetimes passed until, without warning, Ingeniero found himself back in his human body.

  Above him, the lens was dark, inert once more. His pain-free, undeformed body felt utterly unnatural, like a foreign shell.

  A portion of Iamo protruded upward from the chamber below. Soon the slave had unfastened his master.

  Ingeniero stood with much difficulty, being forced to rely on Iamo’s support. Together, they somehow awkwardly descended to the lowest level. There, Ingeniero took a bath in a large artificial diamond tub, using large quantities of the plentiful water melted from a tethered water-ice asteroid. He found himself instinctively making undulant movements in the water as if to glide away, remembered movements his human body could only halfheartedly reproduce.

  After emerging from the tub and toweling off, Ingeniero stumbled in a confused daze to bed and fell almost instantly asleep.

  In the morning, he felt more his old self. Rummaging through his restored human memories, he found them to be at least as convincing and immediate as those of being a mudworm. Emboldened by having survived his first exposure to the lens, Ingeniero decided to test himself for any improvements in his condition. He detached a lump of mind putty from Iamo and subjected it to his sculptural impress.

  The goal of this trial had been a representation of one of the diamond-shaped manta rays. What resulted was a version of that creature that might have been produced by a mildly talented adolescent. Crestfallen, Ingeniero tried to buck himself up. Surely this sculpture was better than his attempt at a termite skyscraper. The hellbath under the lens had produced a measurable level of improvement. Additional sessions would surely sharpen his talents even further.

  Ingeniero set the sculpture on a shelf instead of destroying it. Let it stand as an incentive to return to the Chamber of the Lens.

  But not today.

  In point of fact, Ingeniero could not bring himself to return to the Chamber of the Lens for the next nine days. Why rush? He had six months here, he told himself, and surely just one or possibly two more sessions under the lens would completely restore his creative vitality. And letting his mind rest between sessions would probably aid the process. Too much stretching of his mental capacities could not be good for his sensitive brain.

  So Ingeniero busied himself with the few attractions around the tower. He donned his filmy vacuum suit once more and took an abbreviated walking tour of the planetoid. The immediate region boasted several impressive natural formations: stark canyons, jagged craters, brooding chiaroscuro mountains. Partnered with Iamo—whose usefulness in any emergency was unquestionable—Ingeniero pretended he was touring some of the more pleasant aesthetic vistas of the Diffusion, famous bucolic scenes on worlds such as Seabreeze and Cloudtrap.

  Life there was none—just a dead calm all day long.

  But always above his head when outdoors, the velvety black galactic canopy, splashed with raging colors and churning gases, spitting ions and fountains of brute particles, reminded Ingeniero of the torment that awaited him in the Chamber of the Lens, the silent radiant observers lashing him like a thousand fiery-eyed demons. And of course, the vacuum skies boasted not even the slightest speck of cloud to interfere with the overhead displays. Far from appearing as innocent displays of nature’s majesty, this stellar zoo seemed to Ingeniero a collection of malign creatures eager to feast on his corpse.

  So the uneasy mind-sculptor retreated inside the tower and sought to lose himself in his recorded simulations and stimulations. But none of these artfully crafted playlets or documentaries carried the same level of immersion that his life as a mudworm had. In retrospect, Ingeniero marveled at the way his old identity had totally dissolved, to be replaced by the consciousness of various marine creatures. What a sublime, liberating experience, conducive toward an all-embracing creativity! Purchased at such incredible pain, true. But had the flensing really been so bad?

  As recollections of the harshness of his rite of passage into the mud-world faded somewhat, Ingeniero would return to the Chamber of the Lens and contemplate strapping himself down once more. He would run his hand along the edge of the dais, test the restraints. But he always balked at actually doing so, turning on his heel and hurrying downstairs. What finally motivated him to undergo another excruciation was a third hopeful attempt at mind-sculpting. This essay produced an even more horrid botch than his termite skyscraper.

  He was retrogressing, not improving! Impossible, but undeniable …

  This path led only to disgrace and defeat, the end of Ingeniero the famous artist, and the subsequent desertion by his public, his patrons, his claque of sycophantic friends eager to abandon him for the next hot thing. He had to go under the lens again.

  Splayed out once more underneath the cyclopean orb, Ingeniero grimly shut his eyes and triggered the shutter-release command.

  Familiarity brought no shield against the titanic pain and torment induced by the hot flood of power from the lens. For the second time, Ingeniero was flayed and dissected, reconstituted as a mass of abused flesh, then launched across the void.

  Or did he draw the void down within himself?

  His mind came this time into a host he recognized: the sentient insect swarms of Wrasse. With their communal minds distributed across millions of tiny bodies, the Wrassians were essentially immortal, the death of any individual mote being negligible. Consequently, without the release of his host’s extinction, Ingeniero spent his entire thirty minutes under the lens experiencing centuries in the life of a single Wrassian swarm that called itself Go-slow. Go-slow’s main employment in life was to rehash old mathematical theorems looking for false proofs. This activity consorted poorly with Ingeniero’s tastes, and his immersion in the identity of Go-slow was less than perfect.

  Ingeniero came to himself feeling slightly disappointed with his second experience under the lens. Once freed by Iamo, the sculptor eagerly made another trial with a portion of Iamo’s substance, focusing on producing the image of an individual Wrassian mote. The likeness was passable, but not brilliant. Still, an advance ove
r the alarming nullity of power that Ingeniero had exhibited yesterday. Evidently, a lack of total identification with the host race did not impede the lens’s curative effects.

  Bolstered by the improvement, Ingeniero resolved to go under the lens again the very next day. And, true to his vow, he did, becoming a gaseous entity inhabiting the atmosphere of a Jovian world. The very next day he underwent another session, diving into the vegetable minds of Saltus IX. And the next day, and the next day, and the next.…

  By the end of two weeks, the sculptor had regained almost all his old powers.

  But at no small price.

  Always a thin fellow, Ingeniero now looked positively cadaverous, his eyes blazing with the stored remnants of the immense pain he had experienced, as if each orb were a smaller version of the lens. His hair disarrayed, his clothing soiled, Ingeniero hardly resembled the dapper artist who had arrived on Skyfire several weeks ago. He was plainly experiencing a species of ecstasy he would find impossible to describe. He seemed a driven monomaniac whose obsessions now littered the tower. For everywhere around the tower lay crystal sculptures of mind putty, evidence of Ingeniero’s frequent attempts to gauge his progress, a tangible record of all the pullulating life he had experienced, a bizarre menagerie.

  In providing the raw material to satisfy its master’s mania, Iamo had been consequently reduced to a shadow of its old self. Now the slave resembled a wraith, a smoky wisp containing barely enough material to form a vacuum suit for its master. Iamo’s processing power had dwindled also with its loss of bodily circuitry, and it was slow to respond to commands, recognizing only the simplest instructions.

  To Ingeniero, neither his dissolute appearance nor Iamo’s mattered. All that counted was that he was almost fully healed, restored to his wonted heights of artistic power. Surely just one more sessiuirunder the lens would push him into new realms of supremacy.