Vigilant lop-3

by James Alan Gardner

So. There, in my office, scared of the world-soul Xe, worried about Tic’s sanity and shamed by his question, "Stick or bag?"… I finally threw myself back on my Vigil training. Meditation. Acceptance. Discipline without discipline. Like I’d been working on for seven years.

  Down into my center — the part that breathes if you just get out of its way.

  Don’t see this as an apocalyptic transformation; don’t think I grappled down my fear for all time. Nothing is ever so easy. But I sheltered back into my training and let myself take a step.

  Forward.

  The mind is a bottle filled with sugar syrup, salt water, and vinegar. Empty it.

  The mind is a book filled with poetry, laments, and curses. Click delete.

  Empty bottle.

  Empty book.

  Empty mind.

  If you dip your hand into the sea, then scoop it out again, what do you have? No more than a sheen of wet over your palm. You can’t capture handfuls of water by strength; you can’t possess it. But if you dip your hand into the briny and leave it there — if you let yourself feel the cold and smell the salt — then who’s to say you aren’t holding the whole ocean?

  Don’t seek, don’t avoid…just observe. If you want to activate a shy part of the brain, let the rest fall silent. When the consciousness shuts up, quieter voices may speak.

  Memory isn’t linear… except tiny patches, ten seconds here, half a minute there. Only flicky-brief flashes where you can track through a sequence of events without skipping ahead, without finding other memories dragged in by association. The meat of your brain squirms against linearity, terrified of falling into some autistic steady state that locks out the world.

  Then we Homo saps come along, and sludge-wits that we are, almost every activity we invent for ourselves moves in a straight line. Step-by-step instructions, agendas for business meetings, timetables and milestones for working on a project. Our whole culture = first A, then B, then C. Binding the tiger with a chain of one link after another.

  One thing at a time. Society pounds away at us, "It’s wicked-bad-sinful even to contemplate the possibility of experiencing everything all at once."

  But I wanted everything — everything I said and did that night before Chappalar died.

  I opened myself to the memories: not commanding them to come, because the commanding part of my brain wasn’t the nub I wanted to activate.

  Open the inner eye. Just see what’s there.

  Chappalar and me saying good night in front of the Vigil’s office. The dear funny sight of him bouncing through the grove of other office trees in our neighborhood. Me walking down to the transit station, where I caught a scuttler for home.

  No sign of anyone following either of us.

  Off the scuttler and heading for my home compound. Preoccupied, gloomily self-absorbed: worried about the link-seed bomb ticking in my head.

  Sudden memories of a different time — don’t fight the change of subject, let it happen if that’s what my brain served up. The face of a senior student I’d known marginally, someone who died from data tumor early in mushor.

  An imagined picture of scalding blood, squirting from his eyes. The horror his family must have felt. The horror my family would feel if it happened to me. Our kids, trying all their hard-won attitudes, arrogance, outrage, coolness, and finding nothing that shook the grief. My husbands and wives with a few more funerals under their belts, but still deep-struck because they depended on me… depended that I’d be the one in trouble, the one who needed close watching, the first one all eyes turned to when someone asked, "What shall we do tonight?" because Faye might’ve got one of her moods…

  Moods. A torrent of moods flooding into me… not memory anymore, but Remembrance: touching all the moods I’d ever had, not just the night prior to Chappalar’s death, but all the angry moods before, all the guilty moods after.

  Everything all at once.

  Not data tumor. The deluge didn’t come from the datasphere but from my own mind, chagrins and shames I’d tried to squash down, and joys that I’d run from because they were undeserved, too good for someone like me…

  My whole subconscious suddenly exploded to the surface, like an eruption of gas bursting out of deep ocean, wretched stinks and sweet lost perfumes, hates, loves, humiliations, triumphs…

  Subconscious becoming conscious for one gasping moment of totality.

  Then it was gone again, the ocean clapping back into place, subconscious plunging into drowned depths, the moment of revelation getting swallowed under heavy black water.

  I opened my eyes. Tic was watching me closely. He hadn’t moved; but he must have known what happened by the look on my face. Softly he said, "Some proctors grow addicted to that experience. That moment of knowledge. They don’t enjoy it, but they have to look again and again. Others would rather die than repeat it. Wisdom lies between those two extremes: use memory as a tool, not a drug. But. Fanobo roi shunt, aghi shunt po."

  An Oolom proverb: acting wisely is easy, until it ISN’T.

  I said nothing. Speechless. Breathless. In the quiet, Tic’s goggles hissed out a puff of mist to keep his eyes moist.

  "I didn’t tell anyone about Pump Station 3," I whispered. "Not by name. Chappalar must have mentioned it to someone. His lover. Maya."

  Maya.

  "Who is this Maya?" Tic asked.

  "A human woman. I’ve never met her myself — just heard some of the other proctors talk about her. Chappalar said she was a hundred and ten years old."

  "And Chappalar saw her the night before he was killed?"

  "So he told me."

  "Long-term friendship or recent acquaintance?"

  "Recent, I think."

  Tic raised his eyes to the ceiling a moment, then lowered his head again to look straight at me. "There’s no such woman in Bonaventure."

  I was a hair away from asking, "How do you know?" but stopped myself in time. Tic must have used his link-seed to call the world-soul and check our city census database. The search wouldn’t take long — since Homo saps had only lived on Demoth half a century, there weren’t a lot of us aged 110. Sure, a few of Demoth’s original humans arrived in their fifties or older; but not many. Colonization was a sport played mostly by the young.

  "She might not have told Chappalar her right age," I said. "Humans sometimes fudge how old they are."

  "And a charming foible it is," Tic answered. "Never trust a species that tells the truth about everything — they’re either stupid, arrogant, or only interested in documentaries. But there’s no human, male or female, anywhere over the age of one hundred with a name that’s close to the word Maya… not on the voters’ lists in all Great St. Caspian." Oh. Pity.

  "Maybe she lives elsewhere on Demoth," I suggested. "It takes next to no time for someone to travel here by sleeve…" Tic looked away again, then turned back. "No one fitting Maya’s particulars has taken the Bonaventure sleeve in the past two weeks."

  I stared at him in great gaping shock. Sure, the Transit Board required sleeve operators to record who passed through when… but those records were kept confidential except by court order. Police could get warrants to track criminals; accident investigators could find the names of travelers splattered or spaced by malfunctions; but members of the Vigil had no authority to check the movements of private citizens. If I tried such a thing, the world-soul would stonewall me with information does not exist or is not validly accessible. It might also notify my superiors, who’d demand to know what in merry hell I thought I was doing.

  "Transit records are tight-sealed," I told Tic in a low voice. "How can you search through them—"

  "I can’t," he replied. "But the world-soul can. And Xe’s a dear old girl who’ll do her utmost to be obliging if you ask your questions persuasively. One: I am interested in locating a murderer, who is by definition a dangerous non-sentient creature. Two: we have honest reason to believe this Maya passed information, knowingly or not, to our murderer sometime between her evening w
ith Chappalar and Chappalar’s death the next morning. Three: it’s my duty as a citizen of the League of Peoples to warn other sentients about potentially lethal risks… which means I should notify Maya she spoke to a dangerous non-sentient at least once and presumably may do so again. Four: I direct the world-soul to warn Maya posthaste. Five: the world-soul asks how to contact the woman, and I provide all the leads I can, including that she might have recently traveled on the Bonaventure Sleeve. Six: the world-soul anxiously replies it can’t send the warning because no woman fitting the criteria appears in the transit records." He shrugged. "Perfectly straightforward."

  The shrug was a nice touch — Tic’s face looked wholly sincere, as if anyone could have strung together that chain of reasoning in the half second it took to link with the datasphere.

  No thought at all of trying to impress me.

  Whether or not I was impressed, I swore I wouldn’t show it. "So this Maya…" I stopped, struck by a thought. "Conceivably, ‘Maya’ is a nickname that has nothing to do with her real name. That would make it hard to find her in the city database or the transit records."

  "Oh. True." Tic’s face darkened. Literally. Went a shade grayer in the gathering dusk. "Nicknames are such a flippant human custom. Impertinent. Jaunty. If you don’t like your old name, go through a proper rechristening like decent people instead of just deciding…" He fell silent a moment, his face distant. "All right," he said, after a few seconds, "the world-soul will phone every woman in Great St. Caspian over the age of one hundred, and tell her there’s an urgent message if she goes by the name Maya. It will do the same for anyone in the right age range who traveled here by sleeve recently. If there really is a Maya, we should flush her out."

  "If there really is a Maya?" I repeated. "Why do you think she might not exist?"

  "I took a quick peek at the language database," he replied. "The world ‘maya’ appears in several human tongues; but in Sanskrit, it can be translated as ‘fleshly illusion.’ I find that thought-provoking, don’t you? Especially when we know our murderer uses androids."

  Ouch.

  We waited for the world-soul to send its messages. It wouldn’t take long to get a response — any woman who got an emergency beep on her wrist-implant would answer it pronto unless she was under anaesthetic. Or under a twenty-year-old stud with rock-hard dollies.

  But I digress.

  Night was falling faster now: a cold-looking night that would freeze puddles and frost the trees. One of our tiny moons, the fast one called Orange, floated gibbously above the Bonaventure skyline; its usual apricot color looked faded tonight, like a shrivelly yellow pea.

  Three stories above us, Jupkur launched off his window ledge, gliding home for the evening. His breath steamed… which showed it really was cold, considering the coolish Oolom body temperature. I watched him disappear into the gathering darkness, his skin turning purple with the sky.

  And me standing by the window. One hand against the un-glass, letting the nano-puppies lick me again. Bored with waxing poetic about the dusk and the moon, wanting to do something.

  Tedious thing, waiting. Elusive thing, patience.

  Mother used to make me say that prayer, "God grant me the serenity, etc." but I could only chant it through twice before getting the screamy-weamies. Then I’d bound out of the room and go for a run or something.

  It wouldn’t look good if I ran out on a master proctor… especially with him sitting pond-placid on the edge of my desk, staring out at the twilight. And how much longer would we really have to wait? There could only be a few dozen women of the right age in Bonaventure. Half that number in the mining towns and outports. Maybe half again among travelers who’d recently used our sleeve. A hundred people? On that order.

  And if none was Chappalar’s sweetheart? Now that Tic had planted ideas in my mind, I couldn’t help harking back over the past few days. Maya hadn’t shown up at Chappalar’s funeral, had she? And she hadn’t sent flowers or a card, or even a white stone in the Oolom tradition — I’d checked over the memorials at the burial service, and hadn’t seen anything from her.

  Was she a robot spy, sent to watch him? Possibly: top-price teaser androids could fool lonely chumps into thinking the artificial was real… at least for a while. And duping an Oolom would be easier than fooling a Homo sap; Chappalar might dismiss glitches in the android’s programming as normal human idiosyncrasies. Why should he know how our species behaved when things got breathy?

  If Maya was a robot… but then, what about the other proctors who got killed? Did they have robot spies watching them too?

  No need. According to news reports, three of the proctors were killed in their homes, and another two in their offices — no inside information required to find any of them. The final two were attacked together as they waited to present a report to a parliamentary committee… a presentation that was publicized days in advance.

  So: the killer/killers had no trouble finding seven of the eight dead proctors. The exception was Chappalar… whose schedule that morning was known only to me and Maya.

  "Let’s check Chappalar’s office," I said suddenly. "See if we can find anything about this mystery woman."

  "The police searched the place carefully," Tic answered. "So did I."

  "But neither you nor the police were specifically looking for information about Maya. Were you?"

  Tic frowned, then said, "True." He headed for the door.

  MINDLESS MACHINE

  Three of the four walls in the elevator were vidscreens, showing a panoramic view of the city around our office — what you’d see if the elevator were glass and the tree trunk transparent. Oolom architecture used that trick a lot: cramped enclosed spaces like elevator cabs were prettied up with airy visuals (not to mention wind sounds and artificial breeze) to make them seem wide-open to the world.

  Standing back by the elevator door, Tic quietly gazed at the cityscape. He had good stillness — no slouching, no, fidgets, no sighs. Presence in the present.

  I had plenty of time to watch him. (More devil-be-damned waiting.) Oolom elevators climb slug-slowly… only as fast as you can glide up a lazy air thermal. Their elevators go down a lot faster, matching the typical airspeed of an Oolom in landing descent.

  This particular elevator had no lights of its own — just the glow of the stars and the dried-pea moon. From below came the subdued spill of streetlamps. There was also the glittery flicker of crocus-flies, already out of hibernation and flashing their tiny mating beacons: hoping to do the dance and get eggs laid before predators woke for spring… just as I hoped this clump-hole of an elevator would reach our stop before the blessed cream-blossoms opened next month…

  In the twinkling quiet, Tic asked, "What did the Peacock Tail feel like?"

  He hadn’t moved from that perfect stillness. Just a soft-voiced question in the dark.

  "I never touched whatever it was," I told him. "It didn’t come that close to me."

  "Not physically," Tic said. "What did it feel like emotionally?"

  I shook my head, not knowing what he wanted to hear. "My emotions were running on a different track at the time: scared out of my skin that I’d get my face burned off."

  "Even so," Tic said, "the Peacock was something new and surprising. The instant you saw it, didn’t you have a reaction? ‘Dear-dear, more trouble’… or maybe, ‘Hurrah, I’m saved.’ "

  "Does it make a difference?" I asked.

  "One never knows. What does the elevator feel like to you?"

  "Like an elevator!"

  "Just a mindless machine?"

  I gave him a sour look. "Don’t tell me the elevator is smart like the windows."

  Tic smiled. "You still remember the windows?"

  "Sure."

  "Then Xe likes you. Even if you insist on playing obtuse. What does the elevator feel like?"

  "It’s tired," I answered, saying the first thing that came into my mind. "Feeling cruel overworked. In the old days, it had nearly nothing t
o do — the Ooloms didn’t use it much. But now that we’ve got three human proctors…"

  Four.

  "Sorry, four counting me, so now that we’ve got four human proctors…"

  I stopped. Tic’s mouth hadn’t moved; so who said Four?

  The world-soul?

  The elevator?

  "Yipe," I said. "Yipe, yipe, yipe."

  "It’s a stimulating world once you hear the machines." Tic had a smug dollop of I-told-you-so in his voice. "If you insist on challenging the metaphors, an elevator can’t really feel tired, of course. It’s just due for maintenance… since it does have to work harder carrying you lead-weight humans several trips a day rather than delicately light Ooloms a few times a year. But when the elevator reports it’s wearing out, the world-soul represents that as being tired… at least in the minds of those who are properly attuned."

  I groaned. "I’m picking up sob stories from an elevator."

  "No. The world-soul is projecting information in a form you can easily grasp. Would you prefer a deluge of cold performance statistics? We’re both animals, Smallwood: social animals with abundant brain space evolved for analyzing emotions, and a scanty pittance for analyzing numbers. The world-soul likes to present data in a form our brains are best equipped to understand — that the elevator is deplorably fatigued from lugging around you human lardasses."

  Who’re you calling a lardass, bone-boy? I came close to growling that. But for all I knew, Tic might ask the elevator what it thought… and I did not want to have this blasted machine tell me, Just between us, Faye, you could stand to lose a few kilos…

  Time to change the subject. I said, "Why’d you ask how the Peacock Tail felt? Do you think it’s tied up with the world-soul too?"

  "No. Mere curiosity." Tic looked out over the city. "These days, I pick up emotions everywhere. Not just from machines, but from truly inanimate things. Rocks. Trees. Running water. I can actually feel…" He stopped, shook his head. "Tico. I anthropomorphize everything. Except people, of course. Even my poor beleaguered brain can’t anthropomorphize them."