Slant

by Eikeltje

  OTHER BOOKS BY BREB BEAB

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  Psychlone

  Beyond Heaven's River

  Strength of Stones

  The Wind from a Burning Woman

  Blood Music

  Eon

  The Forge of God

  Eternity

  Hardfought

  Tangents

  Heads

  Queen of Angels

  Anvil of Stars

  Moving Mars

  Songs of Earth and Power

  New Legends

  Legacy

  A TORN OOBEBTY

  ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters

  and events portrayed in this novel are either

  fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright ][997 by Greg Bear

  All rights reserved, including the right to

  reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in

  any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Torn Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  Tot Books on the World Wide Web:

  http://www, tor. com

  Toris a registered trademark of Torn

  Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Book design by Judith Stagnitto Abbate

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bear, Greg

  [Slant] / Greg Bear. -lst ed.

  p. cm.

  The title consists solely of the slant sign.

  "A Torn Doherty Associates book."

  ISBN 0-3 I 2-85517-6 (hardcover: acid-free paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3552.E157S55 1997

  813'54dc21

  97-7063

  CIP

  First Edition: July 1997

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

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  "Tell all the truth,

  but tell it slant''

  EMILY DICKINSON

  RIVERS

  Oataflow today is money/blood, the living substance of our human

  rivers/arteries. You can steamboat the big flow, or slowly raft these rivers

  up and down the world, or canoe into the branches and backwaters, with

  almost perfect freedom. There are a few places you can't go--Saudi Arabia,

  Northern Enclave China, some towns in Green Idaho. Nobody much cares to

  go there anyway. Not much exciting is happening in those places.

  --The U.S. Government Digiman on Dataflow Economics,

  56Revision, 2052

  I EDUCA TED CORPSES

  Omphalos dominates Moscow, Green Idaho. It glows pale silver and gold like

  a fancy watch waiting to be stolen. A tetrahedron four hundred feet high, with

  two vertical faces and a triangular base, it is the biggest thing in town, more

  ostentatious than the nearby Mormon temple, though not so painfully white

  and spiky. The leading edge points at the heart of Moscow like a woodsman's

  wedge. The vertical faces descend, blind and windowless, to sink seventy feet

  below ground. The single sloping face is gently corrugated like a dazzling

  ivory washboard for the leaden sky.

  Omphalos is a broad-shouldered edifice, Herculean architecture for the ages,

  given the kind of shockproof suspension and massive loving armor once reserved

  for hardened defense installations and missile silos.

  Jack Giffey waits patiently in line for the public tour. It is cold in Moscow

  today. Thirty people stand with him in the snaking line, all clearly marked

  by their gray denims as young tourists biking through Green Idaho; all youthfully

  unafraid of the reputation of the state's Ruggers, the legendary gun-wielding

  rugged individualists, who see themselves not as lawless brigands but

  as steely-eyed human islands in a flooded, corrupting stream.

  But the state's reputation is exaggerated. Not more than three percent of

  the population could accurately be labeled Rugger. And fewer than ten young

  tourists each year vanish from the old logging trails in the regrowth timberlands,

  their forlornly beeping Personal Access Devices and little knit caps

  nailed to posts on the edges of the abandoned national forests.

  In Giffey's opinion, Green Idaho has all the individuality ora zit on a corpse.

  The zit may consider itself special, but it's just a different kind of dead meat.

  Giffey is known to his few friends as Gill. At fifty-one he looks mild and

  10 GREG BEAR

  that attract the interest of children and discouraged women past their picky

  twenties. He doesn't like Green Idaho any more than he likes the rest of the

  nation, or the world, for that matter.

  Old-fashioned radiant outdoor heaters mounted on poles glow raw-beef red

  overhead, trying to keep the people in line warm. Giffey has been here before,

  thirteen times; he's sure Omphalos knows his face and has tagged him as worth

  paying marginal attention to. That is okay. He does not mind.

  Giffey is among the very few who know that Omphalos absorbs knowledge

  from the outside at the extraordinary rate of fifty million dollars a year. Since

  Omphalos is publicly assumed to be a fancy kind of tomb for the rich and

  privileged, its dead and near-dead must be very curious. But few ask serious

  questions about it. The builders of Omphalos paid a lot for freedom from

  oversight, the kind of freedom that can only be bought in Green Idaho.

  The rulers of Green Idaho, true to their breed, hate the Federals and the

  outer society but revere money and its most sacred benison: freedom from

  responsibility.

  Giffey has been to the Forest Lawn Pyramid in Southcoast California Omphalos

  is, architecturally, by far the classier act. But he would never think of

  robbing the truly dead in Forest Lawn, with their few scattered jewels adorning

  rotting flesh.

  The frozen near-dead are another matter. Entombed with all their palpable

  assets--precious metals, collectibles, long-term sigs to offshore paper-deed se-curities-the

  corpsicles racked in their special refrigerated cells in Omphalos,

  Giffey believes, might be worth several hundred million dollars apiece.

  Those rich enough to afford such accommodations have their choice of packaged

  options: cheapest is capitation, bio-vitrifying and cryo-preserving the

  head alone. Next is head and trunk; and finally, whole-body. There are even

  more expensive and still-experimental possibilities ... For the wealthiest of

  all, the plutocratic highest of the high.

  The sloping face of the wedge gleams like a field of wind-rippled snow. The

  line begins to move in anticipation there are sounds from within. Omphalos

  opens its tall steel and flexfuller front doors. Its soothing public voice spreads

  out over the crowd, only mildly funereal.

  "Welcome to the hope of all our futures," the voice says as the line pushes

  eagerly into the tall, severe granite and steel lobby. Great shining pillars rise

>   around the student tourists like steel redwoods, daunting and extra human.

  The floor is living holostone, morphing through scenes of future splendor

  beneath their feet: flying cities high above sunset mountains, villas on Mars

  and the Moon, idyllic valleys farmed by obedient arbeiters while beautiful,

  magisterial men and women of all races and creeds watch from the balconies

  of their spotless white mansions. "This completely automated facility is the

  repository for a maximum of ten thousand two hundred and nineteen biologically

  conserved patrons, all expecting long and happy lives upon their recon

  /

  SLANT 11

  "Within Omphalos, there are no human employees, no attendants or engineers or guards..."

  Giffey has never met a machine he could not beat, at chess, at war games,

  at predicting equities weather. Giffey believes he may be one of the smartest

  or at least most functionally successful human beings on this planet. He succeeds

  at whatever he wants to do. Of course--he grins to himself---there are

  many things he has never wanted to do.

  He looks up at the distant lobby ceiling, studded with crystal prisms that

  project rainbows all around. Above them, he imagines stacks of cold cells filled

  with bodies and heads. Some of them are not frozen, he understands from secret

  sources, but are still alive and thinking, suspended in nano baths in what is

  euphemistically called warm sleep. They are old and sick and the law does not

  allow them to undergo any more major medical intervention. They have had

  their chance at life; anything more and they are classified as greedy Chronovores,

  seekers after immortality, which is illegal everywhere but in the quasi-independent

  republic of Green Idaho, and impractical here.

  The terminally ill can, however, forfeit all but their physical assets to the

  republic, and enter Omphalos as isolated wards of the syndicate.

  Giffey presumes the still-living are the curious ones. They stay current as

  they sleep.

  Giffey does not care what they're dreaming, half-alive or wholly dead,

  whether they're locked into endless rounds of full-sensory Yox, or preparing

  themselves for the future by becoming the most highly educated near-corpses

  in the datafiow world. They should be honorably gone from the picture, out

  of the game. They don't need their assets.

  Omphalos's occupants are just a different set of pharaohs. And Jack Giffey

  is just another kind of tomb-robber who thinks he can avoid the traps and

  break the seals and unwrap the mummies.

  "You are now within the atrium of the most secure building in the Western

  World. Designed to withstand catastrophic earthquakes, volcanic activity, even

  thermonuclear explosions or microcharge dispersals--"

  Giffey is not listening. He has a pretty decent map of the place in his head,

  and a much more detailed map in his pad. He knows where the arbeiters must

  come and go within the building's two entrances. He even knows who has

  manufactured the arbeiters, and what they look like. He knows much else

  besides. He is ready to go and does not need this final tour. Giffey is here to

  legitimately pay his respects to a remarkable monument.

  "Please step th-is way. We have mockups of hibernaria and exhibits usually

  reserved only for prospective patrons of these facilities. But today, for you

  exclusively, we allow access to a new and vital vision of the future--"

  Giffey grimaces. He hates today's big lies--exclusively, only, I love you alone,

  trust, adore, but ultimately, pay. Post-consumer weltcrap. He's glad he has paid

  his money for the last time.

  12

  GREG BEAR

  and behaviors. The system passes them through to the display area. The casket

  room. Lie in silken comfort throzigh a/l eternity.

  The young tourists in their denims and warm, upscale Nandex stand agape

  before the ice-blue enamel and fiexfuller hibernarium, a long flattened tube

  stretched across a mocked-up cubicle like a dry-docked submarine cemented

  at both ends. Giffey knows what the tourists, the young students, are thinking.

  They are all wondering if they will ever be able to afford this kind of immortality,

  a chance at the Big Downstream.

  Giffey doesn't care. Even riches and the high life do not matter to him

  because unlike his partners, he has severe doubts they will ever be able to fence

  such goods, nearly all of which will be marked with ineradicable tracers. Besides,

  gold means much less than it used to. Datafiow is all.

  He's in it to tweak a few noses, and to play against the machine he suspects

  lies within. Hardly a machine at all...

  "Our exclusive method of bio-vitrifying cryo-conservancy was pioneered by

  four doctors in Siberia and perfected fifteen years ago. The fluids of a human

  body normally crystallize upon freezing, but by vitrifying these fluids, making

  them smoothly glassy, we eliminate crystals completely--"

  Giffey believes he will face an unauthorized artificial intelligence--Omphalos's

  own advanced petafiop INDA, perhaps even a thinker. He's always

  wanted to go up against a thinker.

  He suspects he'll lose. But maybe not.

  And what a game!

  M/F, F/M, M/M, F/F

  e is what

  between us

  /

  happens

  / is what separates us.

  We are all different sexes, though with only two brands of equipment.

  --The Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie

  2 S T 0 N E H A M M E R

  Alice Grale believes this is cataspace, all interaction but no motion. In the

  small black room off the long black studio, waiting can be a dull chunk of

  time filled any way at all. She and her co-star, Minstrel, are talking, waiting

  for adjustments on the stage. Minstrel lounges naked on the old low couch,

  / SLANT 13

  "So why don't you like those words?" Minstrel asks. "They're ancient and

  traditional, and they describe what we do."

  "They're ugly," she says. "I say them if I want to or when I'm paid to, but

  I've never been fond of them." Alice sits on the folding metal chair before him,

  illuminated by a soft free spot of white light, wearing a flimsy black robe, her

  touching knees exposed. There is some relief in old friendship. She has known

  Minstrel for nine years. They have been talking for twenty minutes and Francis

  is still not ready for them.

  "You never fail to surprise me, Alice. But I'm making a point. Try saying

  the word," he challenges. "The tetragrammaton."

  She considers, then says it, with a rise of her cheeks and a curve of her

  lips and derogatory tilt of her head, her voice not very loud and void of

  emphasis.

  "You're not doing it justice," Minstrel complains. "God knows I've

  heard you say it often enough. Say it professionally, if you can't get into it

  personally."

  Alice glares at him.

  "I mean it," he says. "I'm making a point here."

  Minstrel seems a little intense today, pushy. But she says the word once

  more. Her eyes narrow and her nose wrinkles.

  Minstrel sniffs. "Your heart isn't in it," he says dubiously, "but even so, it

  brings a snarl, feel it?"

  Alic
e shakes her head. "It's what somebody else wants me to say, and that's

  the way they want me to say it."

  Minstrel chuckles and taps her knee with one long square-tipped finger.

  "Like all women, you are not your art."

  Alice is both perplexed and irritated. "What's that mean?"

  "The word is a snarl. It's old and hard and blunt--it's a stone hammer.

  You say it when you really need the person you're with and you aren't embarrassed

  to show yourself deep down. It means what's happening touches your

  feral instincts."

  "Bullshit."

  "You say that casually enough," Minstrel observes. He stands, applies finger

  to cheek and inclines his head. In this pose, long and loose, he reminds Alice

  of an E1 Greco saint. All he needs is a slack blue loincloth.

  She feels the familiar deep appreciation, the yearning that has not diminished

  in over fifty professional encounters in thirty-one vids, beginning with

  her first when she was nineteen. That was ten years ago, and he was thin and

  ribby, hollow-chested and uncertain of his peculiar talent. Now he is lean and

  omni-asian brown, muscles finely toned and defined, his body a temple as well