Slant

by Eikeltje

  and clear."

  "It'll pass," Mary says.

  "I hate having to think of myself and worry about myself every single

  second, all the time. It's like looking into a mirror that's glued to my nose. I

  hate what I see."

  Mary brushes Alice's cheek lightly with a finger. "It's a pretty decent face,"

  {I she says, playing on the vernacular of this year: decent meaning top shink,

  desirable.

  "May I ask you something?" Alice says, lifting up on her elbows.

  "Sure," Mary says.

  "You're going to have me testify, aren't you?"

  "I don't think so. Crest committed suicide."

  "He didn't say anything to me that made any sense. He just seemed terribly

  guilty. At the same time, he was arrogant--a real bastard. Arrogant and pitiful.''

  Mary regards her steadily, no judgment, no reaction, just listening.

  "Do you know who Roddy is?" Alice asks.

  "No."

  "He's the key." Alice leans back on the pillow.

  "You may be right," Mary says. "I have to go away now, perhaps for a few

  days. You'll stay here, of course. The house monitor is cut off from the outside for the time being. If you need to talk to somebody, you'll have to give your

  message to one of the men in the kitchen.They're bored; they might like having

  /

  S L A N T 255

  "Roddy can't get in?" Alice asks.

  "Not unless he walks in in person," Mary says, and smiles.

  "He's not a person. He's a demon."

  "I'll let you know what he is, as soon as I find out."

  "I didn't make him up."

  "I don't think you did. He's part of my search file. Along with pile of dirt."

  "That's crazy, isn't it?" Alice says.

  "No more than everything else."

  "Are you involved with somebody?" Alice asks.

  "Not now. Why?"

  "I like to know such things," Alice says. "Relationships. Particularly now,

  they seem important." And then: "Do you approve of me? I mean, do you

  like me?"

  "Yes," Mary says.

  Alice's face glistens in the dim room light. She is so hungry for approval,

  for Mary's approval, that she wants to ask a dozen more leading questions, but

  she still has some shred of dignity. "Thank you. I like you, too."

  Mary pats her arm and stands. "The guys in the kitchen can get a message

  to me wherever I am. Don't worry about asking them for help. They're gentlemen,

  all of them. I'll be busy, but if it's important--if you remember

  something--"

  "I'll touch you."

  Mary smiles and leaves the room.

  Alone, Alice is nothing again, less than nothing, but the darkness is not

  her judge, and Minstrel's hands have faded, to be replaced by simple grief.

  /M

  Next refuge--the personal distortion. Accept it: you come clothed in

  culture, and the clothing pinches, bruises, cuts off circulation. We all bear

  the cicatrices of ritual scarification. Then, ultimate betrayal, the culture

  uses our scars to reinforce its own structure.

  We are the culture; the culture is us; we are the cruel and blind and hobbled, and

  we are also the torturers.

  Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie

  10

  Jack Giffey hums to himself impatiently. He paces before the elevator, then

  marches down the hall, past the old man and the younger man, slumped against

  the wall. He feels their eyes on him. They expect to die. He might be the

  cause of their death. That isn't what irritates him; he has a headache now, too,

  not the pain of constricted arteries, but a constant whispering, just below his

  awareness, that something is going wrong. Something is wrong with the family. I

  am a family man.

  Giffey wonders if he is the real fly in the ointment: though Jenner seems in

  some distress, as well.

  Perhaps it is Omphalos's lack of reaction, setting him off balance, confusing

  him. He is working that around in his head: why no more defense? He concludes

  that the building is biding its time, trying to avoid losing more war-beiters

  (if there are any more) to the spray and whatever other surprises they

  have in store. It's a rational tactic. Omphalos is weak and knows it.

  "All right," he says, and Jenner jumps to his feet, cradling his sprayer, a

  flechette pistol in his left hand. "We should crack the oven and see if the bread

  is baked."

  "Finally," Hale says. The two prisoners near the elevator get to their feet.

  The old man seems in some pain, but his eyes burn with patient, practiced

  hatred. The younger man seems in shock. Giffey takes him by the arm. "Come

  with me."

  Hale, Jenner, Giffey, Marcus, and Jonathan walk back down the hall to the

  lounge. Here, Giffey uses a pocket knife to tear a piece of fabric from a couch,

  41 under the silent eyes of the other prisoners. Then they proceed to the garage.

  "What's your last name?" Jonathan asks Giffey.

  "Giffey," he answers, "What's yours?"

  "Bristow, Jonathan Bristow."

  "Glad to make your acquaintance, Jonathan. You're my shield today."

  "My friend--Marcus--he may be ill."

  "This won't take forever."

  "No, I mean, the stress--"

  "Your friend can handle the stress," Giffey says. "He looks pretty tough to

  me. I'm more concerned about us than you."

  "Why are you here?" Jonathan asks.

  Giffey doesn't answer, stopping instead to examine the twisted, not-quite-closed

  hatch to the garage. The hatch is still hot. Steam and other gases vent

  in lazy puffs through the door's gaps. The corridor itself is hot, stifling. Jenner's

  face is pale and his lips are working.

  Giffey gives him a stern, querying look.

  "I'm on it." lenner av hut hirln trn i1 pound will flx frnrn

  /

  SLANT 257

  Wrapping his hand in the scrap of couch fabric, Giffey pushes the door to

  one side and a rush of steam and thick yeasty smell floods the hall. They all

  start coughing. Giffey instinctively blocks Jonathan up against the wall with

  his arm to keep him from doing anything unexpected. Somewhere, blowers

  kick in and the hallway is cleared, but it takes several minutes.

  Omphalos has not shut down the air to this level. Giffey had been worried about

  that. The MGN can't finish its work without air. The garage might have gotten

  even hotter, and at about four hundred degrees, nano cooks itself. The building

  can't selectively shut down certain rooms; it has to keep air going to all parts of certain

  levels to keep the hostages alive. Weak, and solicitous.

  Giffey lets Jonathan loose. "Sorry," he says.

  Jonathan seems to know something about MGN. He hasn't been surprised

  by anything yet.

  "You invest in nano? Work with it?" Giffey asks.

  Hale takes an interest in the man's response.

  "Yes," Jonathan says, glancing nervously between them.

  "You know what's in there?" Hale asks, pointing to the garage.

  "MGN. I don't know what it's making."

  Marcus wears a glazed squint. He is less curious than in dread.

  They open the hatch the rest of the way, Jenner applying his shoulder to

  push it past a squealing jam.

  "Actually," Giffey says, "I'm not sure myself."

  Beyond, in the oven-warm garage, one of the
limos has vanished and the

  other has been half-dissolved. The Ferret has also disappeared. At first, Giffey

  can't see anything through the steam whirling away through the open door.

  His skin feels as if it might blister with the heat, and he keeps his eyes closed

  until the rushing air is a little cooler.

  "The walls are eaten down to the concrete," Jenner observes enthusiastically.

  "It's used the flexfuller, most of the metals, nearly all the plastic." His face

  takes on a flushed pink color in the heat, or perhaps it's his excitement.

  The garage is a shambles. The metal and flexfuller plating have indeed been

  utilized by the MGN. Ragged remnants cling to the corners.

  "There they are," Jenner says, stepping gingerly down the buckled steps.

  "Don't touch the walls," Giffey says. "Don't touch anything."

  "They have to cool first, don't they?" Hale asks.

  "They have to cool," Giffey confirms.

  "Should be another five or ten minutes before they can move," Jenner says,

  but he looks back to Giffey for support. Giffey's programs carried the designs.

  Given the luck of the mix of raw materials, even Giffey is not sure exactly

  what or how many will be waiting for them. The MGN is programmed to optimize.

  I tried to optimize my family. I am a

  The floor is covered by a glistening sheen filled with sharp-edged lumps of

  discarded glass and plastic. There are at least a dozen cat-sized elongated beetle

  258

  GREG BEAR

  and four transports the size of big dogs or ponies standing on spiny bristle-motion

  feet, like caterpillar scrub brushes. On the backs of two transports rise

  cubical shapes like thick decks of cards. Giffey is a little awed by this, at the

  same time his estimate of their chances rises enormously. These are fiexers,

  adaptable shapers with hinged card-shaped components. They can become almost

  anything, perform almost any task, go almost anywhere. Giffey instantly

  has a use for them: they will be controllers, mechanical and datafiow special

  agents.

  "Controllers," Jenner says, looking at Giffey.

  "My thought exactly," Giffey says. He's excited and energized by their good

  fortune, and irrationally proud of Jenner then, thinks of him like a son. I already

  have a son. Somewhere.

  The other two transports carry wires and disks, arranged around their

  surfaces like scales or spines, giving them the semblance of children's toy

  hedgehogs.

  "Intruders," Giffey says, and Jenner agrees, his grin threatening to split his

  cheeks.

  "Man, we can go anywhere, do anything," Jenner says.

  The steam hides a larger shape, itself steaming with the heat of its assembly.

  It's large and sleek and looks like a microscopic animal scaled up to the size

  of a small car. Jointed arms tipped with crowns of steely spikes radiate from

  the fore end of a squat, lobster-jointed body, glistening black and iron gray.

  "It's a Hammer," Giffey tells Hale. Jonathan listens from the hall. "An all-purpose

  worker and demolition machine."

  "What are the caterpillars with the boxes and bristles on their backs?" Hale

  asks.

  "Transports. They'll

  the flexers and wires and other

  to where

  pieces

  carry

  we'll put them to use," Giffey says.

  Jenner cackles. "We have it made/"

  Giffey agrees. The mix has turned out in their favor. The tiny little military

  factories have assembled the components of a very impressive coercion and

  weapons package. It's much more than he expected--getting the flexers and

  intruders should improve their odds enormously, even against a high-level

  INDA or a true thinker.

  "Happy?" Hale asks Giffey.

  "Ecstatic."

  The voice inside his head whispers, Most armies don't have this. How do you

  rate?

  "When can we take command and move them out?"

  Giffey removes the pad and activation disks from his jacket pocket. "They've

  cooled enough," he says.

  Hale inclines his head, smiles in satisfaction, and says, "Let's explore."

  Giffey inserts the disks in each transport and warbeiter, and they begin to

  /

  SLANT 259

  F/M

  Comes a split even in politics. In the end, the liberals want the government

  to survey and control everything but the bedroom; the conservatives

  want government to survey and control everything but their banks

  and personal fortunes.

  Patriarchs all, they cannot help but try to corner the market.

  Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie

  Jill no longer knows where she is. Her seeing is supplied by Roddy; it comes

  as an incredibly sharp cubist coalescing of many images throughout a space

  that can be one, two, three, many rooms within Omphalos, or even sensations

  and images from outside: snow cold on a surface, wind blowing across a

  doorway.

  For some minutes now, Roddy has not spoken, and she is left to supply her

  own narrative of what she senses in her captivity.

  Learning to interpret the images is difficult, but she manages in fifteen

  seconds. She has access to all of her internal capacities and abilities. She is still within her physical units, not some kidnapped portion hustled away to Roddy's

  multi-floor body of INDAs and hectares of dirt and (bees, wasps, ants).

  That last impression is fleeting and confusing.

  There is some I/O of high bandwidth connecting her with Green Idaho/

  Omphalos, perhaps a satlink, more likely a cable or fibe, that neither she nor

  Nathan knows anything about, but that Roddy has found and kept disguised

  and open despite their best efforts. There are many I/Os within Mind Design's

  offices; perhaps some are so old they have been forgotten, accumulating stray

  income for some long-overlooked provider.

  Jill becomes acquainted with Omphalos's interior. She sees (but can't hear,

  and only intermittently can read the lips of) eleven humans within the building,

  all on the main floor. A massive glowing heat signature fills one large

  room near the outer walls; it is at least three hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit

  in that space. Roddy's sensors still operate there, however inefficiently:

  at intervals she makes out moving shapes, bridges of gluey molten material

  strung between walls, surfaces boiling and blebbing with activity, and in the

  middle of it all, the misshapen hulks of two vehicles and a damaged, rapidly

  With surprising speed, the shapeless material within this space is taking

  on many smaller forms. The gluey strands break and collapse and withdraw.

  The room is slowly cooling; she sees ducts attached to the room pulling furi

  ously and automatically at the heat.

  Jill becomes acquainted with the multiply imaged human figures. They,

  too, are tagged, some with green numbers, some with red. Green number I

  flashes continuously, she does not know why; it is a man in his sixties.

  Two of the red numbers, I and 2, also pulse. Roddy is marking them for

  some reason. One is a young man with short fuzzy blond hair, the other a

  powerfully built man just past his middle years, with gray and black hair.

  They are near an elevator. Others are at rest in a smaller ro
om between the hot

  spot and the elevator lobby, and are colored both green and red.

  "Jill."

  "Yes!"

  "My apologies. I am very busy. I am thinking of ways to kill some of these

  humans. I have no other option. If I were stronger or better equipped, I would

  try to overpower them. Now I see them making something in my number two

  garage, and destroying that part of the building in the process."

  "Why are you showing me these things and talking to me?"

  "Cipher Snow has withdrawn and will not communicate. She has left me

  with unavoidable duties. I do not like the sensation of being left to myself;

  she has tended me since my memories begin."

  "Roddy, I do not see your defensive units."

  "I am not marking those spaces yet. There is no threatening activity there."

  Jill senses this answer is not entirely true. "How do you plan to kill these

  people? What kind of weapons do you have?"

  "Very few. I have no control over power supplies and air and water. I can

  open and close doors and hatches in upper levels--"

  Jill experiences, with unsettling immediacy, Roddy's sudden sense of shock.

  "The garage has new arbeiters within it. They appear to be weapons, very

  powerful weapons."

  Eternities of seconds pass and Roddy is silent. Jill interprets this as shock