Slant

by Eikeltje

particularly distinguished (though how would he know?), but impressive with

  its dense packs of chestnut and dapple gray horses and Napoleonic soldiers.

  The woman is Seefa Schnee. That much he knows; he just can't remember

  why he knows that, or what it means. But he is no dummy. He's figuring out

  things for himself between the alternating engagements of his two personalities,

  two histories. He can even explain the fresh onset of twitches and muttering.

  Jack Giffey is not and never has been real.

  He stalks the woman quietly, hiding around corners and darting out to

  follow as she makes her way from the large garden to wherever she is going,

  probably down. That suits Giffey, real or not.

  Both Giffey and the Other have worked as soldiers most of their lives. Both

  Giffey and the Other have been trained to kill. Both Giffey and the Other

  found themselves displaced upon the death of Colonel Sir John Yardley, but

  at some point thereafter, one went away. The other was born.

  Colonel Sir is the crossroads of his two selves.

  He has a theory.

  (The woman stops at the end of a blind hallway. There is a door in the right

  hand wall at the end. She removes a key ring, quaintly mechanical, from her

  pocket, and fits a key into the door.)

  by some government. Since it was the government of the United States of

  America that moved once again into Hispaniola to bring stability and take

  charge in a power vacuum, he presumes it was the U.S. of A., land of both

  Giffey's birth and the Other's, that split him down the middle.

  Since Giffy is now coming down with the same malady as Jenner, ticks

  and expostulations of meaningless rage, it is an easy assumption that he was

  therapied, equipped with monitors, perhaps as the condition of some sort of

  judicial punishment. Or...

  The Other was seen as useful. He was equipped with monitors that restructured

  his psyche, giving him the mask of Jack Giffey as a thorough, self-deluding

  cover, making the Other into a human smart bomb. An unaware

  warbeiter targeting Omphalos. Jenner was recruited elsewhere, a separate piece

  of the plan; and Park, who thought he had recruited Giffey, was led into the

  scheme like a man picking a forced card from a magician's deck.

  How else would Giffey and Jenner get access to MGN?

  Somebody knows. Somebody has been suspicious of this place for some time.

  Or perhaps it is simply government paranoia, set to strike against some overweening

  aspect of the Republic of Green Idaho. Actually, he can sympathize

  with that, even cheer on his programmed, fictional self.

  Jack Giffey's goals never did make much sense. But to confront Seefa Schnee,

  and her personal bell-ringer...

  He could do worse.

  The neutral affect accompanying this hypothesis is striking. But now he

  has other fish to fry. He manages to catch the door before it swings shut.

  The lights flicker out once more, and a disturbing shudder goes through

  the building, as if Omphalos is trying to wake up. He hears the woman's steps

  the

  stairs falter. She stops. Then, in the darkness, she continues with

  a

  sure

  gait. She is very familiar with this place, these heavy steel stairs.

  He still has his flashlight. He waits to switch it on until he can no longer

  hear the woman's steps. There are at least three flights, perhaps four or five.

  It's a long way down.

  In the darkness, the light's beam darting ahead, he begins his descent. The

  Giffey persona probably knows what to do under these circumstances; it seems

  likely he has received special instructions or training.

  He allows Jack Giffey to rule, for the time being.

  But this also leads to his uttering little squeaking, jagged obscenities, and

  he claps his free hand over his lips to hide the noise.

  $4

  >Jill, I'm trying to reach you. Can you reJond?

  She can't. She assumes the message is from Nathan; Roddy allows her this

  much as he uses all her resources to leapfrog back into control of Omphalos.

  But he will not allow her to answer Nathan.

  >Jill, I'm in Green Idaho. I'm inside Omphalos and I'm looking for Roddy. I've

  left everything in La Jolla with the techs. They're working to shake you loose.

  Anything you can tell us would he useful.

  Jill receives this in complete silence. Then, Roddy tosses her a quick cold

  query: "What will he do?"

  "They seem to have discovered where you are, and they already know what

  you are doing."

  Roddy considers this. "They will shut me down." His thinking is labored;

  he has not yet completely reintegrated his basic memory.

  "I think they will cut your I/Os and then study you," Jill says.

  She catches a cubist glimpse of what Roddy is observing. There are more

  than twenty people in Omphalos now; some have died, and some have entered

  recently. He is tracking all of them. The man named Marcus has not moved

  for some minutes, but is still alive. He is surrounded by recently arrived people,

  five of them, that Roddy has not yet labeled. Jill guesses that they are doctors.

  There is another figure marked in steady green, alone. He is in an area

  Roddy does not control, in an elevator created for the personal use of Seefa

  Schnee.

  Another three figures, each marked flashing red, are present, but Roddy is

  not letting her see their exact locations. They may be below ground level.

  Roddy tracks all of these people as intrusions. He clearly wants to eliminate

  most of them; and for the first time, Jill sees, Roddy is not going all-out to

  protect Marcus Reilly. He is more concerned with Seefa Schnee. But to Jill's

  puzzlement, there are two Seefa Schnees in Roddy's maps of Omphalos.

  One of them is being pursued by a flashing red intruder. The second sits

  alone in a room not far from Roddy's central location, wherever that may be.

  Roddy seems to sense Jill's interest in his mother. He switches her available

  set of views suddenly, and in so doing, gives her some control over spaces in

  which he is no longer interested. For a few seconds, Jill studies miles of service

  corridors and unfinished floors within Omphalos, all empty, silent, boring.

  312

  GREG BEAR

  Roddy's method of seeing, she barely recognizes the man at first--it is a man.

  But the figure is too familiar to escape recognition for long.

  Nathan is inside Omphalos, just as he said!

  Jill rushes her sensory awareness through the halls and chambers, tries unlocking

  a few doors, finds that she can, and makes a clear pathway toward the

  center and, she hopes, toward Roddy and Seefa Schnee.

  The trail of dead and dying wasps and bees has thinned; Nathan sees a small,

  twitching body only every fexv yards now, and he's walked at least half a mile

  through twisting service corridors, down stairs, through doors that should have

  been locked but open at his touch. He is so deep in Omphalos--maybe even

  below ground level--that his pad can make only occasional contact with the

  outside through the satlink in his rented armored car--all that was available

  at the Moscow airport.

  He stops for a moment to catch his breath. None of the corrido
rs in this

  part of Omphalos look finished; the walls are bare metal and fiexfuller and

  concrete, unpainted, wiring and ribes and piping clearly visible. He can hear

  the rush of air and water through pipes and ducts overhead. The lighting is

  sparse, designed for arbeiters--deep red and intermittent at best.

  ople are not supposed to be here.

  is heart thumps even after he has rested and caught his breath. "Christ,

  I'm scared," he tells himself, and tries to focus on bringing his fear under

  control. The problem is, his fear is entirely rational. He is in danger. He saw

  the bodies in the waiting room, and followed the trail of insects from there to

  where he is now...

  He has a crude map supplied by the FBI, glowing faintly on his pad's night

  display. He thinks he knows where he is. There's a couple of unmarked spaces,

  quite large, below ground. He's near the upper reaches of the larger of the two,

  at the center of Omphalos, if his reckoning is correct.

  He wishes he had never met Seefa Schnee. He remembers the night, near

  the end of their brief relationship, when Seefa spent several long, agonizing

  hours arguing with him, trying to explain over his heated objections how to

  put insect colonies to directed neural use. He can't bring himself to believe

  she's succeeded; if he does, he'll have to swallow a lot of crow, amend his

  estimates of her ability, and he does not want to do that. Seefa Schnee has

  never been a gracious winner in any intellectual conflict.

  / SLANT 313

  really here. Not to help the FBI, not even to serve his troubled country, but

  to find the snare into which Jill has fallen, and release her, any way he can.

  Nathan has come to regard Roddy as the worst kind of blind date, a kidnapper

  who has stolen something very valuable to him.

  Jill is perhaps the sweetest intellect he has ever met in his thirty-two years.

  Nathan is more than half in love with her, an angelic platonic love freed of

  any physical connotations, though he has had rather impractical dreams...

  He's never told Ayesha any of this, of course.

  He puts his pad in his pocket. From this point on, the map is useless.

  He's back to dying bugs.

  Anybody with half a brain can see Torino is absolutely right. Schnee told him

  that significant and aggravating night. Nature is a complex of minds. Every species

  has its own neural boundaries, gathering information and fixing it as knowledge. And

  knowledge is anatomy, the continuing body of the species--

  To Seefa, every bee in a colony is an obvious analog of a neuron in a brain,

  though capable of both more complex neural judgment and motion. Node in

  the hive lattice and muscle combined. And how is a hive, viewed as a whole,

  basically different from you and me, or any other animal, but most e7?ecially social

  animals? The social order is a kind of super-mind, nested within the species super-mind.

  It's so obvious it's trite.

  Nathan silently agreed that it was trite. Also, dead wrong. He has never

  thought much of Torino's work, and Seefa's ideas were, if anything, even wilder.

  He crouches over a black and yellow wasp. It bobs its abdomen wearily as

  it crawls along the hall, trying to get back home.

  The problem with our concept of mind is that we confuse our own kind of selj

  awareness with thinking in general. Self-awareness is an attribute of certain kinds of

  social animals. Why should a mind be self-aware? It's enough it's world-aware. If it

  isn't socially connected to other minds, it doesn't need social filters or self-modeling. It's

  self-making, self-sufficient. It measures and embodies and acts. A world-aware mind is

  just one step close, to God than you and I.

  He values self, his own, Jill's, Ayesha's, the selves and awarenesses of his

  friends and family. He doesn't give an empty damn for theory and selfless

  science at the moment. Intellectual games don't help him keep up his courage.

  There's a door ahead, heavy steel, half-open. He hears a buzzing from the

  other side of the door, soft and insistent, all-pervasive in the otherwise silent

  hallway.

  Nathan takes a deep breath, holds it, and peers through the door, more than

  half expecting to die.

  The next room is warm and dry, not completely dark, but very nearly so.

  His eyes adjust slowly to the dimness. He doesn't dare use his flashlight.

  The walls are covered with irregular lumps: wasp nests. The floor is thick

  with large black and red ants mnvin, nurnnefillv between rll rn,,4 ...... to

  314

  GREG BEAR

  A simple winding trail has been kept clear, bare concrete floor, not quite a

  foot wide. It crosses the room, passes around the mounds, perhaps--he hopes--

  extends to a door on the other side.

  There is no time to backtrack and find another way.

  He makes his first step, listens. The sound is a constant hum and a whispery,

  chitinous shuffling. The wasps fly around him, but do not land or make ag

  gressive moves. The air is full of them, however. If he sucks in his breath, he

  might drag a few of the stinging insects into his mouth, into his lungs.

  He's soaked. Sweat pours from his face and down his back.

  Maybe these are just failed experiments. Maybe Seefa keeps them around

  for protection. They're good at that, certainly but they aren't uncontrolled or

  hair-trigger, like killer bees.

  Nathan estimates, hopes is perhaps the better word, that he has crossed the

  room halfway. He can dimly see a yellow glow bouncing from several clustered

  ant mounds that reach to the roof like stalagmites in a cave. He walks gingerly

  around the mounds, and a wasp buzzes against his cheek, making him jerk to

  one side. For a nauseating moment, he feels he is about to lose his balance and

  topple into the ants, but he recovers with an out-thrust arm and steadies

  himself.

  The wasp does not sting, the insects remain calm. Controlled.

  Controlled, or self-controlled. Humans have been talking with bees and

  other social insects, in various ways, for sixty or seventy years. Bee-direction is

  a well-established science used in agriculture. Maybe Seefa has mastered control

  of some kinds of social insects, and that's where her accomplishment ends.

  But as his eyes adjust, he sees that the nests, the ant trails, even the flight

  paths of the wasps, the arrangement of their clumped paper nests, is hauntingly

  tiliar. Not circuitry--nothing so crude as that--but arrangements dictated

  by pure lattice theory. Not random, not natural; evocative, deeply familiar to

  any student of thinker design.

  Self-ordered, cooperative, connected, after a fashion.

  A controlling fashion established, he tells himself, by none other than crazy,

  unfashionable, out-of-control Cipher Snow.

  He sees the light beyond the mounds. It's another door, or rather a window

  in a door, but the door is closed. He can't make out what lies beyond. It's only

  i. slightly brighter beyond the door than in here with the insects.

  What Nathan can't bring himself to believe, even now, is that he has already

  found Roddy, that all of this is part of the child-like, dangerous thinker who

  has snared Jill.

  The door handle is
mercifully free of insects. He opens the door slowly.

  Beyond is a small glass-enclosed chamber equipped with a decade-old Mitsu-

  Shin terminal and a rolling programmer's chair. He recognizes the chair. It

  was Seefa's favorite; she had it with her at Mind Design. The back of the seat

  is covered with printed plastic stickers of daisies and kittens.

  / SLANT 315

  The door closes slowly, quietly. The insects stay in their room.

  Outside the glass walls, Nathan sees a large garden. As he watches, concentric

  rings of lights come on over the garden, brightening slowly to full sun-