Slant

by Eikeltje

  glare. He puts his hand over his eyes, half-blinded.

  "Seea?" he calls out.

  Silence.

  He approaches the glass. The garden covers a space perhaps a hundred

  feet on a side, surrounded by waist-high walls, and beyond the walls, he

  can barely make out the dim reaches of a larger chamber, outside the sunlamp

  glow.

  A swinging door opens in the glass. Nathan steps out into a rich scent of

  moist dirt and greenery: peas, their tendrils curling up narrow stakes onto row

  after row of trellises. Bees hum industriously between small blossoms.

  To his left, four large gray and white boxes rest on concrete pads at the

  edge of the garden--older model INDAs. Thick fibers push from the sides of

  the boxes and spread in a pale radiance, then curve down and enter the dirt.

  Nathan stands on the dirt and stoops. His fingers dig into the rich

  black loam, encountering a slickness of warm slime, disturbingly like

  reaching into a woman's genitals. He pulls his hand out quickly. The soil

  is laced with two kinds of fiber, and tiny plastic spheres. One kind of fiber

  is optical, carrying signals back to the INDAs, he thinks. The other kind

  connects the plastic spheres, which are obsolete medical monitors, ten or

  fifteen years old. He racks his memory for more details on these little

  spheres. He was given some as a young boy. They analyzed the contents of

  gastrointestinal tracts, looking for possible infections. They have since been

  replaced by diagnostic toilets.

  Seefa has conducted her work on a very slim budget, with great ingenuity.

  Nathan can no longer doubt what he is seeing.

  The soil is thick with bacterial growth, connected with and nurtured in

  some way by the peas on their trellises. The outdated medical monitors sample

  the bacterial populations and report on biological solutions to challenges posed

  by the interfacing INDAs, perhaps in the form of antibiotics or tailored bacteriophages.

  The bacteria "swap spit," exchange plasmids, recipes, solve the challenges,

  and in so doing, with immense subtlety and power, though perhaps very

  slowly, bring to bear on human problems the most fecund and ancient powers

  of nature.

  It is genius, pure and simple. Nathan was wrong. Seefa was right. No one

  would listen to her, and she was driven to th/x, to supplying answers and tools

  to demented elitists.

  Despite himself, Nathan's eyes moisten. Under any other circumstance, this

  would be a cosmic moment, as great as finding life on another world.

  His feet press into Roddv's core substance. Roddv's flesh RdHv'

  316

  GREG BEAR

  Roddy is indeed a little boy, standing in a mound of dirt. And perhaps by

  now, crucial parts of Jill are encoded in the bacteria-laden loam, as well.

  He scrubs off his feet before re-entering the glass cage. Then he sits in

  Seefa's chair, and tries to make sense of the INDA displays that spring up

  before him.

  36

  It is all so very confused. Jack Giffey stands in one poorly lit place like a ghost,

  and then his memory blurs and shifts and the Other stands in another equally

  gloomy place, and somehow the flechette pistol has been fired many times, and

  the woman lies on the floor. He smells smoke and electricity.

  Giffey hunkers down and lets the gun drop. There might be more left to

  do, but he isn't at all sure what it is. He's positive of only one thing--that

  something has gone very wrong inside him. If he is a human smart weapon,.

  the programming has failed. And yet--

  He's killed Seefa Schnee. That's an accomplishment, but it is not all that

  he was sent here to do. It may not have been part of his specific instructions, but

  within his discretion. So was this a malfunction, too? The dead woman, a mistake?

  He looks up and for the first time notices where he is. A dark vaulted ceiling

  rises at least forty feet above, lit with tiny sparks of service lights. A door opens

  pe

  the stairs behind him, and he and the dead woman are on a walkway susnded

  above a pool of temporarily inactive slurry, dark and viscous. The

  construction is unfinished. Nano pathways weave through the recesses like

  high-rise highways in an antique vision of the future. Drums of architectural

  nano have been stored down here, hundreds of them stacked high in one corner.

  He suspects they are empty.

  Omphalos is poorly planned, over budget: ambition without wisdom. Jack

  Giffey and the Other, together, agree that this is not surprising. The Other

  has been involved in strategic and tactical plans, right-hand man to Colonel

  Sir, and everything he sees here smacks of rank incompetence.

  He looks around and tries to get to his feet, but his mouth explodes with

  loud obscenities and his mind goes white. When it stops, he is flat on his back.

  Someone says, "There you are, old fellow. Take it easy now."

  A foot kicks away the fiechette pistol. The Other looks up with eyes narrowed.

  A heavy-built man in a plain brown longsuit is kneeling beside him.

  "Shot her, did you?" he asks.

  The Other nods. "He shot her."

  /

  SLANT 317

  "I am," the Other agrees.

  The conservatively dressed man has very broad shoulders and a no-nonsense,

  stiffly handsome face that does not easily express emotion. "Not your fault,"

  he says. "As soon as we put two and two together, we knew we had to track

  you down and get you offline."

  "Offline. Kill me? For what I did before?"

  "No. You're safe enough from me. I don't even know what you did..."

  "I killed hundreds of civilians in a massacre in Hispaniola in 2034," the

  Other says. "Not personally. I was--"

  "Right. I don't need to know. Your cover is compromised. You've been

  screwed up by this fallback virus or whatever it is."

  "I wondered about that."

  "You're smart, old fellow. Can you get up?"

  "I think so. I tend . . . to swear a lot. Don't be startled and.., don't shoot

  me if I have a fit."

  "I won't."

  The Other stands. Jack Giffey seems like a character in a vid, vivid and

  unreal. "Where is my family? Are they still safe?"

  "If that was part of the guarantee, they're still safe."

  "It was. Immunity and sanctuary. Was I working alone?"

  "You mean, were you the only one on this case? No. But you might be the

  only one who made it this far... Where's Jenner?"

  "Dead."

  "The only one," the broad-shouldered, emotionless man confirms.

  The Other stands over the woman's body. It's quite a mess, with all the

  burrowing, corkscrew rounds of the flechette pistol having done their work.

  He must have unloaded his entire clip into her. But something isn't right.

  "Who was she?" the Other asks.

  The large man turns and glances down. "This one? This is a complete miss,

  old fellow," he says.

  The Other bends over and looks at the body more closely. "It's an arbeiter,"

  he says.

  "Yeah. A decoy."

  Somehow, this catches him by complete surprise. A successful ruse in the

  middle of all this nonsense. He stammers and jams his hand into his mouth,

  biting his knuckles un
til the urge passes. "I forget what else I'm supposed

  to do."

  "Nothing. You're done," the large man says. "We're getting you out of

  here as quietly as possible. Others will finish the work now. Where's the

  Hammer?"

  For a moment, he has no idea what this question means. Then he remembers.

  "It's upstairs. Out of the way. It needs constant direction. The assault...

  damaged its autonomous brain." He makes circling gestures with his hands.

  318

  GREG BEAR

  The large man listens intently. "Does it still have a load of explosive?"

  "Yes."

  They move back along the walkway, under the high, aloof worklights,

  through the door, and back up the four flights of stairs. Halfway up, he remembers

  that he is very curious about something. "What's my name?" he asks.

  "Black," the large man answers. "Carl Black. By the way, I'm supposed to

  say to you: 'One and seven don't count in cigars.'"

  The grizzled man flinches in earnest now and grips the railing tightly to

  keep from falling. The name and the password do their work.

  Jack Giffey dies. He's a little frightened as he goes--Carl Black feels this

  much--and then the construct, the memories, the attitudes, where they are

  not part of Black himself, fizzle out like bad connections in a network.

  "Come on, old fellow," the large man says, taking his arm.

  "Thank you," Carl Black says.

  He does feel old, completely used up. It's all he can do to finish climbing

  the stairs.

  37

  "Who in hell are you?"

  Jonathan opens his eyes and peers up through the open doors of the elevator.

  A small, thin woman in black blouse and pants stands just out of reach, staring

  anon at him with wide, scared eyes. She dangles a cigarette between thumb

  forefinger, with an inch of ash threatening to drop.

  "You can't be down here. Only I use this. Get out."

  Jonathan unwinds slowly and gets to his feet, embarrassed to be found in

  such a position. "I don't know where to go."

  "Not this way," the woman says, shooing him with one hand. "Go back up

  and get out."

  Jonathan stands a foot and a half taller than her, but her eyes fairly spit

  defiance.

  "You're Seefa Schnee," he says.

  She flicks the cigarette away and backs up. "I don't know you."

  "I came here with Marcus Reilly." He is near the heart of Omphalos, and

  he has come this far without Marcus, but he is certainly not above using

  Marcus's name to improve his chances.

  She doesn't seem to be armed.

  "Marcus is no big deal," she says. "Was he going to recruit you?" She

  automatically covers her mouth with the back of her hand as a string of broken

  / SLANT 319

  "Yes," Jonathan answers after her episode passes.

  She wipes her lips. "No big deal. Running out of money, You know that,

  don't you? Seeing places you aren't supposed to see. Look what they make me

  work with."

  "Marcus was going to show me everything," Jonathan says. The coldness in

  his head is seeping into his trunk. His chest feels like ice. He can kill if he

  needs to, anything to get out of here--and anything necessary to restore his

  family's order, or to avenge its breakdown. At the heart. Pluck it of.

  "What d-do you do?" Schnee asks.

  "I work in nano nutrition," Jonathan says. "Nutrim Group."

  Schnee nods rapidly. Her fingernails are heavily stained. He has never seen

  fingernails stained with tobacco smoke. They look sharp and ugly. She blinks

  and hides her hands behind her back.

  "That's important," she says in a conversational tone, as if they are getting

  acquainted at a party. Jonathan senses Seefa Schnee is deeply lonely. "We're

  out of key raw materials. He'd do that." Something switches in her thoughts

  and her voice grows tense. "But you can't stay here. It's all shit now. You

  escaped from the intruders--did Marcus escape?"

  "He's on the first level, waiting. I'm going to find a way out."

  "Mhm hm," Schnee murmurs, clearly not believing him. Still, she regards

  him with interested eyes. "Mhm hm. This isn't the way. You have to go back

  to the first level and take the emergency elevator..." She seems to remember

  something. "The big hall isn't finished. You have to go around the big hall."

  Jonathan steps out of the elevator. Schnee backs off another step. She's

  wearing black pajamas. Her feet are bare. A small, expensive pad is slung from

  a cord around her neck, and he sees extensive dattoos on the backs of her hands

  and wrists.

  "You have the same problem my wife does," he says. "She says things...

  odd outbursts."

  Schnee's face wrinkles in anger. "God damn it, get out."

  "No," Jonathan says. "Show me what you did for Marcus, and how you

  did it."

  "You're not with Marcus!" she shouts.

  "I was," Jonathan says, "but I'm learning to be my own man."

  $8

  They've worked their way across the first level to the face of Omphalos, the

  front chambers near where tourists are received and the building reveals its

  public face. Martin looks over Torres's pad diagrams, scrutinizes the walls and

  ceiling, shakes his head.

  "There are so many spaces not marked," he says. "It could be in any one of

  them."

  "What size would it be?" Torres asks.

  "That depends on how much money they spent. A complete biosynthetic

  lab... Licensed professional models can be less than a thousand cc's."

  "Assume it was put together on the sly," Daniels says. "Designed by a

  skilled amateur."

  "Then it could fill an entire room. Any of the rooms marked here."

  Mary walks away from them, turning into a corridor of the main hallway

  to the tourist center. She is looking for patterns of wear in the expensive woolen

  carpet. A metabolic carpet would repair itself and pathways would be untraceable.

  There might be more insects, of course, but she hasn't seen any since

  the elevator lobby.

  She has an hour, maybe two, before she collapses, desperately ill. She hopes

  the doctors treating the old man in the library can do something for her.

  She hopes Nussbaum appreciates her sacrifice.

  tey ary is beginning to understand the personalities that designed Omphalos:

  were stubbornly conservative in oddly predictable ways. She examines the

  pictures on the walls, recognizes a suite of biologically themed prints by twentieth-century

  artist Ross Bleckner: clusters of blurry cells, designs suggesting

  microscope slides. Her ex, E. Hassida, admired Bleckner.

  If these are originals, they are worth a great deal of money. And--

  The connection seems obvious, too obvious, but too good to ignore. The

  sudden burst of energy she feels almost overcomes her gathering discomfort.

  "Down here," she calls in as loud a voice as she can manage. She runs her

  hand along the walls. There are no obvious doorways, but that in itself means

  nothing. She has a few slightly illegal routines in her PD pad that can handle

  the signals found in most secure installations in public buildings. She decides

  she'll try these before the others arrive, to avoid questions she's much too tired

  to answer
.

  Mary walks up and down the corridor, porting her pad at waist level to the

  wall. Three doors reveal themselves after a sweep of five seconds. The inner

  sanctum, the builders must have believed, does not need to be so secure...

  /

  SLANT 321

  Either that, or there's nothing terribly important behind these doors, and her

  hunch is dead wrong.

  Now she tries to get the doors to open. One door opens after four seconds,

  the others shortly after. Torres sees her performing this work, and Daniels after

  him, but neither say anything. Professional discretion.

  Martin quickly wa[ks forward on his short legs, face childishly eager.

  "What have you got?"

  "I don't know," Mary says. "Maybe just some wild geese." She nods to the

  prints. Martin examines them, then grins. When he smiles, his features become

  quite attractive. He's a little like Nussbaum this way. It's the obvious intelligence

  that lights up the unremarkable face.

  Martin pushes at the doors one by one. They swing inward on standard

  heavy-duty hinges, ancient tech in so modern a building. Bland, normal, unmarked

  doors that can simply fade into a wall... Now she's certain something

  important is behind them.

  They enter the middle door. The room is filled with polished black cubes

  stacked on black steel racks. Martin reaches behind one rack and feels the back

  of a box.

  "Sequencers," he says. "Probably dedicated for proteins or enzymes." He

  counts the boxes with his jabbing fingers, using both hands. Each box is about

  a foot on a side.

  "Three hundred of them," he says. "If I'm right, maybe a third of the boxes