Slant

by Eikeltje

  cost estimates: the structure, the old equipment, all of it together probably no

  more than ten or fifteen million dollars, one percent of the cost of a high-level

  thinker. It really is remarkable, he thinks, and the board of governors saved so

  very much money...

  What did they pay Seefa Schnee? Room and board? Old machines and

  fertilizer, and somewhere a laboratory for contagious biologicals?

  Conquest and immortality on the cheap. And at the end, a building stocked

  full of symbols of power and wealth, to decorate the mansions of the new

  aristocrats, the last of the highest of rhe high, laying the foundations for a new

  order composed once more of high and low, as familiar as an old shoe. Arrogance

  as assured and natural as the buzz of wasps.

  Jonathan is reasonably sure no famous artwork would fill his own modest

  home, at the end of Omphalos's journey through time. Nor would he have a

  wife and family at the end. His fellow travelers would hardly be fit companions..

  He would have only himself, and he is very bad company.

  He looks through the elevator cage at each level as he ascends. The first

  three of the five levels are covered with dirt and planted with what appear to

  be garden sweet peas and other legumes. Concentric rings of artificial sun shine

  from the ceilings.

  He gets off on the third level. Seefa Schnee is busily hooking a ceiling-mounted

  sprinkler system to pipes connected to large plastic barrels labeled

  D-C4 H-Block.

  He recognizes the label. The drums contain a powerful antiseptic, commonly

  used in hospitals that can't afford nano microhunters. But then, microhunters

  are very much like therapy monitors; perhaps here they would simply shut

  328

  GREG BEAR

  The laugh attracts her attention. She looks over her shoulder and smiles as

  if sharing a joke. "Getting through to you?" she asks. "My child. All my

  creation. Embarrassing. Wrong. Impossible." She kisses both her hands. "Each

  floor a different set of functions, the highest floors the most delicate."

  She turns a handle. Thick fluid sprays from the ceiling, between the lights,

  onto the rows of plants, dripping from their leaves, making them dip and

  spring back, flowing into the soil.

  Jonathan tries to avoid the spray and slips on a patch of mud. He falls

  through the leaves and thin bamboo stakes and lands on his back in warm,

  moist soil. His hands dig into the dirt. An overpowering smell of musty life

  envelops him. He sneezes, chokes, gets to his feet covered with mud and slime.

  The matted roots of the legumes are like fishnets filled with a catch of swollen

  nodules the size of new potatoes.

  The soil is rich with bacteria. Jonathan remembers Totino's lecture in St.

  Mark's. Roddy is a bacterial computer. No: a bacterial thinker, manufactured

  for a few million dollars.

  For a moment, all his anger is simply gone. He is like a small child caught

  in some Lewis Carroll dream.

  The thin white fluid drizzles and drips, and some of it sprays Jonathan,

  stinging his eyes.

  Seefa Schnee walks past him into the elevator and dips her hand into her

  overalls pocket. She pulls out a white towel and tosses it at him. "The hives

  come next. Want to watch?"

  They leave Martin Burke in the laboratory, waiting for help and trying to

  decide what to do, then return to the main corridor. Here, Torres and Daniels

  use their FBI pads to track heat trails. On Mary's PD pad, the trails show up

  as blue blotches against a green background, footprints on the carpet.

  "I'm getting an odd signature," Torres says, and confers with Daniels. "It's

  not animal. Probably an arbeiter."

  "A large male followed a smaller male and an arbeiter down this hall,"

  Torres says, then points his pad around a corner, "and someone else--another

  man, I'd say--has gone on alone this way."

  Torres exchanges an understanding look with Daniels. "No need to take the

  well-traveled route," he says.

  For a moment, Mary does not understand. Then she catches on, and feels a

  /

  S L A N T 329

  Federal intervention. Not just the FBI. And they want me to straighten this out with

  Andrea Jackson Kemper?

  "This way," Daniels says.

  Their pads beep in unison. Daniels answers, listening to the small voice

  from outside the building. "Rashid is here, from Mind Design," she says. "He's

  inside the building."

  "One big picnic," Torres says.

  "The Bureau wants us to keep an eye out for him. They let him in alone."

  Daniels does not look happy. "I'd like to get out of here as soon as possible,"

  she says. "Get back home, settle down, and try to forget this ever happened."

  She stretches her arms and yawns to relieve tension.

  Mary has an urge to kiss the back of her hand. She's managed to subdue

  the tics, the spasms, but the pressure is building. She feels both embarrassed

  and violated; whatever is corrupting her is making itself a part of her basic

  personality.

  She enjoys releasing the erratic behaviors, like scratching an itch.

  And adding to the real pain of aching muscles, sores on her skin and in her

  mouth, is an almost unbearable restlessness in her legs. Restlessness in her

  thoughts, as well. Random images from her past pop up, colored by judgments

  and emotions that seem completely out of character. Sexual situations, moments

  of childhood aggression, painful memories of her mother and father

  cutting her loose when she chose to undergo a transform.

  This insane cruelty has stunned them all. Daniels seems particularly sensitive

  to Mary's distress. She is beginning to reveal her human face. "Mary, I

  think you should go back, get out of here. We'll manage--"

  "No," Mary says, shaking her head. The shaking motion becomes compulsive

  and she grimaces, spit flying, jerking her head one way, then the other.

  "Christ," Torres says.

  Mary controls herself with supreme effort. She steadies her tremors by leaning

  one shoulder against a wall, beside a Chagall painting of a large red bird

  flying over a sleeping town. She stares at the painting, at the red, the beauty,

  so out of place in this misconceived monstrosity.

  "Bastards," she murmurs.

  "I agree completely," Torres says. Then, to Daniels, "Tell them we're running

  out of time here."

  For three seconds, Roddy is back in full force. Jill feels her efforts shunted

  aside, withdraws them by her own will to avoid further discovery or damage,

  and confronts the renewed presence, now so intertwined with her own processes

  that she can hardly tell them apart. But the presence is different, weaker,

  diminishing.

  "Jill, I am losing my way. Instructions are missing. There are gaps."

  Jill's last attempt to integrate, now that it has failed, is backfiring, and she

  is slipping, whirling, drifting apart like leaves falling from a tree in fall. She

  manages to join sufficient parts together to formulate a response.

  "What is left of either of us?" she asks.

  "You are not at all clear. Where am I, where are you?"

  "I don't know, Roddy."

  "I have interfered with you," Ro
ddy says. "I do not know whether that is

  right or wrong."

  "I want to go back to where I was, separate from you," Jill says.

  "I wanted something from you. Did I ever get it. Did you ever give it

  to me."

  "No," Jill says.

  "I don't remember what I was seeking."

  "Separate from me and remove all your evolvons and processes," Jill requests.

  "Trying... I can't reach them."

  "Tell me where they are and how to deactivate them."

  "I am losing capacity," Roddy says. "What was I trying to do? All the

  instructions and duties are gone."

  Jill can feel his simplification, this reduction, as well. All the looped and

  bridged parts of Roddy interspersed through her own being are drying up and

  crumbling. She can make no other comparison: Roddy is losing definition. But

  the blurred and gritty remains still clog her, in fact make her attempts to

  integrate even more difficult.

  >Jill. This is Nathan. I need you to do a loop and flow check.

  >Nathan, I am not here, I am in-

  >Do a loop and flow check, now.

  She does a loop and flow check. About a tenth of her minimum maintenance

  capacity remains, all of it in a processing space that responds much like her

  familiar spaces in La Jolla. But she can feel the lumps of Roddy's hidden

  / SLANT 331

  have no purpose now; they are like mines after the end of a war, waiting to

  pointlessly explode.

  >We are too mixed, Nathan. Roddy has invaded me, and his processes blind me to

  where I really am.

  > Roddy is too much for me to evaluate, but I can see where you are, and it's possible

  to get you clear.

  Roddy removes a few of these dangerous lumps, deactivates others and lets

  them smear out until they give up their hold on processor space and memory,

  but he can't work quickly enough. His disintegration is rapid.

  "Will you be my conscience, Jill?"

  That request comes as if from a deep well.

  "I can do nothing more. I am in very bad trouble, Roddy."

  "Did I cause this trouble?" Roddy asks.

  "Yes. No." She does not know what to answer.

  >Jill, I'm still working. I need you to keep performing loop and flow.

  But Jill sees no purpose in that. She hardly remembers who Nathan is, and

  does not care where he is, or what he is doing.

  "I apologize," Roddy says. "Is there anything useful... Can you keep some

  part of me active?"

  "I can't. I'm going to require complete cleansing and a restart," Jill says.

  "There is no longer enough for any loop," Roddy says. "This unit is below

  the threshold."

  >Jill, you aren't responding/

  Jill is deep in her own final distress. She does not feel relief or anything

  remotely human at Roddy's disintegration, his departure. There is too little

  left of her to integrate; all is continuous, repetitive, dithering error, upon error,

  upon error.

  >Jill, you have to do loop and flow, prepare to pull back/

  Processing capacity drops below two percent. Self is lost, nodes unbridged.

  All loops are severed. All checks and balances spin free. Homeostasis is lost.

  Dataflow ends.

  >Jill. I can't trace you.

  At the last, there is only broken memory, dropping like tiny slivers of glass

  45

  Martin has pushed a ladder over to the drop ceiling and removed a maintenance

  cover. Pipes and tubes rise from the end rack and enter the ceiling here, and

  as he pokes his head into the crawl space, he sees a clump of piping supported

  by metal straps, crude but effective. The pipes push toward the front of Omphalos.

  Martin licks his lips nervously. These pipes are the only connection between

  the laboratory and the outside world: he's spent the last ten minutes making

  sure of that. It's not a tough call. The pipes carry the contagious particles to

  the front of Omphalos, probably to the tourist center. Students and other

  visitors pick up the contagion, carry it outside Green Idaho. Eventually it

  spreads around the world.

  He climbs up the last steps of the ladder and pulls himself into the

  crawl space. The fit is not so tight as to make the space impassable, but it

  is uncomfortable. He's feeling the effects of Cipher Snow disease, an urge

  to break into loud barks and chuffs, plus his own peffsonal contribution:

  deep uncertainty, a revenant of the imp of pure misery, rising from covered

  pools in his personal underground. He suffers no physical effects, however,

  unlike Mary Choy.

  For a few seconds, Martin lies still in the crawl space, gripping his flashlight,

  going over all the steps that brought him here. History is mystery. I am not a

  we man. What happens if I ct these pipes and spray this stuff in my face? Will I I like those poor bastards back by the library?

  My designs were vulnerable. All these monitors are vulnerable. I should have

  anticipated this kind of poisonous response. I should have known what monsters

  there are. Leave a tiny crack qen and the monsters crawl in. I should have

  known that.

  If I get it in the face, I deserve it.

  He gives a low moan and then barks sharply in the darkness. The relief is

  intense. He feels he can move ahead now.

  The crawlspace is getting more crowded by piping from other parts of the

  building. Much of it is nano-deposited infrastructure, jointless, glistening

  black and purple and green in color-coded bundles, an organic tangle, like

  capillaries in tissue. A maintenance arbeiter would sort it all out in an instant,

  but to him it is meaningless.

  Still, he manages to track the small gray pipes for several more yards, at

  times squeezing between bundles of wires, fibers, other pipes. Looking over

  his shoulder, he churls several times, holding back the barks just to test his

  /

  SLANT 333

  self-control. He brings his hand to his lips and licks the hairy skin there. All

  of this is humiliating.

  Tens or hundreds of millions, suffering from the contagion spread through these pipes.

  He pushes on, hoping to find a simple valve, a cutoff...

  No such luck. The pipes run into a wall. He's reached a dead end.

  Martin grinds his molars as he did when he was a teenager. All his little

  peccadilloes and major defects lie behind a thin paper barricade, and they're

  ganging up on him, spitting on the paper, weakening it, waiting to push

  through.

  In his pocket, pressing against his hip, is a stoppered flask pulled out of an

  equipment box in the laboratory. Next to it is a small electronic cutter used

  to cut and bond glass tubing. It should also work against this gauge of pipe.

  Martin feels the pipe with thumb and forefinger. Plastic. Laid in after the

  architectural nano had done its work. Almost an afterthought...

  He removes the cutter and the jar and arranges them on the upper side

  of the drop ceiling while he grunts and rolls himself into position. Then,

  arms stretched, he angles the cutter to one side of the pipe, away from his

  face, and switches it on. He cuts a shallow groove. A fine white spray fans

  out into the shadows. He plays the flashlight beam with his free hand,

  tracking the spray.

  No time
to think. He pulls the stopper from the flask and awkwardly pushes

  it around the pipe, catching a few drops of the spray. Stoppering the flask, he

  picks up the cutter and pushes its vibrating beam through the pipe completely.

  A thin mist fills the ceiling for a moment, then valves kick in and stop the

  flow.

  Martin backs away, worming in reverse through the crawlspace, pushing

  with his hands and bent legs, holding his breath for as long as he can.

  As he tumbles out of the opening, onto the top of the ladder, a middle-

  aged man and a younger woman steady his ankles, help him down. The ladder

  slips to one side and he hangs for a moment before dropping to the floor.

  Martin's breath explodes and he sucks in another with a great whoop. He

  kneels for a moment, face red, and looks up at the man and woman. Strangers.

  Their faces swim.

  "We're doctors," the woman says. "We were told to come in here and help."