by Ian Watson
“He’s obsessed with what I told you.”
“So are you, it seems.”
“I don’t like seeing anyone search after ultimate meaning in places where there’s no blood, no gyzym, no juice. The Kybers are machines—very advanced machines, maybe, but still machines. Whatever sacrificed its birthright to engineer them has paid the price of extinction for its vanity. Dr Norn refuses to recognize that fact. He thinks the Kybers will be able to tell him who coded the acorn.”
Keiko felt that, mutedly, Sixkiller was raving; none of what he said made any straightforward sense. “You’re a pantheist,” she said, testing the description mentally. “You’re a Shintoist in eagle feathers.”
“Without the goddamn feathers. I see no spirit in these death-worshipping mechanical aliens—except an evil one. Machines have no souls, Dr Takahashi.”
“This from a floater pilot? From a man who has many times entrusted his life to the mercy of the Heavenbridge?”
“Controllable machines, Dr Takahashi.”
“Whereas the Kybers—”
“Are machines that seek to control the organic processes and the organic beings that you and I represent. Therefore, they’re our enemies. If he thinks them good fodder for xenological study, Dr Norn is a traitor to life. Meanwhile, Dr Takahashi, the Kybers are agents of entropy and death.”
“Farrell—” She hoped that the repetition of his first name might soften him enough to employ hers.
“Now they lie in what Betti calls kybertrance,” he interrupted her, “a state almost indistinguishable from death, and their planet will soon be dragged off its Dextro orbit into the chill of winter transit.”
“Toward another sun,” Keiko cautiously pointed out.
“Don’t allow Dr Norn to come to you tonight. The Kybers have infected him with their own negative essence, Dr Takahashi. He’s gradually taking on the deathly attributes of the machines he regards as oracles.”
Sixkiller was insane. Onogoro had undone him. To suppose Andrik surrendering to any sort of pernicious antilife force was to misread the character of the man. Keiko retreated another step. Although several centimetres shorter than Craig Olivant, Sixkiller was taller than Andrik, muscular in a sleek, catlike way, and only slightly less intense in his movements and enthusiasms. It was frightening to face him alone on the deserted outer margin of the expeditionary Platform. Nor did the anguished notes of a recorded synthesizer composition floating out to them from one of the inflatables have any power to allay Keiko’s fear. The music seemed to isolate her even further.
“Since you’re giving advice,” she said, struggling to suppress both her anger and her fear, “what would you have me do?”
Sixkiller seemed not to hear the question. “Dr Norn is going to hurt you,” he said. “But he’s going to hurt all of us if he continues to pursue this obsession of his.”
“And I shouldn’t allow him to visit my dormicle?”
“Come to mine,” Sixkiller said, smiling more gently than Keiko had ever seen him smile. “Come to mine.”
“You’ve already formed alliances,” Keiko told him. “And I feel no physical attraction for you.”
“Captain Hsi? He hasn’t time to think of such things lately, Keiko.” (There he had finally used her given name—but in a context that made her wish for a return to impersonal formality.) “Besides, at present I’m in thrall to no one. Speaking solely of my private relationships, that is.”
Yes, thought Keiko, and you apparently regard me as a warm but distant star to be wooed during winter transit. If so, you’re wrong to interpret my willingness to hear you out as either desire or sympathy. …
Sixkiller, cocking his head attentively, seemed to read these thoughts in her face. “Good night, Dr Takahashi,” he said quietly. He plunged his mittened hands into the pouch on the belly of his parka, then stalked back toward the common room and the melancholy basso sighing of the synthesizer. Keiko closed her eyes on his retreating figure.
FIVE
“Dear God, Kei, what’s that?”
Andrik, a heat-quilt twisted about his legs, had just pulled himself to a sitting position on her bedstead. He was staring into the dormicle’s holoniche at the nimbused and multiarmed statues of Kannon projected there from a microdot on a plastic card. Keiko wiped her eyes and looked at the xenologist. She saw him through a blur of tears and the lingering gold radiance shed by the images of the bodhisattva. Her dormicle had become the Hall of Mercy, and her lover had revived to its transfiguration.
“Sanjusangendo,” she whispered.
“What?”
As best she could, Keiko explained. After their bout of love-making it had struck her that the Kybers of Onogoro bore a strong resemblance to the statues of Kannon in the Hall of Mercy. She did not tell Andrik that she had briefly seen his own body as a machine, nor that that perception had led her to make a startling connection between the benighted natives of this world and the thousand enlightened Buddhas-to-be in the temple in Kyoto. If Kannon was holy, then a Kyber might also be holy. And if Andrik had briefly seemed a mindless mechanism rather than a living organism, well, perhaps his passion to understand could enlighten and transfigure him, too. Sixkiller’s fear need not infect her and the others.
Everything was holy, rightly perceived.
“The resemblance is superficial,” Andrik declared, studying the images in the holoniche. The figures in the foreground stood about a hand high; those behind them diminished in size until the faces on the tenth row were mere thumbnail masks coated with antique-gold polish. “Despite all those arms, Kannon has a human face.”
Keiko said nothing.
“Can you imagine a host of Kybers standing in rows in a Buddhist temple, switched off—emblems of our human mercy if we decide to rescue them from this decoupling? Can you, Kei?”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“They worship one another, or did before they all shut down. Why shouldn’t we join in?”
“Farrell Sixkiller says you’ve already begun.” Keiko realized that, without meaning to, she had framed a kind of accusation.
“He worships ignorance. The Kybers my gods, and blissful ostrich ignorance his—that’s the score, eh?”
Again Keiko held her tongue.
Andrik softened toward her, vowed that his remark about placing the Kybers in a Buddhist temple had been intended facetiously—as if she had not understood that much for herself. Noticing her pique, reading the depth of her melancholy, he grew jauntily philosophical:
“Sometimes, Kei, I think we’ve flown to the stars for one reason and one reason only: to worship at the shrine of the Strange. Having left our own shrines vacant, of course.”
Now she spoke up: “That’s too easy an analysis, Andrik. Besides, it’s not true of Nippon. The shrines and temples aren’t vacant there.” It hurt to be separated from her country, and the trembling hologram of the statues of Kannon cruelly reinforced her sense of estrangement and loss.
“Is there a difference?” Andrik asked. “Between shrines and temples, I mean?”
“Temples are Buddhist, shrines are Shinto. Buddhism is the spiritual, meditative religion. Shinto is a celebration of the earth, of the flesh. But one doesn’t choose between being a Buddhist or a Shintoist, Andrik. One is finally both. Either, in fact—from moment to moment, from day to day. As I am, even here on Onogoro.”
“And the Kybers?”
“Having ‘taught’ one,” she said laughing wanly, “I can easily imagine that an ultraintelligent biomachine might become a Buddhist. Such an entity represents pure thought, Andrik, thought beyond thought. But—like Sixkiller, I’m afraid—I don’t know how much a creature could ever be a Shintoist. No flesh. No earth.”
“A little sand, though,” Andrik offered playfully. “Silicon circuitry, my Lady Kei.”
She shook her head. “Sand gardens—rock gardens—are reflections of Buddhist reverie. As at Ryoanji Temple. Before I left my country for Luna Port, Andrik, I spent three
hours sitting in the temple grounds contemplating that little sea of white sand with its fifteen stone islands. Then, the very next day, I joined the surge of millions up the hill above the Inari Shrine at Fushimi—up through ten thousand vermilion torii gateways stationed shoulder to shoulder like … like giant croquet wickets.” She smiled, proud of this transnational analogy. “ And I? I was a corpuscle in the human bloodstream there, body pressing against body all the way to the top, gladly losing myself in the press.”
“So you’re a Shintoist when you make love?”
Keiko flinched, then hoped that Andrik had not taken note. “Perhaps.” She turned off the projector; the statues of Kannon vanished. “Viewed in that way, though, you should perhaps regard orgasm as Buddhist, a moment of nirvana.”
“Maybe this mass hibernation of the Kybers is a protracted communal orgasm, then. A time of enlightened cyber-thoughts. Kyber-thoughts. Or maybe it’s a long Shinto memorial service, when they remembered what they were.”
“Sixkiller says they’re dead.”
“But they can resurrect themselves to our idea of life, Kei. Maybe they live through death—just as we rejuvenate ourselves with sleep, taking the elevator of Morpheus down through the non-REM levels of consciousness to the REM floors of dreams. Their sleep is literally death, and their dreams are profound but inaccessible kyberthoughts.”
“Sleep doesn’t rejuvenate you, Andrik. You fight it, waking up as hyper as you went to bed.”
Naked and trembling, Andrik cast aside the heat-quilt and donned a robe. A moment later he was pacing. He halted in front of the holoniche. “Turn the projector back on, Kei.”
She did, and upon Andrik were superimposed, or inter-threaded, the gleaming illusory images of the statues. He stepped aside, permitting the entire miniature scene to leap backward into the holoniche.
“There is more than a superficial resemblance,” he said. “Kannon is inscrutable, and so are the Kybers. Their thoughts are beyond our apprehension—kyberthoughts, nirvana-thoughts.”
“Then Sixkiller is right, Andrik: we’ll never be able to comprehend them, at least not in this life.”
Andrik resumed pacing, disrupting the hologram each time he passed in front of the projector. “Overloaded with data, they shut down,” he said in a speculative tone. “They sleep—they die, rather—in order to process this data. They pass into stasis, into voluntary death, into genuine death—with the possibility of either a willed or an externally triggered resurrection. The mechanism for this awakening operates like a thermostat, switching them on again! They rejuvenate themselves through death!”
“You mean a cryostat, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Andrik said, halting and pointing an appreciative finger at her. “Exactly. A cryostat.” Then he paced again. “What must they imagine when they’re dead? That they’re alive? And, when they’ve switched back on again, that they’re … dead? That their awakening has plunged them back into the illusion and heartbreak of mere existence?”
Listening to Andrik’s feverish self-interrogation, Keiko grew uneasy. The Kybers had infected him with their “negative essence”, Sixkiller had said, and now, indeed, it seemed that there was something cold and entropic about her lover’s obsession with them.
“What if we could kidnap a Kyber and chill it down to the temperature of liquid nitrogen in a cryotank?” he was asking. “Would its brain achieve light-speed reasoning? Would it pump its frozen limbs too fast for us to follow?”
“Andrik—”
“Death and cold are their natural mediums,” he continued.
“Media,” she corrected him half-heartedly. Just at the moment a touch of linguistic certitude felt like a port in a storm.
But he turned to address her directly. “Maybe I mean mediums as in seance? Their lateral pupils, Kei—their lateral pupils are their death-eyes. Thanatoscopes, call them. Instruments for perceiving life-in-death and death-in-life. It’s certainly clear to me that they can see things beyond our ken, things out of our range of empirical and metaphysical perception.”
“Hush,” Keiko whispered.
“It’s clear to me, too, that—”
“Hush,” Keiko said, with tender emphasis.
Andrik’s eyes widened and his lips remained parted. He was standing in a shimmer of tiny statues, his navy-blue robe and his pale flesh patterned with the golden overlay. He seemed stunned by her command.
“I love you, Andrik.”
She repeated the words to herself, translating them for the first time mentally into Japanese—kimi wo aishite iru—acknowledging their boldness in her own language. For a man to say such a thing would be, well, affected. For a woman, it would almost be lacking in the sensitivity essential to love. Was this why, even though they had been physically involved with each other since their sixth week aboard the Heavenbridge, she had never said these words to him? Ah no, it was different. They had been lovers, yes, but not each other’s “loved ones”. The distinction was not something that Keiko had ever understood very well, but Andrik, who had apparently survived two unsatisfactory formal alliances in his past, seemed to think it a meaningful and important one. Therefore, herself wary of possessing and being possessed, and remembering even in their Translic pillow talk her own dialect of love, Keiko had doubly honoured the xenologist’s outspoken prescriptions against voicing a commitment deeper than occasional friendly access to each other’s sympathy and person. Love for Andrik, she knew, was an unobtainable abstract akin to, well, to the secret knowledge of the Kybers. Now, however, Andrik had begun to believe that given half a chance he could grasp the hidden kernel of that knowledge and utterly encompass it. If that were so, as unhealthy as his preoccupation with the aliens loomed, then why could he not also comprehend the strictures and the liberations of another human being’s love?
“Say again.”
She repeated the words.
And he surprised her by saying, easily, and apparently with sincerity, “And I love you.” He stepped toward her. The bodhisattvas shifted on his face. He looked like a picture puzzle of some kind of fragmented or endlessly replicated saint. Yes, that was it, thought Keiko, both amused and astonished: Andrik had been Kannonized.
Saint or no, he nodded at the bed.
“Not just yet,” she said, remembering her earlier image of him and the fears it had set galloping.
“Then let me hold you,” he suggested. “It’s cold, and I simply want to hold you, Kei.”
So they lay together on Keiko’s spartan bedstead, the heat-quilt crumpled atop them and their arms mercifully interlocked beneath its folds. They lay this way, her lips to his forehead, until Onogoro’s dawn. The thousand illusory statues of Kannon kept watch.
SIX
A sound of faint chimes awakened Keiko. She arose, donned her abbreviated kimono, and went to the door. The monitor screen above it showed her Betti Songa, already dressed and alert, standing in the corridor.
“I’m here, Betti. What is it?”
The African woman spoke into the microphone in the dormicle’s outside wall. “Captain Hsi wants all scientific personnel to gather at once in the observatory.”
“Before breakfast?”
Betti laughed. “If you haven’t already eaten, yes. You slugabed.” She was gone.
Andrik was off the bed and nearly into his clothes before Keiko could relay this message, and a moment later they were on their way together through one of the Platform’s hoopgirdered tunnels to the lab complex. The window-lenses in the corridor were completely frosted over with jumbled patterns of rime.
“Did it sleet last night?” Keiko asked Andrik.
He glanced at the ghost symbols on the window they were passing. “Only an Eskimo would know what to call last night’s weather. I rub noses, but I don’t savvy the one billion distinctions among different kinds of snow. Thank Dextro, it looks clear again.” Refracted brilliance dazzled their eyes, as light shone through the frost.
Assembled in the lecture room of the t
wo-storey observatory were most of Keiko’s professional colleagues, less than a dozen people. Four expedition members were on a protracted floater trip over the southern extremity of the Kyber continent; they had been gone nearly eight local days. Because neither the Platform mechs nor the floater pilots had been summoned to the lecture room, Farrell Sixkiller was blessedly absent.
Squeezing past Sharon Yablon into the third row of chairs horseshoeing the speaker’s dais, Keiko was conscious not only of the lateness of her and Andrik’s entrance but of the nervous expectancy of the entire group. Her own fear was that Captain Hsi was going to announce an immediate abandonment of Onogoro because of its imminent decoupling from Dextro. Andrik would not take that very well, she knew—nor did the prospect of monitoring from the Heavenbridge the planet’s extra-orbital pilgrimage toward Laevo particularly appeal to her, either. The transit would take almost two standard years, and she would have next to nothing to do. Surely they had another fifty or sixty local days in which to make genetic analysis of Onogoro’s strange biota and to spy on the hibernating Kybers.
Surely …
Captain Hsi and Craig Olivant were standing together at a makeshift music-stand lectern, but Craig, deferentially, had positioned himself a step or two behind the captain.
“Ladies, gentlemen,” Captain Hsi began, speaking Translic with no hesitancy and scarcely any accent this morning, “Dr Olivant tells me that many of you are already aware that Dextro-Gemini II may soon legally change its name to Laevo-Gemini II.”
Hearty laughter greeted the captain’s words. It sounded nervous and overquick to Keiko’s ear, as if her colleagues were grasping at the slender reassurance of humour. Olivant smiled wanly, and Andrik, sitting on her right, stared fixedly at the captain without any change of expression, which was coolly neutral. The captain was not known for humour, even in situations that might warrant its use.
“No matter,” Captain Hsi continued. “If we pursue the planet with the Heavenbridge, we may yet call it with some accuracy,” nodding meaningfully at Keiko, “Onogoro.”
