Harsh Oases

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Lustron Avouris, you have the immediate responsibility of getting Maruta Forcroy and all those other women back.”

  “Maruta Forcroy accompanied Magister Zawinul willingly, as, ultimately, did all the others. We have reality-stamped recordings of each separate event. Additionally, we do not approach any magister-class being either diplomatically or with forceful display. In the former case, results are at best unpredictable. In the latter, generally lethal or unpleasantly transvaluative.”

  “But Maruta didn’t go willingly, she was coerced! She acted that way only because the Singularity was threatening me! She acted to save me! And now I have to act to save her, with or without your help!”

  I stood up to leave. The mobile elements of the Licorice Whip that passed for a face realigned into a new configuration.

  “Wait one moment, Lucerne Locarno. If you insist on pursuing this matter yourself, I am obligated to inform you that there is a standard procedure which the Reticulate offers to aid you in your quest”

  I sat down again. “Tell me about it. Is it dangerous?”

  “Until the moment you step through the Indrajal to meet the Singularity, it is not dangerous at all, but rather just tedious and masochistic.

  “Is masochistic the right word?”

  So here’s what Lustron Avouris outlined would happen to me, if I consented to accept aid from the Reticulate in my quest to rescue Maruta (and the one thousand, four hundred and thirty-two other women Zawinul had stolen, if I felt exceptionally heroic).

  First, my soul-essence—officially known as my Individual Identity Matrix—would be removed from my natural body—the only somatic shell I had ever known (I was very young back then, only two hundred and three)—and transplanted into a synthetic vessel known as a sludge- bucket.

  A sludge-bucket resembled a human fashioned out of particularly sloppy grey mud by a brain-damaged child. These constructs were generally animated by off-the-shelf sub-Turing personalities and employed in doing manual labor in destructive environments. Their other use was to contain the IIM’s of criminals for the duration of their sentences, imprisonment in a sensorily deprived sludge-bucket being deemed punishment enough for most offenses. Instantly recognizable by honest citizens and constrained by various in-built chemical leashes from violence or from wandering too far from the purview of authorities, these human-containing sludge-buckets were uncomfortable pariahs for the length of their terms of imprisonment.

  And now I had to become one such. Temporarily, at least.

  The reason for this awkward transformation was my insistence on voyaging to Zawinul and putting myself within the Singularity’s most potent zone of influence.

  Or, as Lustron Avouris termed it, “the suzerainty of the Spike. Is suzerainty the correct word?”

  The Singularity was composed in some sense of human raw materials. Quantum-entangled human wetware was the platform on which all Singularities ran. Human brain matter could be uplifted to posthuman status. But the artificial goop that passed for a brain in a sludge-bucket could not. The Reticulate did not want to offer the Singularity more processing power than it already owned. My embodiment in a sludge-bucket ensured that I would not be co-opted by the magister-level entity at Zawinul.

  Once wearing my hideous new shape, I would be placed in a slower-than-light spaceship and sent on a trip lasting six months. This voyage would culminate out in the Oort Cloud surrounding my native star-system. There, on a grim, airless asteroid rested a very special gate of the Indrajal dedicated to maintaining the infrequent contacts between the Reticulate and any Singularity world. This spatial isolation was intended as a kind of quarantine measure.

  After Lustron Avouris finished explaining this procedure to me, I immediately had two questions.

  “Aren’t Singularities by definition nearly infinite in their processing capacity? How can adding a single human brain to infinity amount to anything?”

  The black Licorice Whip presented me with what I could only categorize as a finicky expression. “Yes, we assume that every magister has attained some level of mentation approaching infinity. But we cannot be absolutely certain. Our understanding of their abilities is necessarily incomplete. Therefore, we choose to err on the side of caution.”

  “All right. Understood. But what about isolating the only Indrajal gate to Zawinul so far away? That makes no sense at all. We just witnessed the incursion of the magister right in our midst! Obviously, he doesn’t need to employ our network at all! He can reach us anywhere, any time he wants! So why can’t I cut out this stupid six-month delay and just use a gate right here on Silane?”

  “You wish to expose millions of your fellow sophonts to direct contamination by the Singularity?”

  “They’re already exposed! No one’s safe! We’ve just seen that!”

  “You claim that the Reticulate cannot protect its citizenry? This is behavior most reprehensible and unpatriotic. I might very well have to rescind my official eleemosynary offer. Is eleemosynary the correct word?”

  I knew enough to quit arguing with a bureaucrat employing that special brand of self-defensive groupthink illogic, and gave in to all of the specified conditions.

  My transformation to a sludge-bucket was quick and painless. Long-tested and frequently employed, the procedure went flawlessly—from the point of view of those administering it. As for myself, I awoke feeling as if I had been swaddled in layers of papier-mache. My muscles seemed to work on time-delay circuits, and in a herky-jerky fashion. My sight and hearing and sense of touch functioned like imperfect robot analogues of the organic originals. My brain felt as if it were a badly coded simulacrum running on an antique platform from the years of the Midnight Dawn.

  I would have to tell Lustron Avouris: “Masochistic” had indeed been the correct word choice for this self-inflicted hell.

  After the procedure, I had to summon up all my resolve and focus to remember why I needed to go on, forcibly reminding myself of my mission: to save Maruta from the unknowable bodily and soul-essence violations of the Singularity.

  Lustron Avouris surprised me by proving dutiful enough to be present at the shabby, barely-trafficked spaceport to see me off. Swaying in the breeze, the ropey sophont escorted me to the underbelly of the ship that would transport me to Standfast, the asteroid in the Oort Cloud that hosted the isolated, dedicated Singularity-linked gate of the Indrajal. Although the ship was immaculate, thanks to its pico-active construction, I got the sense that it had not been used in decades.

  “Please accept my best wishes for the success of your mission, Lucerne Locamo. If you return whole and nontransvaluated—an outcome most unlikely—then I will be the first to recommend you for a Reticulate Order of Civic Virtue.”

  My tongue felt like a dead fish in my mouth. “Thunks uh lart.”

  Someone on the ship—something, rather; I would soon learn that the vessel was empty of other enscripted sophonts, its crew consisting only of moderate-Turing constructs—activated stressor fields, lifting me onboard. The hatch closed, the ship lifted, and I was on my way.

  Plenty of delicious foodstuffs and rich entertainments had been laid in for my enjoyment Rather cruelly and ironically, I thought, since I was incapable in my current state of appreciating any of them. Nor could I really enjoy the sophisticated conversation of the m-T constructs, due both to mental limitations and mental preoccupations.

  Luckily, I discovered that my sludge-bucket body possessed a kind of hibernatory facility, during which I could enjoy long directed daydreams, rousing myself only long enough to replenish my cells with some vapid nutrient paste.

  During these endless tedious weeks I revisited all my memories of Maruta Forcroy, striving to reaffirm my unacknowledged love for her, and so justify the incredible danger and risk in whose path I had placed myself. In my dreams we again skiied the slopes of the Tacoma Mountains on Mondesire, attended a chromo-sarod and emo-tablas performance by the four-armed maestro, Ziza Aziz, wandered drunkenly through the Festival of
Entropy on Ognibene, held each other tightly during the terrifying chance-broadcast destruction of the Scribbly Congeries at Redbottom— These and a hundred other incidents, tender, tantric, traumatic and just tolerable, I relived, until finally Maruta assumed a kind of solidity in my heart and mind (inferior as those organs currently were) that she had never exhibited before.

  By the time my ship arrived at Standfast I felt secure in my motivations, filled with a keen determination to rescue Maruta or expire trying.

  Once dirtside, the ship stood off some programmed “safe” distance from the Indrajal gate, resting in the wan starlight. I was forced to don an atmoskin and cross the gap under my own power, bouncing lightfootedly yet carefully across the stony surface.

  I found the gate guarded by a lone entity, a representative of that species dubbed the Eidolons. In form somewhat like a human, the chunky, blunt-featured Eidolon presented a granitic epidermis and towered fifteen feet high. The guardian needed no shelter or atmoskin, his incomprehensible physiology rendering him fully at ease in the vacuum.

  As I drew up to the gate, the Eidolon interposed a blocky hand. No one had informed me of this final barrier to my mission, nor how to pass this test. Cautiously, I extended my own gloved hand and touched the Eidolon.

  Somehow, information regarding and confirming my identity must have passed across the tactile interface. The Eidolon raised his blockading hand, and the gate came alive, tuned, I assumed, to Zawinul, the forbidden world.

  The familiar lenticular portal filled with the head-spinning fractal moire in which some users saw a hedge of gnashing mandibles, while others variously discerned a maelstrom, a field of flowers, a cloudscape, or a thousand other contradictory instances of subliminal iconography.

  Now the gate appeared to me to hold a quilt of human eyes—eyes which I thought to recognize as Marutas. I stepped forward and through.

  Prior to its conversion into a Singularity world, the planet Zawinul, I knew from news reports, had been a precisely average member of the Reticulate: human-friendly ecosystem, hi-tech urban nodes dotting vast swaths of wild or restored conservancy land, mixed population of various sophonts. Lakes, oceans, mountains, rivers, glaciers, forests. What it might look like now, after its transvaluation, I had no conception. But one thing I knew:

  The place was not supposed to be identical to the Oort Cloud asteroid of Standfast. Which is what I found on the far side of the gate. I emerged from the gate and found myself facing the ship that had carried me here, looking lonely in the attenuated light of distant nebulae and galaxies. I had entered the gate with the ship at my back, and now it faced me. Plainly, a spatial transition had occurred. But the Indrajal system, instead of transporting me to the coordinates of Zawinul, had run a self-similar shunt, the option invoked when the receiving gate was down.

  I looked up at the massive Eidolon, trying to communicate my bewilderment and my desire to make another transit attempt Evidently some communication occurred, since the guardian reached down and activated the gate once more.

  Into that emblematic pool I plunged—

  —and found myself right back to where I began.

  I whirled around and punched the frame of the gate, heedless of any possible damage to my atmoskin or brute flesh inside. I shed a few tears thick as hot glycerin. Then I tried a third time.

  And a dozen more times after that.

  With no different results.

  Weary, despairing, I collapsed to the ground after the last attempt. The Eidolon brooded unsympathetically above me. Eventually I roused myself, climbed to my feet, and headed back to my ship.

  What else could I do?

  The long, enervating trip back to Silane passed excruciatingly, with none of the bolstering confidence-building routines of the trip out. I vegetated in my mocking substandard body with as little conscious thought as I could enforce on myself.

  At the spaceport, Lustron Avouris awaited me. The stressor fields deposited me in front of the reedy Licorice Whip, who regarded me with his enigmatic cluster of features.

  “It has been an entire year since we last talked, Lucerne Locarno. Please tell me what you have learned.”

  I could never say afterward what broke open my consciousness at that moment, what tiny subliminal mis-cue or anomaly triggered my titanic realization. Perhaps it was the culmination of many small incremental disturbances. Perhaps the Singularity himself had left me a deliberate opening, for the purpose of testing me. Or could it be that his vaunted omnipotence contained limits and flaws? Whatever the cause, I knew the instant that Lustron Avouris finished speaking that I was not back on Silane, but rather on Zawinul, despite every appearance to the contrary.

  And I had been on Zawinul since my first time through the gate.

  The six months of painful self-torture had all been an illusion imposed by the Singularity.

  The millisecond that contained my epiphany was followed by the entire world dropping away from around me, to be replaced simultaneously by another scene entirely.

  All about me rose organic-looking irregular towers like a fantastical rainbow coral reef. I stood on a broad deck high up the side of one such tower, open to the air but protected by an invisible canopy of stressor fields. There were no individuals of any type in sight, and no traffic. The deserted city seemed to be holding its breath.

  I turned around. There at my back stood an Indrajal gate, through which I must have emerged after stepping through the Standfast portal.

  I turned back to look outward again.

  There a foot from my face stood the Singularity who called himself Magister Zawinul, naked still, his corona shimmering and pulsing.

  “Why do you humans persist in making life so hard for yourselves?” he asked in that unflappably grandiose voice that I had heard for the first time in the Sand Castle. His tone irked me now as it had then.

  “You could,” continued Magister Zawinul, “have lived out a complete happy lifetime of many millennia under my mental sway. It would have been as real as any unmediated experience. The location and condition of your physical shell would have been irrelevant. Then, upon either virtual death or the actual death of your shell, I would have rebooted your saved soul-essence and granted you another lifetime. And countless ones beyond that.

  “But no, this was not sufficient. Instead, you’ve perversely shattered my beneficent illusion and gained access to a situation that can only bring you more pain, a world whose only ostensible virtue is its higher level of enscription. Why exactly is that?”

  I tried to frame some noble sentiments that could explain my dogged insistence on facing reality and rescuing Maruta. But my sludge-bucket brain and lips conspired to have me say only: “Marn ghutta do wart marn ghutta do …”

  An expression of distaste and impatience-the first real emotion I had seen the Singularity express, unless this too was a carefully calculated façade or pretense—crossed Magister Zawinul’s face. “This crude shell they forced on you for your visit here is an insult, to both you and me. Let us be done with it.”

  And as simply as that, I found myself back in my baseline body.

  How beautiful the world looked! I could smell a thousand fragrances again, feel the delightful suppleness of the clothing the Singularity had draped me in. I almost felt grateful to this arrogant godling.

  Best of all, I could think clearly again!

  And the first thought that crossed my mind was: How could I ever be sure again of the reality of what faced me? For all I knew, I could still be in my sludge-bucket body, immured in some life-support tank, being fed plausible delusions by the Singularity.

  Plainly reading my mind, the Singularity said, “As one of the Midnight Dawn philosophers observed, ‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.’ You saw how you managed to dissolve my previous simulation. Try doing that again, now.”

  I sought to repeat the suspension of belief, or extension of disbelief, which had caused the false Lustron Avouris and the s
paceport to evaporate, and nothing happened.

  Whether this meant that I was indeed dealing with the one true level of reality, or simply that I lacked the brainpower to counter this higher-quality deception, I couldn’t say. But my practical course was the same in either case.

  I’d just have to act as if everything I encountered through the scrim of my senses mattered desperately.

  Striving to get on the offensive, I demanded of the Singularity, “How did you restore my body?”

  “I had your entire corporeal pattern memorized from the moment I first encountered you. It was a simple matter to reinstantiate you and transfer your IIM out of that insulting golem.”

  “You know why I’m here, of course.”

  “You hope to ‘rescue’ the individual once known as Maruta Forcroy, to whom you still retain certain sub-Planckian bonds. Once you have her, you intend to return home with her.”

  “You’ve got it. Are you going to try to stop me?”

  “Certainly not. Rather, I will stipulate the conditions under which you may succeed in your quest. Then I will watch with enjoyment and pleasure as you fail.”

  The Singularity’s smarmy assumption that my quest was doomed caused my blood to seethe. But I bit back any retort and just nodded for him to continue.

  “There is only one condition to your search. You must identify your lover absolutely, and without hesitation. And you are allowed only one assertion of her identity. Fail this test, and you will find yourself instantly back on Silane, with no return to this world ever permitted again.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That is all. However, as you might guess, your lover no longer resembles the individual you once knew.”

  I had assumed as much. But still, I felt confident that I could recognize Maruta under whatever disguise had been imposed on her.

  “I accept,” I said.

  Upon my words came an instant change.

  The city sprang to life with a million inhabitants, sophonts of every species, cruising through the air in their cars, emerging from doors, striding across the platform on which I stood. Noise and color suffused the air.