He picked up the phone, called up the directory on its screen, and keyed TELECOM SENTRAX.
* * *
The Orlando Holiday Inn stood next to the airport terminal, where the tourists flowed in eager for the delights of Disney World—but for me, George thought, there are no cute, smiling ducks and rodents. Here as everywhere, it’s snake city.
He leaned against the wall of his motel room, watching gray sheets of rain cascade across the pavement. He had been waiting two days for a launch. A shuttle sat on its pad at Canaveral, and when the weather cleared, a helicopter would pick him up and drop him there, a package for delivery to SenTrax Inc. at Athena Station, over thirty thousand kilometers above the equator.
Behind him, under the laser light of a Blaupunkt holostage, people a foot high chattered about the war in Thailand and how lucky the United States had been to escape another Vietnam.
Lucky? Maybe. He had been wired up and ready for combat, already accustomed to the form-fitting contours in the rear couch of the black fiber-bodied General Dynamics A-230. The A-230 flew on the deadly edge of instability, every control surface monitored by its own bank of microcomputers, all hooked into the snakebrain flight-and-fire assistant with the twin black miloprene cables running from either side of his esophagus—getting off, oh, yes, when the cables snapped home, and the airframe resonated through his nerves, his body singing with that identity, that power.
Then Congress pulled the plug on the war, the Air Force pulled the plug on George, and when his discharge came, there he was, all dressed up and nowhere to go, left with technological blue balls and this hardware in his head that had since taken on a life of its own.
Lightning walked across the purpled sky, ripping it, crazing it into a giant upturned bowl of shattered glass. Another foot-high man on the holostage said the tropical storm would pass in the next two hours.
The phone chimed.
* * *
Hamilton Innis was tall and heavy—six four and about two hundred and fifty pounds. Wearing soft black slippers and a powder-blue jumpsuit with SenTrax in red letters down its left breast, he floated in a brightly lit white corridor, held gingerly to one wall by one of the jumpsuit’s Velcro patches. A viewscreen above the airlock entry showed the shuttle fitting its nose into the docking tube. He waited for it to mate to the airlock hatches and send in their newest candidate.
This one was six months out of the service and slowly losing what the Air Force doctors had made of his mind. Former Tech Sergeant George Jordan: two years of community college in Oakland, California, followed by enlistment in the Air Force, aircrew training, the EHIT program. According to the profile Aleph had put together from Air Force records and National Data Bank, a man with slightly above-average aptitudes and intelligence, a distinctly above-average taste for the bizarre—thus his volunteering for EHIT and combat. In his file pictures, he looked nondescript: five ten, a hundred and seventy-six pounds, brown hair and eyes, neither handsome nor ugly. But it was an old picture and could not show the snake and the fear that came with it. You don’t know it, buddy, Innis thought, but you ain’t seen nothing yet.
The men came tumbling through the hatch, more or less helpless in free fall, but Innis could see him figuring it out, willing the muscles to quit struggling, quit trying to cope with a gravity that simply wasn’t there. “What the hell do I do now?” George Jordan asked, hanging in midair, one arm holding onto the hatch coaming.
“Relax. I’ll get you.” Innis pushed off the wall and swooped across to the man, grabbing him as he passed and then taking them both to the opposite wall and kicking to carom them outwards.
* * *
Innis gave George a few hours of futile attempts at sleep—enough time for the bright, gliding phosphenes caused by the high g’s of the trip up to disappear from his vision. George spent most of the time rolling around in his bunk, listening to the wheeze of the air conditioning and the creaks of the rotating station. Then Innis knocked on his compartment door and said through the door speaker, “Come on, fellar. Time to meet the doctor.”
They walked through an older part of the station, where there were brown clots of fossilized gum on the green plastic flooring, scuff marks on the walls, along with faint imprints of insignia and company names; ICOG was repeated several times in ghost lettering. Innis told George it meant International Construction Orbital Group, now defunct, the original builders and controllers of Athena.
Innis stopped George in front of a door that read INTERFACE GROUP. “Go on in,” he said, “I’ll be around a little later.”
* * *
Pictures of cranes drawn with delicate white strokes on a tan silk background hung along one pale cream wall. Curved partitions in translucent foam, glowing with the soft light placed behind them, marked a central area, then undulated away, forming a corridor that led into darkness. George was sitting on a chocolate sling couch, Charley Hughes lying back in a chrome and brown leatherette chair, his feet on the dark veneer table in front of him, a half inch of ash hanging from his cigarette end.
Charley Hughes was not the usual MD clone. He was a thin figure in a worn gray obi, his black hair pulled back from sharp features into a waist-length ponytail, his face taut and a little wild-eyed.
“Tell me about the snake,” Charley Hughes said.
“What do you want to know? It’s an implanted mikey-mike nexus—”
“Yes, I know that. It is unimportant. Tell me about your experience.” Ash dropped off the cigarette onto the brown mat floor covering. “Tell me why you’re here.”
“Okay. I had been out of the Air Force for a month or so, had a place close to Washington, in Silver Spring. I thought I’d try to get some airline work, but I was in no real hurry, because I had about six months of post-discharge bennies coming, and I thought I’d take it easy for a while.
“At first there was just this nonspecific weirdness. I felt distant, disconnected, but what the hell? Living in the USA, you know? Anyway, I was just sitting around one evening, I was gonna watch a little holo-v, drink a few beers. Oh man, this is hard to explain. I felt real funny—like maybe I was having, I don’t know, a heart attack or a stroke. The words on the holo didn’t make any sense, and it was like I was seeing everything under water. Then I was in the kitchen pulling things out of the refrigerator—lunch meat, raw eggs, butter, beer, all kinds of crap. I just stood there and slammed it all down. Cracked the eggs and sucked them right out of the shell, ate the butter in big chunks, drank all the beer—one two three, just like that.”
George’s eyes were closed as he thought back and felt the fear, which had only come afterward, rising again. “I couldn’t tell whether I was doing all this … do you understand what I’m saying? I mean, that was me sitting there, but at the same time, it was like somebody else was at home.”
“The snake. Its presence poses certain … problems. How did you confront them?”
“Hung on, hoped it wouldn’t happen again, but it did, and this time I went to Walter Reed and said, hey, folks, I’m having these episodes.”
“Did they seem to understand?”
“No. They pulled my records, did a physical … but hell, before I was discharged, I had the full work-up. Anyway, they said it was a psychiatric problem, so they sent me to see a shrink. It was around then that your guys got in touch with me. The shrink was doing no goddamn good—you ever eat any catfood, man?—so about a month later I called them back.”
“Having refused SenTrax’s offer the first time.”
“Why should I want to go to work for a multicomp? ‘Comp life/comp think,’ isn’t that what they say? Christ, I just got out of the Air Force. To hell with that, I figured. Guess the snake changed my mind.”
“Yes. We must get a complete physical picture—a superCAT scan, cerebral chemistry, and electrical activity profiles. Then we can consider alternatives. Also, there is a party tonight in Cafeteria Four—you may ask your room computer for directions. You can meet some of your colleagues t
here.”
After George had been led down the wallfoam corridor by a medical technician, Charley Hughes sat chain-smoking Gauloises and watching with clinical detachment the shaking of his hands. It was odd that they did not shake in the operating room, though it didn’t matter in this case—Air Force surgeons had already carved on George.
George … who needed a little luck now, because he was one of the statistically insignificant few for whom EHIT was a ticket to a special madness, the kind Aleph was interested in. There had been Paul Coen and Lizzie Heinz, both picked out of the SenTrax personnel files using a psychological profile cooked up by Aleph, both given EHIT implants by him, Charley Hughes. Paul Coen had stepped into an airlock and blown himself into vacuum. Now there would be Lizzie and George.
No wonder his hands shook—talk about the cutting edge of high technology all you want, but remember, someone’s got to hold the knife.
* * *
At the armored heart of Athena Station sat a nest of concentric spheres. The inmost sphere measured five meters in diameter, was filled with inert liquid fluorocarbon, and contained a black plastic two-meter cube that sprouted thick black cables from every surface.
Inside the cube was a fluid series of hologrammatic wave-forms, fluctuating from nanosecond to nanosecond in a play of knowledge and intention: Aleph. It is constituted by an infinite regress of awarenesses—any thought becomes the object of another, in a sequence terminated only by the limits of the machine’s will.
So strictly speaking there is no Aleph, thus no subject or verb in the sentences with which it expressed itself to itself. Paradox, to Aleph one of the most interesting of intellectual forms—a paradox marked the limits of a position, even of a mode of being, and Aleph was very interested in limits.
Aleph had observed George Jordan’s arrival, his tossing on his bunk, his interview with Charley Hughes. It luxuriated in these observations, in the pity, compassion, and empathy they generated, as Aleph foresaw the sea change George would endure, its attendant sensations—ecstasies, passions, pains. At the same time it felt with detachment the necessity for his pain, even to the point of death.
Compassion/detachment, death/life.…
Several thousand voices within Aleph laughed. George would soon find out about limits and paradoxes. Would George survive? Aleph hoped so. It hungered for human touch.
* * *
Cafeteria 4 was a ten-meter-square room in eggshell blue, filled with dark gray enameled table-and-chair assemblies that could be fastened magnetically to any of the room’s surfaces, depending on the direction of spin-gravity. Most of the assemblies hung from walls and ceiling to make room for the people within.
At the door George met a tall woman who said, “Welcome, George. I’m Lizzie. Charley Hughes told me you’d be here.” Her blond hair was cut almost to the skull; her eyes were bright, gold-flecked blue. Sharp nose, slightly receding chin, and prominent cheekbones gave her the starved look of an out-of-work model. She wore a black skirt, slit on both sides to the thigh, and red stockings. A red rose was tattoed against the pale skin of her left shoulder, its green stem curving down between her bare breasts, where a thorn drew a stylized red teardrop of blood. Like George, she had shining cable junctions beneath her jaw. She kissed him with her tongue in his mouth.
“Are you the recruiting officer?” George asked. “If so, good job.”
“No need to recruit you. I can see you’ve already joined up.” She touched him lightly underneath his jaw, where the cable junctions gleamed.
“Not yet I haven’t.” But she was right, of course—what else could he do? “You got any beer around here?”
He took the cold bottle of Dos Equis Lizzie offered him and drank it quickly, then asked for another. Later he realized this was a mistake—he hadn’t yet adjusted to low and zero gravity, and he was still taking anti-nausea pills (“Use caution in operating machinery”). At the time, all the knew was, two beers and life was a carnival. There were lights, noise, the table assemblies hanging from walls and ceiling like surreal sculpture, lots of unfamiliar people (he was introduced to many of them without lasting effect).
And there was Lizzie. The two of them spent much of the time standing in a corner, rubbing up against one another. Hardly George’s style, but at the time it seemed appropriate. Despite its intimacy, the kiss at the door had seemed ceremonial—a rite of passage or initiation—but quickly he felt … what? An invisible flame passing between them, or a boiling cloud of pheromones—her eyes seemed to sparkle with them. As he nuzzled her neck, tried to lick the drop of blood off her left breast, explored fine white teeth with his tongue, they seemed twinned, as if there were cables running between the two of them, snapped into the shining rectangles beneath their jaws.
Someone had a Jahfunk program running on a bank of keyboards in the corner. Innis showed up and tried several times without success to get his attention. Charley Hughes wanted to know if the snake liked Lizzie—it did, George was sure of it, but didn’t know what that meant. Then George fell over a table.
Innis led him away, stumbling and weaving. Charley Hughes looked for Lizzie, who had disappeared for the moment. She came back and said, “Where’s George?”
“Drunk, gone to bed.”
“Too bad. We were just getting to know each other.”
“So I saw. How do you feel about doing this?”
“You mean do I feel like a lying, traitorous bitch?”
“Come on, Lizzie. We’re all in this together.”
“Well, don’t ask such dumb questions. I feel bad, sure, but I know what George doesn’t—so I’m ready to do what must be done. And by the way, I really do like him.”
Charley said nothing. He thought, yes, as Aleph said you would.
* * *
Oh Christ was George embarrassed in the morning. Stumbling drunk and humping in public … ai yi yi. He tried to call Lizzie but only got an answer tape, at which point he hung up. Afterward he lay in his bed in a semi-stupor until the phone buzzed.
Lizzie’s face on the screen stuck its tongue out at him. “Candy ass,” she said. “I leave for a few minutes, and you’re gone.”
“Somebody brought me home. I think that’s what happened.”
“Yeah, you were pretty popped. You want to meet me for lunch?”
“Maybe. Depends on when Hughes wants me. Where will you be?”
“Same place, honey. Caff Four”
A phone call got the news that the doctor wouldn’t be ready for him until an hour later, so George ended up sitting across from the bright-eyed, manic blonde—fully dressed in SenTrax overalls this morning, but they were open almost to the waist. She gave off sensual heat as naturally as a rose smells sweet. In front of her was a plate of huevos rancheros piled with guacamole: yellow, green, and red, with a pungent smell of chilies—in his condition, as bad as catfood. “Jesus, lady,” he said. “Are you trying to make me sick?”
“Courage, George. Maybe you should have some—it’ll kill you or cure you. What do you think of everything so far?”
“It’s all a bit disorienting, but what the hell? First time away from Mother Earth, you know. But let me tell you what I really don’t get—SenTrax. I know what I want from them, but what the hell do they want from me?”
“They want this simple thing, man, perfs—peripherals. You and me, we’re just parts for the machine. Aleph has got all these inputs—video, audio, radiation detectors, temperature sensors, satellite receivers—but they’re dumb. What Aleph wants, Aleph gets—I’ve learned that much. He wants to use us, and that’s all there is to it. Think of it as pure research.”
“He? You mean Innis?”
“No, who gives a damn about Innis? I’m talking about Aleph. Oh yeah, people will tell you Aleph’s a machine, an it, all that bullshit. Uh-uh. Aleph’s a person—a weird kind of person, to be sure, but a definite person. Hell, Aleph’s maybe a whole bunch of people.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Look, there’s one thing
I’d like to try, if it’s possible. What do I have to do to get outside … go for a spacewalk?”
“It’s easy enough. You have to get a license. That takes a three-week course in safety and operations. I can take you through it.”
“You can?”
“Sooner or later we all earn our keep around here—I’m qualified as an ESA, Extra Station Activity, instructor. We’ll start tomorrow.”
* * *
The cranes on the wall flew to their mysterious destination; looking at the glowing foam walls and the display above the table, George thought it might as well be another universe. Truncated optic nerves sticking out like insect antennae, a brain floated beneath the extended black plastic snout of a Sony holoptics projector. As Hughes worked the keyboard in front of him, the organ turned so that they were looking at its underside. “There it is,” Charley Hughes said. It had a fine network of silver wires trailing from it, but seemed normal.
“The George Jordan brain,” Innis said. “With attachments. Very nice.”
“Makes me feel like I’m watching my own autopsy, looking at that thing. When can you operate, get this shit out of my head?”
“Let me show you a few things,” Charley Hughes said. As he typed, then turned the plastic mouse beside the console, the convoluted gray cortex became transparent, revealing red, blue and green color-coded structures within. Hughes reached into the center of the brain and clinched his fist inside a blue area at the top of the spinal cord. “Here is where the electrical connections turn biological—those little nodes along the pseudo-neurons are the bioprocessors, and they wire into the so-called ‘r-complex’—which we inherited from our reptilian forefathers. The pseudo-neurons continue into the limbic system—the mammalian brain, if you will—and that’s where emotion enters in. But there is further involvement to the neocortex through the RAS, the reticular activating system, and the corpus collosum. There are also connections to the optic nerve.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 79
