The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  “Tory, I don’t know—”

  “Then wait,” he said. “It’ll come.”

  ***

  But it was a long night. And a restless hour after Tory had slipped easily into sleep, Elin put on her jumpsuit and went outside.

  She walked into a gentle darkness, relieved by Earthshine and the soft glow of walking lights on the catwalks above. There was a rustling in the grass, and a badger passed within ten feet of her, intent on its nightly foraging. She wandered.

  There was a lot that had to be sorted out. This evening, to begin with, this sudden sexual adventure. It was like nothing she had ever done before, and it forced her to admit to herself that she had been changed—that nothing was ever going to be the same for her again.

  She found a secluded spot away from the cluster of huts Tory lived among, and hunkered down against a boulder. She thought back to her accident. And because it was a matter of stored memory, the images were crisp and undamaged.

  ***

  Elin had been the end of her shift on Wheel Laboratory 19 in Henry Ford Orbital Industrial Park when it happened. She was doing development work in semiconductors.

  “Theta is coming up to temperature,” her workboard said.

  “Check.” Elin put the epsilon lab to bed and switched the controls over. Holding theta up flush against the hub cylinder, she gingerly mixed two molten alloys, one dense, the other light.

  Wheel Lab 19 was shaped like a rimless bicycle wheel. Two dozen spindly arms spread out evenly from thick central hub. At various distances along the spokes were twenty-three sliding lab units and a single fixed workspace. The wheel rotated fast enough to give the workspace constant Earth-normal gravity.

  When the mix began to cool, Elin dropped the lab a half-kilometer to the end of its arm. Mercury shifted between ballast tanks to keep the rotation constant, and the lab went from fractional Greenwich gravity to a full nine gees.

  A dozen different readouts had to be checked. Elin felt a momentary petulant boredom, and then the workboard readjusted her wetware, jacking up her attentiveness so that she ran through the ritual in detached professional fascination.

  As the new alloy cooled, its components tried to separate out, creating an even stratification gradient across the sample. Elin waited, unblinking, until all the readouts balanced, then swiftly jabbed a button and quick-froze the wafer. Using waldoes, she lifted the sample from its mold and placed it in a testing device.

  “Measurements recorded. Delta is prepped.”

  “Check.” Elin ran the lab back to the hub. The workboard adjusted her wetware again, damping down patience and widening scope of attention. Deftly, she chose the same component alloys, varying the mix slightly, and set them to heat. By then the workboard was demanding her attention on chi.

  It was all standard industrial wetware so far, no different from that used by thousands of research workers daily. But then the workboard gave the ten-second warning that the interfacing program was about to be shut off. Her fingers danced across the board, damping down reactions, putting the labs to bed. The wetware went quiescent.

  With a shiver, Elin was herself again. She grabbed a towel and wiped off her facepaint. Then she leaned back and transluced the wall—might as well put her feet up until her replacement showed. Stretching, she felt the gold wetware wires angling from the back of her skull, lazily put off yanking them.

  Was I really that indolent? Elin wondered.

  Earth bloomed underfoot, crept over her shoulder and disappeared. New Detroit and New Chicago rose from the floor, their mirrors flashing as the twinned residential cylinders slid slowly upward. Bright industrial satellites gleamed to every side: zero-gee factories and fullerspheres, wheels, porcupines, barbells, and cargo grids.

  Earth rose again, larger than a dinner plate. Its clouds were a dazzling white on the dayside. Cities gleamed softly in the night.

  A load of cargo drifted by. It was a jumble of containers lashed together by nonmagnetic tape and shot into an orbit calculated to avoid the laser cables and power transmission beams that interlaced the Park. A bit of motion caught Elin’s eye, and she swiveled to follow it.

  A man was riding the cargo, feet braced against a green carton, hauling on a rope slipped through the lashings. He saw her and waved. She could imagine his grin through the mirrored helmet.

  That’s rather dashing, Elin thought.

  Elin snorted, started to look away, and almost missed seeing it happen.

  Somehow, in leaning back that fraction more, the cargohopper had put too much strain on the lashings. A faulty rivet popped, and the cargo began to slide. Brightly colored cartons drifted apart, and the man went tumbling end-over-end away.

  One end of the lashing was still connected to an anchor carton, and the free end writhed like a wounded snake. A bright bit of metal—the failed rivet—broke free and flew toward the juncture of the wheel lab’s hub and spokes.

  Reliving the incident, Elin’s first reaction was to somehow help the man, to suit up and go out with a lifeline before Traffic Control scooped him up.

  The old Elin Donnelly snickered. Traffic Control was going to come down on the jerk with both feet, and serve him right too. He was going to have to pay salvage fines not only for the scattered cargo but for himself as well. Which is what you got when you go looking for a free ride.

  She was still smiling sardonically when the rivet struck the lab, crashing into a nest of wiring that should not have been exposed.

  Two wires short-circuited, sending a massive power transient surg-ing up through the workboard. Circuits fused and incited. The boardwent haywire.

  And a microjolt of electricity leaped up two gold wires, hopelessly scrambling the wetware through Elin’s skull.

  For a moment, everything was blank. Then—“Whooh.” Elin shook her head, reached back, and unplugged the leads. She laughed weakly to herself. Without bothering to opaque the walls, Elin unjugged a vacuum suit and began to climb the workspace arm to the hub. Ballast tanks whispered to her each time her hands touched a rung. Rings of lights paced her up the arm. She floated into the hub, and the touch of weightlessness was as cold as death.

  Automatically, Elin set the mass driver for New Detroit. Through the hub aperture, she could see the twin residential cylinders, oblong lozenges, either of which she could hide with one thumb. Something within her shrieked and gibbered with the desire to pluck them from the sky, dash them to the ground.

  “Something is very wrong with my mind,” Elin said aloud. She giggled merrily as magnetic forces tugged at the metal hands of her suit, accelerated her to speed, and flung her out into the void.

  An hour later the medics recovered her body from New Detroit’s magnetic receiving net. It was curled in on itself, arms wrapped about knees, in a fetal position. When they peeled her out of the suit, Elin was alternating between hysterical gusts of laughter and dark gleeful screams.

  ***

  Morning came, and after a sleepy, romantic breakfast, Tory plugged into his briefcase and went to work. Alone again, Elin wandered off to do some more thinking.

  There was no getting around the fact that she was not the metallurgist from Wheel Lab 19, not anymore. That woman was alien to her now. They shared memories, experiences—but how differently they saw things! She no longer understood that woman, could not sympathize with her emotions, indeed found her distasteful.

  Elin strolled downslope because that was easiest. She stopped at an administrative cluster and rented a briefcase. Then, at a second-terrace café that was crowded with off-shift biotechs, she rented a table and sat down to try to trace the original owner of her personality.

  As Elin had suspected, she found that her new persona was indeed copied from that of a real human being; creating a personality from whole cloth was still beyond the abilities of even the best wetware techs. She was able to determine that it had come from IGF’s inventory, and that duplication of personality was illegal—which presumable meant that the original owner w
as dead.

  But she could not locate the original owner. Selection had been made by computer, and the computer wouldn’t tell. When she tried to find out, it referred her to the Privacy Act of 2037.

  “I think I’ve exhausted all of the resources of self-discovery available to me,” she told the waiter when he came to collect his tip. “And I’ve still got half the morning left to kill.”

  He glanced at her powder-blue facepaint, and smiled politely.

  ***

  “It’s selective black.”

  “Hah?” Elin turned away from the lake, found that an agtech carrying a long-handled net had come up behind her.

  “The algae—it absorbs light into the infrared. Makes the lake a great thermal sink.” The woman dipped her net into the water, seined up a netful of dark green scum, and dumped it into a nearby trough. Water drained away through the porous bottom.

  “Oh,” Elin stared at the island. There were a few patches of weeds where drifting soil had settled. “It’s funny. I never used to be very touristy. More the contemplative type, sort of homebodyish. Now I’ve got to be doing something, you know?”

  The agtech dumped another load of algae into the trough. “I couldn’t say.” She tapped her forehead. “It’s the wetware. If you want to talk shop, that’s fine. Otherwise, I can’t.”

  “I see.” Elin dabbed a toe in the warm water. “Well—why not? Let’s talk shop.”

  Someone was moving at the far edge of the island. Elin craned her neck to see. The agtech went on methodically dipping her net into the lake as God walked into view.

  “The lake tempers the climate, see. By day it works by evaporative cooling. Absorbs the heat, loses it to evaporation, radiates it out the dome roof via the condensers.”

  Coral was cute as a button.

  A bowl of fruit and vegetables had been left near the waterline. She walked to the bowl, considered it. Her orange jumpsuit nicely complemented her cafe-au-lait skin. She was so small and delicate that by contrast Elin felt ungainly, an awkward if amiable giant.

  “We also use passive heat pumps to move the excess heat down to a liquid storage cavern below the lake.”

  Coral stopped, picked up a tomato. Her features were finely chiseled. Her almond eyes should have had snap and fire in them, to judge by the face, but they were remote and unfocused. Even white teeth nipped at the food.

  “At night we pump the heat back up, let the lake radiate it out to keep the crater warm.”

  On closer examination—Elin had to squint to see so fine—the face was as smooth and lineless as that of an idiot. There was nothing there;no emotion, no purpose, no detectable intellect.

  “That’s why the number of waterfalls in operation varies.”

  Now Coral sat down on the rocks. Her feet were dirty, but the toenails pink and perfect. She did not move. Elin wanted to shy a rock at her to see if she would react.

  What now? Elin wondered. She had seen the sights, all that Magritte had to offer, and they were all tiresome, disappointing. Even—no, make that especially—God. And she still had almost a month to kill.

  “Keeping the crater tempered is a regular balancing act,” the agtech said.

  “Oh, shut up.” Elin took out her briefcase, and called Father Landis. “I’m bored,” she said, when the hologram had stabilized.

  Landis hardly glanced up from her work. “So get a job,” she snapped.

  ***

  Magritte had begun as a mining colony. But the first swatches of lunar soil had hardly been scooped from Mare Imbrium’s surface when the economic winds shifted, and it became more profitable to mine areas rich in specific minerals than to process the undifferentiated mélange soil. The miners had left, and the crater was sold at a loss to a consortium of operations that were legally debarred from locating Earthside.

  From the fifteenth terrace Elin stared down at the patchwork clusters of open-air laboratories and offices, some separated by long stretches of undeveloped field, others crammed together in the hope of synergistic effect. Germ warfare corporations mingled with nuclear-waste engineering firms. The Mid-Asian Population Control Project had half a terrace to itself, and it swarmed with guards. There were a few off-Swiss banking operations.

  “You realize,” Tory said, “that I’m not going to be at all happy about this development.” He stood, face impassive in red and green, watching a rigger bolt together a cot and wire in the surgical equipment.

  “You hired me yourself,” Elin reminded him.

  “Yes, but I’m wired into professional mode at the moment.” The rigger packed up his tools, walked off. “Looks like we’re almost ready.”

  “Good.” Elin flung herself down on the cot, and lay back, hands folded across her chest. “Hey, I feel like I should be holding a lily!”

  “I’m going to hook you into the project intercom so you don’t get too bored between episodes.” The air about her flickered, and a clutch of images overlaid her vision. Ghosts walked through the air, stared at her from deep within the ground. “Now we’ll shut off the external senses.” The world went away, but the illusory people remained, each within a separate hexagonal field of vision. It was like seeing through the eyes of a fly.

  There was a sudden overwhelming sense of Tory’s presence, and sourceless voice said, “This will take a minute. Amuse yourself by calling up a few friends.” Then he was gone.

  Elin floated, free of body, free of sensation, almost godlike in her detachment. She idly riffled through the images, bypassing Landis, and stopped at a chubby little man drawing a black line across his forehead. Hello, Hans, she thought.

  He looked up and winked. “How’s it hanging, kid?”

  Not so bad. What are you up to?

  “My job. I’m the black-box monitor this shift.” He added an orange starburst to the band, surveyed the job critically in a pocket mirror. “I sit here with my finger on the button”—one hand disappeared below his terminal—”and if I get the word, I push. That sets off explosives in the condenser units and blows the dome. Pfffft. Out goes the air.”

  She considered it: A sudden volcano of oxygen spouting up and across the lunar plains. Human bodies thrown up from the surface, scattering, bursting under explosive decompression.

  That’s grotesque, Hans.

  “Oh, it’s safe. The button doesn’t connect unless I’m wetwired intomy job.”

  Even so.

  “Just a precaution: a lot of the research that goes on here wouldn’t be allowed without this kind of security. Relax—I haven’t lost a dome yet.”

  The intercom cut out, and again Elin felt Tory’s presence, a sensation akin to someone unseen staring over her shoulder. “We’re trying a series of Trojan Horse programs this time—inserting you into the desired mental states instead of making you the states. We’ve encapsulated your surface identity and routed the experimental programs through a secondary level. So with this series, rather than identifying with the programs, you’ll perceive them all indirectly.”

  Tory, you have got to be the most jargon-ridden human being in existence. How about repeating that in English?

  “I’ll show you.”

  Suddenly Elin was englobed in a sphere of branching crimson lines, dark and dull, that throbbed slowly. Lacy and organic, it looked the way she imagined the veins in her forehead to be like when she had a headache.

  “That was anger,” Tory said. “You’re mind shunted it off into visual imagery because it didn’t identify the anger with itself.”

  That’s what you’re going to do then—program me into the God-state so that I can see it but not experience it?

  “Ultimately. Though I doubt you’ll be able to come up with pictures. More likely, you’ll feel that you’re in the presence of God.” He withdrew for a moment, leaving her more than alone, almost nonexistent. Then he was back. “We start slowly, though. The first session runs you up to the basic metaprogramming level, integrates all your mental processes, and puts you in low-level control of them. The
nontechnical term for this is ‘making the Christ.’ Don’t fool around with anything you see or sense.” His voice faded, she was alone, and then everything changed.

  She was in the presence of someone wonderful.

  Elin felt that someone near at hand, and struggled to open the eyes she no longer possessed; she had to see. Her existence opened, and people began appearing before her.

  “Careful,” Tory said. “You’ve switched on the intercom again.”

  I want to see!

  “There’s nobody to see. That’s just your own mind. But if you want, you can keep the intercom on.”

  Oh. It was disappointing. She was surrounded by love, by a crazily happy sense that the universe was holy, by wisdom deeper than the world. By all rights, it had come from a source greater than herself.

  Reason was not strong enough to override emotion. She riffled through the intercom, bringing up image after image and discarding them all, searching. When she had run through the project staff, she began hungrily scanning the crater’s public monitors.

  Agtechs in the trellis farms were harvesting strawberries and sweet peas. Elin could taste them on her tongue. Somebody was seining up algae from the inner lake, and she felt the weight of the net in callused hands. Not far from where she lay, a couple was making love in a grove of saplings and she…

  Tory, I don’t think I can take this. It’s too intense.

  “You’re the one who wanted to be a test pilot.”

  Dammit, Tory—!

  Donna Landis materialized on the intercom. “She’s right, Shostokovich. You haven’t buffered her enough.”

  “It didn’t seem wise to risk dissociative effects by cranking her ego up too high—”

  “Who’s paying for all this, hah?”

  Tory grumbled something inaudible, and dissolved the world.

  Elin floated in blackness, soothing and relaxing. She felt good. She had needed this little vacation from the tensions and pressures of her new personality. Taking the position had been the right thing to do, even if it did momentarily displease Tory.