Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  Now for the first time in decades she felt the vague reawakening of a sense of purpose. She wanted to see people again—dozens of people, hundreds of people, all of whom would admire her, protect her, find her precious, whom she could care for, who would keep her safer than she was with only one companion…

  Her web station entered the most dangerous part of its orbit, where it crossed the plane of the Rings. Here she was busiest, accepting the drifting chunks of raw materials—ice, carbonaceous chondrites, metal ores—that her telepuppet mining robots had discovered and sent her way. There were killers in these Rings: rapacious pirates, paranoid settlers anxious to lash out.

  In her normal orbit, far off the plane of the ecliptic, she was safe. But here there were orders to be broadcasted, energies to be spent, the telltale traces of powerful mass drivers hooked to the captive asteroids she claimed and mined. It was an unavoidable risk. Even the best-designed habitat was not a completely closed system, and hers was big, and old.

  They found her.

  Three ships. She tried bluffing them off at first, sending them a standard interdiction warning routed through a telepuppet beacon. They found the beacon and destroyed it, but that gave her their location and some blurry data through the beacon’s limited sensors.

  Three sleek ships, iridescent capsules half-metal, half-organic, with long ribbed insect-tinted sun-wings thinner than the scum of oil on water. Shaper spacecraft, knobbed with the geodesics of sensors, the spines of magnetic and optical weapons systems, long cargo manipulators folded like the arms of mantises.

  She sat hooked into her own sensors, studying them, taking in a steady trickle of data: range estimation, target probabilities, weapons status. Radar was too risky; she sighted them optically. This was fine for lasers, but her lasers were not her best weapons. She might get one, but the others would be on her. It was better that she stay quiet while they prowled the Rings and she slid silently off the ecliptic.

  But they had found her. She saw them fold their sails and activate their ion engines.

  They were sending radio. She entered it on screen, not wanting the distraction filling her head. A Shaper’s face appeared, one of the Oriental-based gene lines, smooth raven hair held back with jeweled pins, slim black eyebrows arched over dark eyes with the epicanthic fold, pale lips slightly curved in a charismatic smile. A smooth, clean actor’s face with the glittering ageless eyes of a fanatic. “Jade Prime,” she said.

  “Colonel-Doctor Jade Prime,” the Shaper said, fingering a golden insignia of rank in the collar of his black military tunic. “Still calling yourself ‘Spider Rose’ these days, Lydia? Or have you wiped that out of your brain?”

  “Why are you a soldier instead of a corpse?”

  “Times change, Spider. The bright young lights get snuffed out, by your old friends, and those of us with long-range plans are left to settle old debts. You remember old debts, Spider?”

  “You think you’re going to survive this meeting, don’t you, Prime?” She felt the muscles of her face knotting with a ferocious hatred she had no time to kill. “Three ships manned with your own clones. How long have you holed up in that rock of yours, like a maggot in an apple? Cloning and cloning. When was the last time a woman let you touch her?”

  His eternal smile twisted into a leer with bright teeth behind it. “It’s no use, Spider. You’ve already killed thirty-seven of me, and I just keep coming back, don’t I? You pathetic old bitch, what the hell is a maggot, anyway? Something like that mutant on your shoulder?”

  She hadn’t even known the pet was there, and her heart was stabbed with fear for it. “You’ve come too close!”

  “Fire, then! Shoot me, you germy old cretin! Fire!”

  “You’re not him!” she said suddenly. “You’re not First Jade! Hah! He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  The clone’s face twisted with rage. Lasers flared, and three of her habitats melted into slag and clouds of metallic plasma. A last searing pulse of intolerable brightness flashed in her brain from three melting telescopes.

  She cut loose with a chugging volley of magnetically accelerated iron slugs. At four hundred miles per second they riddled the first ship and left it gushing air and brittle clouds of freezing water.

  Two ships fired. They used weapons she had never seen before, and they crushed two habitats like a pair of giant fists. The web lurched with the impact, its equilibrium gone. She knew instantly which weapons systems were left, and she returned fire with metal-jacketed pellets of ammonia ice. They punched through the semiorganic sides of a second Shaper craft. The tiny holes sealed instantly, but the crew was finished; the ammonia vaporized inside, releasing instantly lethal nerve toxins.

  The last ship had one chance in three to get her command center. Two hundred years of luck ran out for Spider Rose. Static stung her hands from the controls. Every light in the habitat went out, and her computer underwent a total crash. She screamed and waited for death.

  Death did not come.

  Her mouth gushed with the bile of nausea. She opened the drawer in the darkness and filled her brain with liquid tranquility. Breathing hard, she sat back in her console chair, her panic mashed. “Electromagnetic pulse,” she said. “Stripped everything I had.”

  The pet warbled a few syllables. “He would have finished us by now if he could,” she told her pet. “The defenses must have come through from the other habitats when the mainframe crashed.”

  She felt a thump as the pet jumped into her lap, shivering with terror. She hugged it absently, rubbing its slender neck. “Let’s see,” she said into the darkness. “The ice toxins are down, I had them overridden from here.” She pulled the useless plug from her neck and plucked her robe away from her damp ribs. “It was the spray, then. A nice, thick cloud of hot ionized metallic copper. Blew every sensor he had. He’s riding blind in a metallic coffin. Just like us.”

  She laughed. “Except old Rose has a trick left, baby. The Investors. They’ll be looking for me. There’s nobody left to look for him. And I still have my rock.”

  She sat silently, and her artificial calmness allowed her to think the unthinkable. The pet stirred uneasily, sniffing at her skin. It had calmed a little under her caresses, and she didn’t want it to suffer.

  She put her free hand over its mouth and twisted its neck till it broke. The centrifugal gravity had kept her strong, and it had no time to struggle. A final tremor shook its limbs as she held it up in the darkness, feeling for a heartbeat. Her fingertips felt the last pulse behind its frail ribs.

  “Not enough oxygen,” she said. Mashed emotions tried to stir, and failed. She had plenty of suppressor left. “The carpet algae will keep the air clean a few weeks, but it dies without light. And I can’t eat it. Not enough food, baby. The gardens are gone, and even if they hadn’t been blasted, I couldn’t get food in here. Can’t run the robots. Can’t even open the airlocks. If I live long enough, they’ll come and pry me out. I have to improve my chances. It’s the sensible thing. When I’m like this I can only do the sensible thing.”

  When the roaches—or at least all those she could trap in the darkness—were gone, she fasted for a long dark time. Then she ate her pet’s undecayed flesh, half hoping even in her numbness that it would poison her.

  When she first saw the searing blue light of the Investors glaring through the shattered airlock, she crawled back on bony hands and knees, shielding her eyes.

  The Investor crewman wore a spacesuit to protect himself from bacteria. She was glad he couldn’t smell the reek of her pitch-black crypt. He spoke to her in the fluting language of the Investors, but her translator was dead.

  She thought then for a moment that they would abandon her, leave her there starved and blinded and half-bald in her webs of shed fiber-hair. But they took her aboard, drenching her with stinging antiseptics, scorching her skin with bactericidal ultraviolet rays.

  They had the jewel, but that much she already knew. What they wanted—(this was difficult)—what they want
ed to know was what had happened to their mascot. It was hard to understand their gestures and their pidgin scraps of human language. She had done something bad to herself, she knew that. Overdoses in the dark. Struggling in the darkness with a great black beetle of fear that broke the frail meshes of her spider’s web. She felt very bad. There was something wrong inside of her. Her malnourished belly was as tight as a drum, and her lungs felt crushed. Her bones felt wrong. Tears wouldn’t come.

  They kept at her. She wanted to die. She wanted their love and understanding. She wanted—

  Her throat was full. She couldn’t talk. Her head tilted back, and her eyes shrank in the searing blaze of the overhead lights. She heard painless cracking noises as her jaws unhinged.

  Her breathing stopped. It came as a relief. Antiperistalsis throbbed in her gullet, and her mouth filled with fluid.

  A living whiteness oozed from her lips and nostrils. Her skin tingled at its touch, and it flowed over her eyeballs, sealing and soothing them. A great coolness and lassitude soaked into her as wave after wave of translucent liquid swaddled her, gushing over her skin, coating her body. She relaxed, filled with a sensual, sleepy gratitude. She was not hungry. She had plenty of excess mass.

  In eight days she broke from the brittle sheets of her cocoon and fluttered out on scaly wings, eager for the leash.

  Cicada Queen

  It began the night the Queen called off her dogs. I’d been under the dogs for two years, ever since my defection.

  My initiation, and my freedom from the dogs, were celebrated at the home of Arvin Kulagin. Kulagin, a wealthy Mechanist, had a large domestic-industrial complex on the outer perimeter of a midsized cylindrical suburb.

  Kulagin met me at his door and handed me a gold inhaler. The party was already roaring. The Polycarbon Clique always turned out in force for an initiation.

  As usual, my entrance was marked by a subtle freezing up. It was the dogs’ fault. Voices were raised to a certain histrionic pitch, people handled their inhalers and drinks with a slightly more studied elegance, and every smile turned my way was bright enough for a team of security experts.

  Kulagin smiled glassily. “Landau, it’s a pleasure. Welcome. I see you’ve brought the Queen’s Percentage.” He looked pointedly at the box on my hip.

  “Yes,” I said. A man under the dogs had no secrets. I had been working off and on for two years on the Queen’s gift, and the dogs had taped everything. They were still taping everything. Czarina-Kluster Security had designed them for that. For two years they’d taped every moment of my life and everything and everyone around me.

  “Perhaps the Clique can have a look,” Kulagin said. “Once we’ve whipped these dogs.” He winked into the armored camera face of the watchdog, then looked at his timepiece. “Just an hour till you’re out from under. Then we’ll have some fun.” He waved me on into the room. “If you need anything, use the servos.”

  Kulagin’s place was spacious and elegant, decorated classically and scented by gigantic suspended marigolds. His suburb was called the Froth and was the Clique’s favorite neighborhood. Kulagin, living at the suburb’s perimeter, profited by the Froth’s lazy spin and had a simulated tenth of a gravity. His walls were striped to provide a vertical referent, and he had enough space to affect such luxuries as “couches,” “tables,” “chairs,” and other forms of gravity-oriented furniture. The ceiling was studded with hooks, from which were suspended a dozen of his favorite marigolds, huge round explosions of reeking greenery with blossoms the size of my head.

  I walked into the room and stood behind a couch, which partially hid the two offensive dogs. I signaled one of Kulagin’s spidery servos and took a squeezebulb of liquor to cut the speedy intensity of the inhaler’s phenethylamine.

  I watched the party, which had split into loose subcliques. Kulagin was near the door with his closest sympathizers, Mechanist officers from Czarina-Kluster banks and quiet Security types. Nearby, faculty from the Kosmosity-Metasystem campus talked shop with a pair of orbital engineers. On the ceiling, Shaper designers talked fashion, clinging to hooks in the feeble gravity. Below them a manic group of C-K folk, “Cicadas,” spun like clockwork through gravity dance steps.

  At the back of the room, Wellspring was holding forth amid a herd of spindly-legged chairs. I leapt gently over the couch and glided toward him. The dogs sprang after me with a whir of propulsive fans.

  Wellspring was my closest friend in C-K. He had encouraged my defection when he was in the Ring Council, buying ice for the Martian terraforming project. The dogs never bothered Wellspring. His ancient friendship with the Queen was well known. In C-K, Wellspring was a legend.

  Tonight he was dressed for an audience with the Queen. A coronet of gold and platinum circled his dark, matted hair. He wore a loose blouse of metallic brocade with slashed sleeves that showed a black underblouse shot through with flickering pinpoints of light. This was complemented by an Investor-style jeweled skirt and knee-high scaled boots. The jeweled cables of the skirt showed Wellspring’s massive legs, trained to the heavy gravity favored by the reptilian Queen. He was a powerful man, and his weaknesses, if he had any, were hidden within his past.

  Wellspring was talking philosophy. His audience, mathematicians and biologists from the faculty of C-K K-M, made room for me with strained smiles. “You asked me to define my terms,” he said urbanely. “By the term we, I don’t mean merely you Cicadas. Nor do I mean the mass of so-called humanity. After all, you Shapers are constructed of genes patented by Reshaped genetics firms. You might be properly defined as industrial artifacts.”

  His audience groaned. Wellspring smiled. “And conversely, the Mechanists are slowly abandoning human flesh in favor of cybernetic modes of existence. So. It follows that my term, we, can be attributed to any cognitive metasystem on the Fourth Prigoginic Level of Complexity.”

  A Shaper professor touched his inhaler to the painted line of his nostril and said, “I have to take issue with that, Wellspring. This occult nonsense about levels of complexity is ruining C-K’s ability to do decent science.”

  “That’s a linear causative statement,” Wellspring riposted. “You conservatives are always looking for certainties outside the level of the cognitive metasystem. Clearly every intelligent being is separated from every lower level by a Prigoginic event horizon. It’s time we learned to stop looking for solid ground to stand on. Let’s place ourselves at the center of things. If we need something to stand on, we’ll have it orbit us.”

  He was applauded. He said, “Admit it, Yevgeny. C-K is blooming in a new moral and intellectual climate. It’s unquantifiable and unpredictable, and, as a scientist, that frightens you. Posthumanism offers fluidity and freedom, and a metaphysic daring enough to think a whole world into life. It enables us to take up economically absurd projects such as the terra-forming of Mars, which your pseudopragmatic attitude could never dare to attempt. And yet think of the gain involved.”

  “Semantic tricks,” sniffed the professor. I had never seen him before. I suspected that Wellspring had brought him along for the express purpose of baiting him.

  I myself had once doubted some aspects of C-K’s Posthumanism. But its open abandonment of the search for moral certainties had liberated us. When I looked at the eager, painted faces of Wellspring’s audience, and compared them to the bleak strain and veiled craftiness that had once surrounded me, I felt as if I would burst. After twenty-four years of paranoid discipline under the Ring Council, and then two more years under the dogs, tonight I would be explosively released from pressure.

  I sniffed at the phenethylamine, the body’s own “natural” amphetamine. I felt suddenly dizzy, as if the space inside my head were full of the red-hot Ur-space of the primordial de Sitter cosmos, ready at any moment to make the Prigoginic leap into the “normal” space-time continuum, the Second Prigoginic Level of Complexity…Posthumanism schooled us to think in terms of fits and starts, of structures accreting along unspoken patterns, following the
lines first suggested by the ancient Terran philosopher llya Prigogine. I directly understood this, since my own mild attraction to the dazzling Valery Korstad had coalesced into a knotted desire that suppressants could numb but not destroy.

  She was dancing across the room, the jeweled strings of her Investor skirt twisting like snakes. She had the anonymous beauty of the Reshaped, overlaid with the ingenious, enticing paint of C-K. I had never seen anything I wanted more, and from our brief and strained flirtations I knew that only the dogs stood between us.

  Wellspring took me by the arm. His audience had dissolved as I stood rapt, lusting after Valery. “How much longer, son?”

  Startled, I looked at the watch display on my forearm. “Only twenty minutes, Wellspring.”

  “That’s fine, son.” Wellspring was famous for his use of archaic terms like son. “Once the dogs are gone, it’ll be your party, Hans. I won’t stay here to eclipse you. Besides, the Queen awaits me. You have the Queen’s Percentage?”

  “Yes, just as you said.” I unpeeled the box from the stick-tight patch on my hip and handed it over.

  Wellspring lifted its lid with his powerful fingers and looked inside. Then he laughed aloud. “Jesus! It’s beautiful!”

  Suddenly he pulled the open box away and the Queen’s gift hung in midair, glittering above our heads. It was an artificial gem the size of a child’s fist, its chiseled planes glittering with the green and gold of endolithic lichen. As it spun it threw tiny glints of fractured light across our faces.