Tony Daniel

by Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War

  “But have you run them?”

  “I have.”

  “And what were the results?”

  “Provided seventy percent of the concerns survive as commercial entities, my port should turn us a profit of—”

  “Did you say profit?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s entirely sold short, remember?”

  “Yes,” said the old man. “Yes, of course.” Then the old man did something Kelly had never seen him do before in the twenty years Kelly had been with Teleman Milt. The old man wiped his bald pate with the sleeve of his suit. Evidently, he had been sweating.

  “A profit of thirty percent per e-day if the market drops at near the current rates.” Kelly shook his head, and rubbed a finger along the bone of his chin. “But those fall-rate predictions are completely arbitrary, if you ask me.”

  “Things could get much worse than the Abacus thinks?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Kelly, “They already are.”

  The old man sat down on a chunk of mahogany. He blinked once, twice. Kelly knew that he was conferring with the convert portion of his personality. Most of the old man was a virtual human, with his body serving mainly as an avatar for closing deals, boosting morale, and such. Everyone waited silently for the old man to speak.

  “It appears that thanks to Kelly Graytor’s timely move,” he said, “Teleman Milt can meet sell and liquidity obligations for the present. We’re saved.”

  There was a rapid release of breath among the j.p.s and even a smattering of applause. Quite something to hear from a bunch of cutthroat competitors. Hazen, whom Kelly personally liked the most of the group, gave him a quick, sincere smile.

  “Most of the other financials aren’t nearly so lucky,” the old man continued. “It looks like there’s a tiered collapse going on. HLB has got itself in bad trouble with outer-system debt. Something’s going to have to be done to shore them up.”

  The old man touched his nose. Since he never smiled on principle, this was the sign that generally meant he was pleased.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, using the old locution. “It appears that we have become the closest thing to the bank. If we keep our head about us, we may stand to make quite a bit of money on this downturn.” He took his hand from his nose. “Hazen’s team will work with me on a deal for HLB. The rest of you . . . concentrate on triage. Let’s get this mess under control.” The old man rapped his knuckles against a wooden pillar. “Back to business.”

  The Positions Room, taking his meaning, obliged. Kelly found himself surrounded once more by data. He glanced around at a couple of key indicators. The situation had worsened. But, for the moment, there was nothing to be done about it. He walked quickly from the room before anybody noticed him.

  [Have you got us packed?] Kelly thought to Danis. He was using a secure side channel in the virtuality that Danis had set up. This was not the kind of statement that you could openly verbalize these days—either in reality or in the virtuality.

  [The children are back from school, and I’ve got their converts and myself backed-up in your pocketbook. There was so much information I had to cold-capsule it,] spoke Danis.

  [Meaning what?] said Kelly.

  [That you couldn’t reconstruct us from that information only. You’d need our original version to activate the pocketbook information. We’ve got four legal backups remaining for each of the kids. I’ve got one left for the rest of my life, Kelly.]

  [They’re even talking about taking backup rights away from free converts,] Kelly replied. [We’ve got to get away from here before that happens.]

  [Yes—though God help all the free converts that stayed behind if they do that,] said Danis. [It took some squeezing and link cheating to get all three of us into the pocketbook, even in a static state. Are we still off to Mars?]

  [That’s all out now. We’ve got to get farther away.]

  [Ganymede?]

  [Danis, I want you to look into booking us a passage on a ship.]

  [A cloudship? You’re really spooked, Kel. Where exactly did you have in mind taking us?]

  [Pluto, at first.]

  “Pluto!” Danis’s whisper became fully audible in his mind. “Are you crazy? What kind of a life will that be for Aubry and Sint? What kind of life will that be for you and me?” Danis was in full verbalization mode. Kelly wondered if the membranes of his ears were shaking enough from the strength of her voice to bleed a little bit of sound. There were devices for spying on just such activity, and he wouldn’t put it past the Department of Immunity to use those devices even on ordinary Met citizens.

  [Calm down,] he thought back in a side channel whisper. [We’ve discussed this. How bad it might get, especially for free converts. It’s going to get that bad, Danis.]

  [Kelly, how do you know that?]

  [The same way I knew to short all the stocks.]

  [That doesn’t explain anything.]

  [I know. It’s hard to explain. Maybe it’s an aspect thing.]

  [Oh, come on. Don’t you, of all people, give me that bigoted bullshit. If I’m taking our children to Pluto . . . or wherever you’ve got in mind, you’d better start explaining.]

  “And if I can’t?” Kelly said aloud.

  [If you can’t, then I’ll trust you,] Danis finally replied. [The same way you trust me for an accurate analysis. But trust is not the same thing as understanding.]

  Kelly sighed. [How can I explain something that I don’t completely get myself?] He had intended the thought to be personal, but its intensity leapt the boundary of his personal consciousness, and Danis heard him. Or maybe she just figured out what I was going to say, Kelly thought.

  [If that is the case, then maybe you need to give this trip a little more thought.]

  [There isn’t time. You saw the time stocks and futures. It’s an objective and measurable shift. So you measure it. All I know is that I’ve got to get my family the hell away from the Met.]

  [All right, then,] Danis replied. [All right. I’ll book us passage on a ship departing from the Leroy Port on the Diaphany. When do we leave?]

  [Today.]

  [Today? Kelly, are you sure?]

  [Things will get bad. Count on it, Danis.]

  Kelly reached a transport door and sent a message through the grist for a personal coach. Although Kelly prided himself on normally using public transportation, he thought he would need the isolation of the coach to settle his thoughts.

  [Well, we’re all packed,] Danis said. [Your coach is here.]

  The transport door irised open like a big heart valve, and Kelly stepped through into the round softness of his coach. His grist informed the coach of his personal biology, and the coach adjusted its air and temperature accordingly.

  Two

  Danis Graytor sat back in her favorite worn leather armchair and shook herself a smoke. She breathed in deeply and the Dunhill crackled lowly as the tobacco caught and smoldered. She slid a fine ceramic ashtray across the lacquered top of her side table and listened to the pleasant grate of porcelain on mahogany. After another long drag, she ashed the cigarette and considered the pleasing gray of the tobacco remains against the pure white of the ashtray’s bowl. All of this would soon be only a memory. There was no way she could download her office study into Kelly’s pocketbook and still have room for the essential things her family must take with them on their upcoming journey. Without Danis to maintain it, the office study would soon be written over in the virtuality, erased.

  She made a quick check on Kelly and found that he was still in the coach on his way home. The children would arrive soon.

  Danis ran back over her checklist, more for comfort’s sake than in the expectation that she’d forgotten anything. She never forgot anything. But bugs could creep into even the best algorithm’s program, and Danis never took data for granted. That was the very reason that Kelly had hi
red her on as an assistant in the first place. The love had come later.

  My home is dissolving, Danis thought. Right before my eyes, it is flowing away into the general grist.

  There was, of course, no real here, here, but a particular location in the reality that sustained the virtuality had a certain something. To Danis, it manifested as a smell, a feeling of safety and familiarity somewhere deep inside. She was entirely software, of course, and an algorithm could operate in any medium capable of sustaining its complexity.

  But this is home, Danis thought. This chair, this golden glow from the roof lighting, this odor of cigarettes and account books. And Pluto, of all places! Did they even have grist on Pluto? Well, of course they must. But was there enough? Perhaps she’d find herself inhabiting the solid-state desert of an old mainframe, thinking one thought at a time.

  Her own investments were now, very likely, down the drain. She had liked to think that she had not spent ten years at Teleman Milt for nothing, and that she’d learned a bit about high finance. But the current financial craziness was unprecedented. She’d planned on surprising Kelly with a nice addition to their nest egg using money she’d saved and invested herself.

  But now that was a forlorn hope, and Danis knew it to be one. Kelly’s instincts were seldom wrong when it came to monetary matters, and he was sure things were going to go from bad to worse for the markets. He was a kind of genius in that—which was, of course, why Teleman Milt employed him in the most difficult, volatile area known on E-Street: the Time Exchange.

  Her cigarette was precisely half-finished when Danis snubbed it out in the ashtray. She had never liked the drag she got from the butt end of a smoke. She could have modified the Dunhill Algorithm, of course, but she so enjoyed the visceral nature of grinding out the tobacco and sometimes burning her fingers a bit in the process.

  Kelly’s coach signaled its imminent arrival, and, instead of lighting up another Dunhill, Danis searched her music catalog and found her favorite Despacio piece. She chose an oboe and piano through which to play the sound for Kelly. For Danis, the music would incorporate itself directly into her being. Despacio had been a convert like herself, and his music was only fully enjoyable by an algorithmic being, some claimed. Despacio had been one of the few free converts who did not have a built-in expiration date written into his coding. He had disappeared around the time Danis was born—some said he’d become instantiated in an aspect body, others that he’d gone bonkers and erased himself after such a long life. Whatever had happened, he’d done a good job of covering his tracks. But his work was still extremely popular among free converts.

  After the music started, Danis took a last look around her study, then dimmed the light and flowed out into a general state of awareness in the entire apartment. She shifted without thinking from being a specific representation in virtual space into the fullness of algorithmic presence that lodged in the structure of the apartment—that was that structure—and that knew every conceivable fact about its domain. It was, she sometimes imagined, like a brain suddenly becoming aware of all the processes and subroutines of the body that sustained it.

  Just before Kelly came through the door, Danis turned up the lights in the living room. She checked the temperature and humidity, then ran a quick inquiry of Kelly’s internals. He was sweating a little, and nervous, even though he didn’t manifest this visually. Kelly didn’t just have a poker face; he had a poker body. But he could not hide his innards from Danis unless he deliberately chose to. She cooled the apartment down a tenth of a degree. The music would have to take care of his case of the nerves.

  Kelly gave a quick smile when he recognized the Despacio, then walked directly to a chair and collapsed into it.

  “How soon until the children get here?” he said.

  “An hour and twelve minutes,” Danis replied, vocalizing aloud by vibrating various membranes built into the apartment’s walls. She could have spoken to Kelly through the very chairs and tables themselves, but doing so always produced a harsh, slightly inhuman sound that reminded them both of the voice of the Abacus, the Teller, and the other free converts who worked at the office. They often did not seem to notice how grating their voices could be to biological ears.

  “And everything is ready?” Kelly said.

  “Everything is ready. Would you like some coffee or something?”

  “Some of that Velo brandy,” Kelly replied. “I don’t suppose we’ll be able to take that with us.

  It was also very odd for Kelly to have alcohol as soon as he got home. He usually reserved his drinking for after dinner, when he had his one cigar of the day, as well.

  Danis called up a glass from the grist of the living-room coffee table. She formed capillaries leading from the sac in the kitchen where she kept the brandy, through the floor, up through the table, and into the glass. The brandy glass slowly filled from the bottom up, with no liquid pouring in from the top. All of this was accomplished with little effort on Danis’s part. She’d poured Kelly’s brandy so many times before.

  “Do you want to know the news on the merci?” Danis said.

  “God, no.” Kelly took a sip of the brandy, then settled back into the chair and held the glass against his stomach. Danis watched it move up and down a couple of times, in rhythm with Kelly’s breathing.

  “We still have over an hour until the kids arrive,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you come to the bedroom, Kelly.”

  Kelly looked up, cracked a smile. He didn’t smile at Danis. There was no face at which he would direct his expressions. But he knew that she was everywhere, and that she would see it. He took another, long, sip of brandy, then, without another word, set the glass aside and walked down the hall to their bedroom.

  Three

  Kelly tried to let his cares flow away as he took off his clothes. He almost succeeded, but there was still a little knot of worry remaining, and, of course, Danis noticed.

  “Lie down and let me give you a massage,” she instructed him.

  Danis dimmed the lights down to a twinkling glow. Somehow she was able to coax something approaching candlelight out of the grist—something he’d never managed to do with his comparatively bludgeonlike handling of the communication protocols. The bed warmed, barely perceptibly, and Kelly felt his wife’s presence, his wife, flow around him. It wasn’t a liquid or jelly feel that Danis possessed. The effect was more like a gradual awareness of touch and smell.

  Like dawn rising inside me, Kelly thought.

  Danis, through the grist, worked her way over and inside her husband. She navigated his musculature like a sailor makes his way about his home port’s bay: Here was the sandbar, here the hard rocks, and here the reef water. Before Kelly knew it, she had found the tightness in his back and shoulders and was working at it on a microscopic level. He had no idea what she did to him down there among the molecules, he just knew that it felt incredibly soothing and, somehow, at the same time arousing. He felt himself growing hard against the mattress, but did nothing about it for the moment.

  He groaned low and soft as something unknotted. “Yes,” came her voice within his mind. “There it is. All better now. All better.”

  In the end, he’d trusted his instincts, just as he did when it came to finance. And at home, as at work, he’d been right. Kelly didn’t fool himself into thinking he had any particular skill at judging matters of love. No. It was Danis that had made it all real. It was Danis who had somehow bridged the gap and come to him as a real woman comes to a real man, and had led him to understand that, however grotesque a relationship might look to an outsider, it was the happiness of the people inside it that mattered. He didn’t give a hang about free-convert rights or any of that—hadn’t really thought about it very much, to tell the truth. All he knew was that he and Danis were a very good thing.

  And just as she had on the first night, Dan
is slowly worked her way around him. When she was fully inhabiting the grist of his pellicle, she began to send the signals to his skin.

  He smelled her slight odor of cigarettes and perfume. He felt the heat of the flushed skin of a woman aroused. He felt her weight upon him. That was the mysterious part to Kelly, but Danis had once explained how easy it was to talk to human nerve receptors after you knew intimately the person they belonged to. You could cause a body to believe that another animal body was moving against it. You could make a man’s body believe that he was inside a woman.

  Because he was.

  Four

  Kelly made love to Danis, and when he came, she gathered the spill within her, as any woman will, and flowed away with it. Not this time, but twice before, she had taken it to a place within the Met very close to the sun—a place that fluxed and flowed with enormous radiation. It was the place where converts flourished with maximum energy input, with the greatest quantum excitation. It was a place where human DNA coding and the virtual enthalpic states of a free-convert intelligence could fully and completely combine. And in that place, Danis had carefully woven the new DNA of two human beings. She had brought this precious coding back and placed it within a specially grown ovum here in this very apartment. There was a room where only Danis went. It wasn’t very large; Kelly couldn’t have fit in even if he’d wanted to. It was precisely the same size as a human female’s womb, because that’s what it was.

  But today there was no ovum in the womb, and there the sperm would slowly lose its vitality as it was absorbed into the walls and gave itself back to life that might someday be.

  Danis kissed Kelly and tasted the potion of his lips. Each molecule was as precious to her as the feel of her breasts and face was to Kelly. She let as much of Kelly as possible occupy all of her many billion quantum states distributed in the grist. In her coding, this was stated as an equation to be solved with transfinite values. It engaged all of her faculties at once. It flashed through her like an uncontrolled fire takes a dry forest.