Claude had read an introductory book on the grist in the library, where the basic principles of quantum computing were explained for the layman and the Merced Effect was described. Mrs. Ridgeway was covering some basic stuff in his Rationality class that Claude already knew, and he found his mind drifting to the problem of factoring the product of the primes, which was due tomorrow. His drifting turned to worry and his worry to anxiety. He imagined his father with the whiskey bottle, with his belt, with Claude’s mother’s old hairbrush. And then came the “air-conditioning” feeling. In that cool mental space, Claude realized what he ought to do to solve the problem.
That afternoon, after he finished his other homework, he set to work with the grist. He had learned that each molecule of grist was not a simple on and off switch, but was actually the end product of an infinite number of on and off switches. Mrs. Ridgeway had talked about an “original” computer and many virtual computers, like ghosts, doing calculations in many “possible worlds.” Claude had decided that in one of those possible worlds, he, Claude had accidentally factored the number his math teacher had given him and gotten the right two prime numbers. While Claude had been creating “virtual rooms” with the grist, he’d occasionally had to make a light source. At first, he’d been stymied when he thought he had to program each photon of light that would come out of a lightbulb. But there was a helper program that used the photons exactly like Claude was considering using the factoring. You told it the pattern you wanted, and it calculated all the possible paths of light to give you a stream of light that was not just simulated and not-quite-right, as had been the old virtual reality, but was completely true to actuality. That was, in fact, actuality by another means. Claude saw that he could modify this program and give it the “pattern” he was looking for—two prime numbers. And, as it had with the light, the little program used the quantum physics of grist to do the work of infinite parallel processes. These processes Claude represented in one of his virtual rooms as a pattern of light on the floor. Just as with light, the wrong answers, those that didn’t fit the pattern, canceled one another out. Charles watched as the two prime numbers he was after formed on the floor, as if they had been in the virtual room all along, but were now merely coming into focus. He wrote them down, then left the virtuality of the grist. Back in actuality, he had a whole speech from Titus Andronicus to memorize, and only fifteen minutes left of study hall.
Claude’s math teacher was angry at him the next day. He accused Claude of having looked up the two biggest primes on the merci (although it was called the “Web” back then, and was a much different thing). Claude felt a bit chagrined because he had not thought of this obvious way to get around the problem. But he explained his method to his teacher, and the old man had to grudgingly admit that the boy was onto something. The next day, he mentioned Claude’s solution to Mrs. Ridgeway. She mentioned it to the director of the school, and Claude knew he had a big problem. The school director wanted to call in Claude’s father and discuss with him the possibility of enrolling Claude in a special school after he turned thirteen. Out of the armature. On Mercury.
The director of the school even thought that the prospect was important enough to make a personal visit to Claude’s apartment, to visit his father.
Nineteen
The director of Claude’s school was named Getty. He was the son of the chief engineer in the armature and had grown up with the Polbo Armature growing up around him. He took a special interest in the social conditions of the working poor in what he liked to think of as “his” bolsa. He had been into some of the worst neighborhoods, working in his off hours on community projects and generally making sure conditions were tolerable for all—water, sewage, plenty of vegetables. Getty had always thought it a scandal that many of the greenhouse workers regularly ate processed pabulum imported to the Armature when the place was crammed full of all the vitamins and minerals a human body would ever need. He considered it his personal mission to make sure that everyone had the means to eat right, and he was astounded that the “Vegetables for People” campaign that he headed was not more successful at changing bad habits. Getty considered it to be his mission to finish what his father had started, making the Polbo Armature a clean, fresh, living, and growing space for all.
And so he was completely taken aback when he saw the living space young Claude had been existing in. The flat had not been cleaned in years and when, with a grunt, Delmore Schlencker waved Getty in and showed him to a chair, Getty detected the distinct odor of rotting meat. Getty, himself a macrobiotic vegetarian, shuddered at the thought of the substance from which the smell must be rising. Nevertheless, he remembered himself and his purpose in coming. But he must get this over with as quickly as possible, or he was surely going to pass out from the stench. He quickly informed Schlencker of Claude’s new option to study on Mercury.
“Sounds goddamn expensive,” Schlencker had answered. “We have not got that kind of money. Unless you’re thinking of getting me a raise?”
“There is a scholarship available,” said Getty. He could feel his new somatic adaptations working under his skin, adjusting his body temperature so that the heat in the flat wouldn’t cause him to break out into a sweat.
“There is, is there?” replied Schlencker. The man stood up—even standing, Schlencker was barely taller than was Getty sitting down. “Would you like a bit of wine?” he said.
Getty imagined the vile vintage the man probably had available. Something out of a carton. He shook his head “no.”
“Well, then,” said Schlencker, and left the room. He returned with a glass in his hand and with what Getty recognized as a very respectable Rhein white. It was cool from the refrigerator and was already forming a condensing sweat that ran over Schlencker’s hand as he poured himself a glass. What was this man, living here, doing with such good wine? It didn’t seem right to Getty. Like brie on a . . . a—Getty searched for an image from his youth, something common and bad—brie on a hot dog! That was what this man was. Getty suppressed a gag at the thought.
“You all right?” Schlencker asked him.
Getty took a deep breath. Mistake.
“I’m fine.” He coughed. “Little something in my throat. Now about that scholarship . . .”
Schlencker took a sip of the wine, swirled it in his mouth, then swallowed it. Getty watched the man’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed, like a piece of detached gristle. He had to get out of this place!
“Well, we’re just going to have to see what the boy says,” Schlencker finally replied. “I’ll have a talk with him tonight.” Schlencker finished the remainder of his wine in one gulp. “He’ll let you know in the morning what his decision is.”
For the first time in a very long while, Claude missed a line from one of the sonnets that evening. He had heard Mr. Getty from the next room, and he was nervous as to what his father’s decision would be. He never found out. When he flubbed the line, Delmore took to him with his belt. It hurt like hell, but this time Claude withstood it and did not cry.
Be a man. Justify your privilege of doing Caesar, of learning Lear.
Claude realized that he had been growing. He would soon be bigger than his father. Maybe that, too, was why the beating didn’t hurt so much. It only took an hour or so for the stinging to subside enough for him to get to sleep.
In the morning, he informed Director Getty that he and his father had talked it over and they had decided that maybe the special school was not such a good idea right then. That he needed more time among his peers so that he would not get too big a head about his own importance. Getty, relieved that he would not have to deal with Delmore Schlencker anymore for the time being, accepted Claude’s decision.
Twenty
For the next three e-years, Claude followed the same routine every day. Mrs. Ridgeway did her best to provide him with special instruction in programming, and the old math teacher, Hudo, died and was
replaced by a young man who immediately saw Claude’s potential and set him to studying calculus while the other students laboriously worked through algebra—something Claude had mastered quickly, and soon grown bored with. More and more, he felt himself to be a separate being from the other students. He made no real friends and only stayed out of fights because he was known to strike back with vicious abandon and a disregard for any rules of honor, as it was practiced among the boys.
Not only was he growing physically, his body was changing in other ways, as well. One day, while working in the greenhouse snipping at the plants, his fingers slipped and he sliced into his thumb. The pain was intense and exquisite and, much to his surprise, Claude felt something odd happen in his pants. When he went to the toilet to check himself, he found that a sticky liquid had encrusted his underwear. Claude had, of course, read about such stuff during library period, and was quite aware of what had happened. The why was a little puzzling.
“Well,” he said to the toilet bowl, “I guess I’m a man now.”
After a little experimentation, Claude found that it was not necessary for him to break the skin to make himself come. It was the pain that produced the pleasure, and pain could come in less visibly damaging forms. Following this discovery, Claude masturbated by jamming wooden splinters under his fingernails—he’d found this created maximum arousal in the most reproducible fashion—and only occasionally resorted to a burn or a puncture when he was, as it were, in the highest throes of passion.
By his fifteenth birthday, Claude was taller than his father by half a foot and outweighed him by a good ten pounds. Delmore was drinking more than ever, and the good Rhein wine and whiskey was a thing of the past. He bought his liquor wholesale from a moonshiner who worked in the greenhouse and had a still in one of the back rooms. Claude continued his Shakespeare, but he knew that the next time Delmore made to hit him, he would have a little surprise for his father. The thought of killing his father had become one of Claude’s favorite fantasies, and he now carried an extendable knife with him whenever he went to recite the immortal lines of the bard before Delmore.
But Claude never got the chance. One evening, after they’d both come home from work, Delmore had gone into the bathroom, taking his bottle of liquor along with him. About five minutes later, Claude heard a cry.
“Oh shit, oh no!” screamed Delmore. Claude rushed into the bathroom to find his father on his knees, bent down by the toilet. The bowl of the toilet was bright red with arterial blood.
“I’ve busted a gut. Ah God, I’m ruined!” cried Delmore. Claude watched in fascination as his father crawled out of the bathroom and into the living room, leaving a trail of blood behind him.
“It’s all coming out of my ass,” his father moaned. “I’m bleeding out of my ass.”
Delmore turned around three times in the living room, as if he were a dog preparing to lie down. Then he collapsed in a puddle of his own blood. After a moment, Claude bent down and felt no pulse in his father’s neck.
Amazing, he thought. He sat down in one of the living-room chairs.
“No Shakespeare tonight,” he said.
Claude thought about this fact for a while. And then he thought of all the nights in his life that would suddenly be empty of obligation. If he wanted them to be. He could do anything he wanted now, and no one could stop him.
Twenty-one
Roger Sherman knew something was terribly wrong when his ex-wife contacted him through the grist. They had not spoken in months.
“And to what do I owe this honor?” Sherman said. There was more acid in his voice than he had expected. The split had been his fault, after all. There was no way any woman with sense would have stayed with him during his black period ten e-years ago.
“I wouldn’t bother you while you’re on duty, Roger, but I think this may be important.”
“What is it, Dahlia?”
“Something is happening at the hospital, and I wanted your input,” Dahlia continued. With practiced ease, he let himself slip entirely into the virtuality so that he could talk to Dahlia face-to-face. Instantly he was a hovering presence in the New Miranda hospital emergency ward.
One of Dahlia’s aspects was working near a bed where a raving woman was being strapped down by orderlies. Dahlia quickly laid a hand on the woman’s head and—Sherman knew—sent tranquilizing algorithms swarming under the woman’s skin and into her grist pellicle. This kind of direct grist-to-grist intervention was something only doctors were licensed to do in the outer system.
“More than fifty thousand bland camels through the needle of destiny,” the woman screamed. “I saw it! I saw the brick fall!”
Then the tranquilizers began to take their effect.
“I saw it, I tell you.” The woman’s eyelids began to droop. “There isn’t anybody who says that man can’t cook . . .” And she was asleep.
“What is wrong with her, Dahlia?” Sherman said. Nobody in the hospital heard him, of course, since he wasn’t really here. He was speaking convert-to-convert in the virtuality with his ex-wife. The bodily aspect that was an emergency-room doctor in the hospital continued to minister to her patient. There was lots more to Dahlia, besides—both here on Triton and elsewhere, on the moons of Jupiter. Sherman’s ex-wife was a full-scale LAP, after all.
“I was hoping you could help me with that,” Dahlia answered, a voice in his ear. “This is the fifteenth patient who has been brought in today with exactly these symptoms. Incoherent babbling. Partial loss of motor control.”
“I still don’t understand why you called me.”
“These people’s Broca grist is going haywire,” Dahlia said. “It’s a very rare condition.”
“Have you ever seen it before?”
“Once—and that was a nano lab tech who got into some very bad grist. The etiology was quite clear.”
Sherman turned his attention back to the patient. She was asleep now, but various muscles in her neck and jaw continued to twitch.
“Fifteen,” Dahlia repeated. “Has something gotten loose from the military base?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m talking about military grist, Roger.”
For a moment, Sherman considered the possibility. But the safeguards at the base were rigid, and he made sure they were completely enforced. Suddenly, Sherman felt a great weariness descend upon him.
“Oh no.”
“What did you say?”
“It’s begun.”
“What are you talking about, Roger.”
“This is an attack.”
“An attack?”
“From the Met, Dahlia.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Sherman pulled himself partially from the virtuality. He gazed up into the dark blue Triton sky. “I’ll have Major Theory send you all the information we have on this sort of weapon.”
“A weapon? So it is military grist.” Dahlia was now only a voice in Sherman’s ear. She might as well have been on the other side of the solar system. I guess that was always the problem, Sherman thought. But then his mind turned to practical matters.
“I have to go.”
“Roger, why would anyone do such a thing?”
“Communications warfare.”
“Surely you’re . . . exaggerating.”
“Maybe so. Maybe it’s a coincidence that the Broca grist of fifteen people went simultaneously haywire.”
“Is there an antidote?”
“No.”
“What?”
“No known antidote. Dahlia, I have to go.”
“But Roger, it’s your damned Army that—”
“I have to go.”
He cut the connection. He supposed he’d angered and hurt her once again. There was too much to do to worry about that. He had given her the information she requested. That should be e
nough.
It had never been enough.
Twenty-two
Sherman took a hopper from the base and navigated his way through New Miranda by a series of leaps from one landing pad to another. The leap pads were laid out in a seemingly erratic order, but Sherman was familiar with them and knew the best pattern to get himself home quickly.
New Miranda was a city of spires. The neo-Gothic religious leanings of the first settlers had combined with the low gravity of their new world to produce an architecture that was unique and, at times, breathtaking. There were some apartment buildings here and there, but for the most part each resident on Triton had his or her own spire, that is, families and familiar units did. There was plenty of space, and the power from the Mill produced an abundance of energy to power construction grist, which was the simplest and most efficient nano in the first place.
In most of the spires, the first five floors were fully pressurized and protected. They were usually given over to gardens and fountains. New Miranda billed itself as the “Garden City,” and there was a friendly competition among the more affluent residents in that regard. Of course, this led to a few aesthetic horrors. But there was a professional class of elite gardeners who were strongly influenced by the Greentree priest (and gardener) Father Capability, and many of the gardens were justly regarded as works of art. These were another tourist attraction on Triton, along with the nitrogen rains outside.
We seem to like going to extremes, Sherman thought as he completed another bounce in his hopper. Above the fifth floors was where most of the citizenry lived. These quarters could rise up for many hundreds of feet, and it wasn’t uncommon for a spire to have thirty or more floors, although the people normally lived in only a small portion of it. The spires were lit from the ground, and there were lights in a few windows. Once or twice a year, ice vulcanism near the south pole produced geysers of carbon ash that shot up into the atmosphere for miles. The ash was carried toward the equator as a thin, black dust. The bottoms of the spires were gray or white, but their tips were always coated with a matte black ash, as if they were great pens that had been dipped in a graphite ink. Even with the twinkling lights here and there, from above, New Miranda appeared rather ominous. The streets were barely bigger than sidewalks. Everyone traveled by hopper, or stayed at home and traveled through the grist.
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