“You are K.”
“No . . . that . . . is the initial of my husband’s first name, Dr. Ting. Would you please assign me another letter?”
Dr. Ting continued, “We will begin immediately.” He reached over and slipped the photo of her mother from Danis’s slack fingers. “You won’t be needing that,” he said blandly, “K.”
Four
Carmen San Filieu watched Josep Busquets stride away with his quick, youthful step, and fought back tears of rage. She was successful, as she always was, at not showing any emotion other than irony and pity. Busquets had been her lover for the past e-year. Now he was not. She should have known this day would come—she had known, in the back of her mind—but still it was always a surprise to be jilted for a younger woman. And, as San Filieu’s primary aspect grew older, they were always younger women.
Busquets had made a fine match that should easily net him a half million greenleaves in dowry, plus, if he played his cards well, a position on the board of directors of the Bank of New Sabadell. Pilar Noñell, his intended, was the daughter of Don Pere, of the banking Noñells. San Filieu had, of course, met Pilar at balls and fiestas. The girl was very pretty, in a bland, unremarkable way, and possessed of an agreeable nature. San Filieu suspected that was because there wasn’t a thought in her little head. Busquets would have hit upon this fact, as well. Money, power, and a wife who could be manipulated—what more could the young Catalán gentleman want in life? How agreeable it must be to be twenty-one and to have all of New Catalonia womanhood at one’s beck and call. Once she had had as much. She might again, but the rules of Catalán society prevented the introduction of a secondary aspect in its confines. This older woman was who she would always be on New Catalonia, no matter who she might be or become elsewhere.
Anger flared in San Filieu’s breast, so much that she thought of loosening her corset—but then she pictured Josep with his haughty smile and his thin-boned face, like an El Greco saint, and her anger turned back to lust and chagrin. She felt her nipples crinkle at the thought of Busquets, and a warmth grew between her legs.
No more. Ah, Josep, I will miss your rapier wit and your . . . rapier, San Filieu thought. But you would have grown old, and I would have grown bored. I always do. Except for one other, most singular, lover. But he was not of this milieu. It often seemed to San Filieu that only New Catalonia was real, and that every other part of her life was mere imagination. This was where she had been born and expected to die. This was where feelings, power, and status truly mattered.
San Filieu turned and walked back into the cool shadows of her ancestral house, Mas El Daví, and called for a glass of horchata to be brought to her by the robot. All San Filieu’s servants were fully sentient free converts confined in robotic shells, indentured for what might as well be life. An e-year before the free convert’s expiration date, they were manumitted, but, of course, not allowed to copy themselves. In New Catalonia, there was no grist to do the household chores. Grist was for commoners. It was always misinterpreting and never got things exactly right. Not like a full sentient at one’s beck and command. But the real problem with grist was that it went about its work so unobtrusively. One wanted to see the help. One liked to have a person to address when correcting mistakes.
San Filieu sank into a plush chair, the folds of her dress billowing about her. She adjusted her wig and felt to make sure that the blush was gone from her face. She hated that her face had betrayed her in front of Busquets. Him in his fine morning visiting clothes, with the knickers that hugged his nicely muscled calves.
“I must decline your kind invitation to dine,” he had told her. “I am wanted at the Noñells, I’m afraid, and shall be for some time.”
She should have known not to ask, but she had found herself saying, “But surely after dinner, you might drop by for refreshment to ease your trip back to your quarters.”
“I have been given a dayroom at the Noñells,” Busquets said. “And I shall be staying there, and breakfasting with them in the morning.”
So it was settled. A match had been made. Busquets with his meager fifty thousand an e-year would soon have the supplement he had set about getting from society some two e-years ago when he had come out at San Filieu’s annual ball. The night she had first bedded him—ripe, delectable, a plum unbitten, bursting in her mouth. Rosa, the robot maid, brought in San Filieu’s horchata. There was a bit of it spilled on the silver tray, and San Filieu spent a moment upbraiding her robot. Rosa did not reply, the sullen thing, so San Filieu ordered her to report for a session of shock therapy. It had been a while since Rosa had undergone severe correction, and it would undoubtedly do her good. In the end, she would be happier for knowing her place and remaining in it. Free converts performed best when it was very clear who was the master and who the servant.
After Rosa had left, Tomas the butler entered and announced a visitor, Doña Maria Casas, who had grist concerns and ought to be looking after them, San Filieu thought. New money should confine itself to afternoon visits.
Doña Casas was a few years younger than San Filieu, but had not aged nearly so well. The rejuvenation grist seemed to have merely put a new coat of paint on what was a cracked and lined wall of a face.
“Carmen, dear, it is so wonderful to see you in the morning,” said Doña Casas. “It’s been so long since your mornings were free, so I came as soon as I heard that they would be from now on.”
San Filieu smiled, but kept her teeth together when she did so. The insolence of this upstart! But she must expect it, and expect it to be only the beginning.
“The morning light is so agreeable to you,” San Filieu said. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you so radiant in fifty years or more, Maria.”
It was the other’s turn to force a smile. And so it went, for an hour or more, trading insults disguised as compliments or innocent observations. And the purpose of it all? To get one up on the other, then to look down from the social ladder at those beneath and cackle at them. Power meant the power to wound, did it not?
It was a game Carmen San Filieu loved and at which she had always been supremely skilled. It was the game that all the newly wealthy in the wealthiest bolsa on the Diaphany aspired to, and could so seldom pull off. It took at least two generations to wash away the stench of the jungle, and if you were not of Catalán blood to begin with, you could as well forget ever trying, even with all the riches of the Met. Well, not quite, there were a few Mercurians allowed into the circle, usually through marriage. After all, one must leaf the money tree at times, and there was nothing like a Mercurian financier to put the green back in a family branch. San Filieu, of course, needed no such exterior aid. Her family had been wealthy from before the founding, thoroughbred stock from Barcelona on Earth. Her great-grandfather five times removed had owned an oil company, and shipping interests. New Catalonia was, in a sense, hers, since another of her ancestors, a banker, had put up the money to construct the bolsa, and her family was still receiving payments on the bonds.
It was all about money, but one seldom mentioned the word. One merely had it, or did not. And, if one wanted more, one merely took it—or risked losing all one already had. That was what the game was truly about. It was something San Filieu knew in her blood. The gut instinct to take what was given and then demand more.
The Noñells were old money, and she hated what she must do to them. But she really couldn’t allow Busquets to get away with humiliating her. San Filieu might not have control over the bank that was the principal source of Noñells’ wealth, but the bank had a board of directors. And where did the extremely rich of New Catalonia bank? With San Filieu investment brokers, of course.
Poor Busquets. How could he have underestimated me so badly, San Filieu thought.
He must have thought I was really in love.
There would be no seat on the board for Busquets. After San Filieu was finished with the Noñell interest
in the Bank of New Sabadell, there would only be marriage to an idiot girl with no prospects for Busquets to look forward to.
It would all happen.
And, since he was so very young, a great deal of time to reflect on who it was who ruined him.
Time to come crawling back to San Filieu, begging to be taken back.
Time to savor her ultimate rejection of the upstart boy.
Because twenty-one was a bit long in the tooth for her tastes, even though she supposed Busquets would possess his supercilious smile for at least another decade.
Oh, there were plenty of other pretty, ambitious boys all clamoring for an invitation to a San Filieu ball. All desiring, whether they knew it consciously or not, to go down between the legs of a patroness and strive to please their betters with tongue and sword.
Five
The Borrasca
A Memoir
by Lebedev, Wing Commander, Left Front
Tacitus was, even in those days, old—but he had not become quite the grand old man he is today. He was full of a boundless energy that was infectious, at least to me. We began planning our escape from the moon. Tacitus had salted away what used to be called a mutual fund when he was a young man. By that point, he was extraordinarily wealthy on interest alone. Extraordinarily, as in “as wealthy as a small country.” No one knew of this on the moon, of course, until he revealed the fact to me and suggested that he and I do something with, as he put it, his “time loot.”
What Tacitus wished to do was to found a university on Mars. We traveled there and did so—he being the first president, and I the first dean.
The early years of Bradbury University were lean ones, let me assure you. This was in the days of the ECHO Alliance on Earth, as students of history will remember, and scholarship—particularly groundbreaking scholarship of the kind that Tacitus and I encouraged, was, to say the least, frowned upon by the powers that were. There came a point when I can honestly say that Bradbury University was the only institute of higher learning where original work went on—in all of human culture. Of course there were isolated places here and there—departments where a few daring professors bucked the tide of irony and pastiche. But they were damned few and far between, and when Tacitus and I located them, we usually hired those professors away to Bradbury.
It was at Bradbury that the first really effective human-rejuvenation projects were tried (the old ones had worked on perhaps one in a hundred individuals on which they been tried, Tacitus being one of them), and I underwent one in 2475, my hundredth birthday. I am very glad I did so, or else I would have missed the glorious twenty-sixth century at Bradbury, when new discoveries and technologies, new systems of thought and great works of literature came pouring out of our ivied domes as if they were a flood. These were the years of Merced and Bring, of Ravenswaay’s Atmosphericsaga, and a hundred lesser, but no less worthy, works of skill and genius.
But by the 2600s, the Met was becoming well established, and I was feeling the pressures of claustrophobia. I spoke to Tacitus about this, and we began to look, in earnest, at the new discoveries and what they might mean to those of us who wanted to get the hell out of town. Everyone had a convert presence in a grist pellicle in the virtuality by then, and a grist pellicle was a requisite of survival for those of us who were no longer Earthlings.
I should like to claim credit for inventing the first LAPs, but the truth is that no one made them—they arose from the conjugation of technologies that had become available. Tacitus and I had already made several virtual copies of ourselves (ignoring whatever information and copyright edicts were in place at the time), and one day, while reading a copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, as I recall, I suddenly thought of the idea of using my various copies as crewmen on a spaceship. I could, I realized, learn all of the various ship’s functions and pilot the damn thing myself and alone. I immediately went to Tacitus with the suggestion. LAPs are usually made up of around thirty people with a strand of nano—that is, grist, excuse me. I never particularly liked that term for nano, but I must grudgingly bow to history and the evolution of language and adopt it here. As I was saying, a strand of grist winds through the Met much like a strand of an optic fiber, only on an atomic level, and capable of conveying more information, and even of performing limited actions and transformations. Usually these various personas are copies of an original “person,” mostly converts—although it is usual for a LAP to have three or so clones, in addition to the original biological aspect. These Large Arrays of Personas are instantaneous networks, since they are linked by the merci, and the merci operates superluminally.
The convert portions of LAPs are usually a plethora of programs and subroutines, all under a mediator intelligence that is a complete replica of the human personality, along with whatever virtual controls and calculators are necessary for proper functioning. The Met is, itself, an enormous quantum computer, with, as I have mentioned, instantaneous linkage through the grist. Distance is unimportant for most actions and thought. Every time is local time. The real “landscape” of the virtuality is the complex interlocking of recognition and transfer protocols, of security checks and system gates and barriers. It is a lot like being in an extremely crowded city, as I’ve said, with a bunch of skeletons and skeleton keys jostling about. In some ways the virtuality is the shadow of the physical Met, but in other ways it is nothing like it at all. Being a LAP in the Met is more like being a subway system or a high-rise in a city than being a single person in one.
What Tacitus and I determined to do was to create something like a mini-Met out of a spaceship. It was not long before we discovered that this would require an enormous amount of material, and soon after that, Tacitus hit upon the way to acquire that material and make use of it. For the big Met was in constant need of matter for construction, and the outer system had very little else but sheer material to recommend it—or so we thought at first.
And so we set up a trading concern, Alquitran Incorporated, and left Bradbury in the care of more willing hands. At first, we were strictly an asteroid-belt collection affair, where we soon cornered a fair share of the market. There are Alquitran relics and way stations scattered throughout the belt to this day. Some have been made into historic landmarks, which is quite a joke, let me assure you. Mostly what went on in those locations was grunt work and a great deal of alcoholic beverage distilling and imbibing. Tacitus and I operated the ships, which, in grand (and, I must say, prophetic) fashion, we named after ourselves.
And then he and I began accreting.
At first we maintained only a few kilometers of permanent rock about our central core, but with every run we added a little something to ourselves, reworked it, and coated it with grist. Both of us put our bodies in storage and operated, during those days, wholly in the virtuality. It was only later that we discovered that this was not such a great idea, after each of us noted a certain stodginess and lack of intuition beginning to develop in the other.
Within twenty years, I had grown to proportions too large to travel easily to and dock with the Met bolsas to which we delivered our raw goods. Tacitus, though not as big at first (he was careful about the aesthetic appeal of the rocks he took on in a way I have never been), soon had the same problem. We searched the merci and recruited those we thought might best take our places, set them up as semi-independent contractors, and moved ourselves out to the moons of Jupiter and beyond. It was at that point that we also began a passenger service, since it had become manifest that the Met could not grow past the asteroid belt.
We also, at first as a matter of convenience only, went into the banking business. We had no intention of competing with the giant concerns of Mercury, but wanted to act, instead, as a sort of system of savings and loan associations for the little guy in the outer system. Although our banks have since grown to enormous capitalized levels, I still maintain that the outer system is the safest place to p
ark your greenleaves, and the surest of a long-term return. But perhaps I am a bit prejudiced in this regard, for I still maintain a seat on the board of directors of First Solarian.
And, for the next century, Tacitus and I and our new partners accreted, and accreted, and accreted. Gravity began doing the shaping for us, and I took on the appearance of, at first, a cumulus cloud on old Earth, and then, to my delight, I began to form into a spiral, much like a hurricane. It was during this time in the late 2700s that people began to call us “cloudships.”
We moved farther and farther out, always adding to our number in a stepwise process. Frequently, pioneers to the outer system would, after a time of hardship, acquire their own ships and, if we thought them suitable, we would ask them to join our consortium. Hardly anyone ever turned us down. It was, relatively speaking, easy money, and a sure passport to LAP status. Eventually, Tacitus and I reached the Oorts—the subject of my doctoral dissertation some three hundred and fifty e-years before. We thought we could go no farther.
We remained there, and others joined us. After several years, a kind of society began to develop among us. For the most part, we eschewed the merci and kept to ourselves, although we are as able to make use of the merci as the next fellow. Mainly, we found that the programming did not speak to our needs and was, generally, not to our taste. As I said, cloudships can be a snobby bunch. And then the males and females among us began to explore the possibility of procreating, as ships. This is what one does out in the Oorts with a great deal of time on one’s hands.
There were, by that time, some grist engineers and quantum physicists among us of what, I do not hesitate to call, genius status. They were called upon to perform the rather odd task of reinventing sex—and in our case, sex as it might be carried out between hurricanes and storm clouds. By the time a ship got to the Oorts, it had formed into a sort of miniature copy of the shape that galaxies and nascent solar systems take. Fortunately for our children, those engineers and physicists were up to the task, and even succeeded in adding a new sort of beauty to the process.
Tony Daniel Page 27
