Tony Daniel

by Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War

Twelve

  from

  First Constitutional Congress of

  the Cloudships of the Outer System

  April 2, 3013 (e-standard)

  a transcript

  C. Lebedev: To continue, then, Mr. Chairman . . . freedom . . . serve another without . . . ah, here we are. All thinking entities are people. Not only do we, as a people, affirm this freedom of thought, we are also inalterably and unconditionally opposed to those who would deny it to us. We declare our right as a government of the people to fight and defend ourselves, to educate our young in the principles of freedom, and to establish conditions of justice and security within our society that ensure the continuation and propagation of our freedom. Thinking must be protected and nourished. It is what defines us as a species, whatever form its particular instantiation may take, be it biological, physical, or by some other means as yet to be discovered or defined. Thinking precedes both existence and essence, and plurality is inextricably bound to its nature. The one has no meaning without the many. It is requisite upon our republican democracy to preserve and protect the plurality, as well as the freedom, of thought. They are the same. Any law or entity that arrogates the right to oppose plurality we find abominable, and we will oppose it as a people with all our hearts, minds, and strength. Any thinking individual, no matter how misguided or mistaken, shall have the right to think and express his, her, or its thoughts so long as that expression does not take the form of coercion. These are the principles upon which our government shall be based, and we, the people, do hereby establish them by the means that follow . . . er, that’s it. The next part is Section Two, Mr. Chairman.

  C. Mencken: Very well. Chair recognizes Cloudship Ahab.

  C. Ahab: Mr. Chairman and honorable ships, I have seen this document in its entirety, and I must say to you that it is gravely flawed.

  C. Mencken: Please confine yourself to discussion of the preamble, Cloudship Ahab.

  C. Ahab: I shall, Mr. Chairman. Gravely flawed, I say, beginning with this so-called preamble. Right of anybody to think anything they damned well please? Why, the very thing contradicts itself. If anyone can think anything, then how the hell could these so-called “framers” know that freedom is the basic principle? In this life, it is the forceful who are above the weak, the strong-minded are over the meek. You may not like it, but there it is. Where in this document is there one word about character? About will? No, sir, I do not find it! What the people need is strong medicine, not this weak tonic, this sop and placebo. We may not like the inner system, but there is a strong mind there, and we must respect that strength. As a matter of fact, we should not be debating whether or not to oppose that mind, but how we might join with it in common cause, for the betterment of the species. The strong must lead the weak. This is the law of survival to which we should bow—to which we must bow. Survival of the fittest. And the truth—however unpalatable it may be to minds of a narrower perspective—is that we and Amés are the strongest. It is only a matter of time until we win in the war for survival, which is above all other wars, and from which we cannot escape. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

  C. Mencken: All right. What? Yes, er . . . the chair recognizes Cloudship Mark Twain.

  C. Mark Twain: Well, Ahab has a pretty good point there, but I’m not so sure it is the one he intended to make. Now consider this survival of the fittest thing for a moment. If we take that as a given, then what in the world makes him think that we might band with another in common cause? Either we’re inalterably at one another’s throats, or we’re not, according to Old Ahab’s logic.

  C. Ahab: Who are you calling old?

  C. Mark Twain: I believe that you and I started out in the asteroid belt together, old boy. Used to be friends, as I recall, until you started taking yourself so goddamn seriously. I got a right to calling you old if I call myself the same, and I assure you, sir, I am ancient!

  C. Ahab: Mr. Chairman!

  C. Mencken: Please confine yourself to the matter under consideration, Cloudship Mark Twain. And that is not either your age or Ahab’s. Believe me, you’re both a couple of young cubs to me.

  C. Mark Twain: Thank you for the compliment, Mr. Chairman, and I will do as you say. Now, it seems to me that by the good Cloudship Ahab’s logic, it’s all a big fight to see who is the biggest dog, and it’s going to come down to us and Amés in the end scrapping it out until one or the other of us gets hold of a throat and bites. In that case, we might consider that a pack can bring down the feistiest lone wolf. If I were Ahab, I would consider getting together all those weaker dogs and ganging up on the other big dog, then, when he’s all through and done for, why then I’d take out the littler dogs one by one. That, it seems to me, is where this survival of the fittest nonsense should lead us. But take a look at nature. It’s full of competition, certainly, but there is also a fair degree of cooperation, as well. Back when I was a biological human, I was mighty glad that my mitochondria cooperated with my DNA, for example, though the two of them started out as separate creatures. But that is enough for that line of argument, my friends and neighbors, for we are human beings, and we have moved beyond and above mere survival. Surviving is just one of the things we do. Maybe old survival itself saw its own limitations, so it bred itself a better alternative. At least that’s what I think on my good days. Let us make this a good day, friends, and vote to adopt this preamble.

  Chamber Left: Hear, hear!

  C. Mencken: Thank you, Cloudship Mark Twain. Chair recognizes Cloudship al-Farghani.

  Thirteen

  Leo knew the kid must be bored and scared at the same time, and she was still feeling acute, unconscious pangs of separation from her family, if he was reading the signs right. He wished there was more he could do for Aubry.

  And now there was Jill—this amazing creature come out of the blue. She was a gorgeous thing—all shapely muscle and bone. Her hair was black, and her eyes were a dark blue, more like deep space than like Earth’s sky. She had a spray of freckles across her nose and cheeks that almost might appear to be whiskers in some light.

  And there was that little tremble to Jill, as if her heart were beating much faster than a normal human’s, and that somewhere under her woman’s skin the jill ferret lurked in its den, waiting until biting was needed.

  “So, you’re looking for somebody named Alethea.”

  “Somebody or something.”

  “Something? What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure. She used to be a woman, but now she’s scattered.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I don’t know much more myself. But I’m going to find her.”

  “And that’s what you’re trying to do?”

  “Find her and save her.”

  “Why?”

  “I promised that I would.”

  “Where do you think she is, then?” said Leo. “Maybe I can help.”

  “That’s why I saved you. Tod said he thought you could help.”

  “He told you that?”

  “He wouldn’t let me take him to safety after we fought our way out of the DI sweepers. He told me to go back and find the changeling girl and the leprechaun. That they would know the answer to the question I wanted answered.”

  “He did, did he?” Leo scratched his head. “I don’t know any answers.”

  “Yes,” said Jill. “I asked him about that afterward.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he got the times mixed up.”

  “What?”

  “That was all he said. ‘Sorry, I got the times mixed up.’ What do you suppose he meant by that?”

  “Maybe I will know the answer to your question someday. In the future, I mean.”

  “Not much good for now.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “I need to find Alethea.”

  “Bu
t what is so important about this Alethea?”

  “Something bad is happening. Something maybe worse than any fighting. The rats who are my friends—sometimes they tell a horrible story. About things in the grist that hunt them and catch them. Pull them out of their bodies. The ones that get caught are being taken somewhere. I think that someone is after all the algorithms that own themselves, and I think that someone is Amés or somebody who works for him. There are stories of a camp on Mars.”

  “Noctis Labyrinthus,” said Leo.

  “Yes. The rats tell me tales they have heard. Experiments are being done. Torture. Mass executions of everything smart that doesn’t look like one of you Earth monkeys. I think Alethea may be there.”

  “That is a bad place.”

  “I have to get her out.”

  “I don’t think even you can do that.”

  “Maybe not me,” Jill said. She grinned her ferret smile. Her teeth were smaller and pointier than a normal woman’s. “But maybe me and an army.”

  “Do you have an army?”

  Jill didn’t answer. Her grin became even more unsettling.

  “I think Amés wants to be a lot more than Director,” Leo said. “I think he wants to play every instrument in the orchestra, too. To tell you the truth, I’m sure he believes he can do it better than the rest of us. He doesn’t want to rule the human race, he wants to become it. Own it. Like it was his body.”

  “I have seen animals act like Amés,” Jill replied. “It is usually, I think, when they realize somehow, somewhere inside them, that they are going to die.”

  “Well, I’m an animal; I know that I’m going to die, and I don’t want to rule all of creation,” Leo said. Jill turned her eyes on him, and he could see them sparkling in the wan light. Talk about animals, Leo thought.

  “You are a man,” Jill said. “Amés is a boy.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You and I will see about that,” she said. “I would like to make love to you.”

  “Wha . . . what?”

  “Have sex.” She scratched her head. “What is the word?”

  “Fuck?” said Leo.

  “Yes, fuck. But the other.”

  “Make love?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old are you, Jill?”

  “Older than you. Older than you think.”

  “You don’t look it—”

  “This body is two and a half e-years old, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Two and a half? I don’t understand.”

  “If you make love to me, I will explain.”

  “I . . . I would like you to explain.” Leo was flabbergasted. He had never been so blatantly propositioned before.

  “Maybe we should do it somewhere away from Aubry,” Jill said.

  “That’s a damn good idea.”

  “Even though I really don’t understand why.”

  “Well, maybe that’s something I can explain to you one of these days,” replied Leo. “Let’s go that way.”

  Leo grasped a handful of fibers and pulled himself back into the jungle of the transmitter. Jill followed behind. After they had gone a good ways in, he felt a tug on his leg. Jill was pulling his boots off, using her hold on a particularly thick rope of fibers for resistance. She seemed to move very easily in zero gee. He undressed himself, tumbling around a couple of times like a sky diver in flight, and when he looked again at Jill, she was naked.

  He reached for her hands and pulled her toward him, and as they came together, Jill became a ball of fury, grasping at him and kissing his neck and shoulders. She held tight about his waist. Leo had made love in free fall before, but never like this. Before, it had always been a languid affair, with both parties feeling a bit awkward, and careful that any movement did not send them careening about.

  Jill was having none of that.

  She bit him gently on the ear, and Leo felt himself growing hard against her torso. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her up—not too forcefully, but strongly enough. He thrust his tongue into her mouth, and she sucked on it for all she was worth.

  For a moment, they came apart, and were floating there, connected only by this French kiss.

  Then Leo pulled them closer together and began turning her around, her head down, in relation to him. They fit together perfectly—Leo was barely taller than Jill—and with a slight bend of her waist, her mouth was to him, and she took him between her lips. Their motion translated into a spin, and soon they were doing a slow barrel roll as they pleased one another.

  They did this for a time, then Leo felt Jill’s muscles contract as she had an orgasm. She gasped, and he came out of her mouth.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her. “I didn’t—”

  “What was that?” Jill whispered.

  “What was what?”

  “The way I just felt. What was that?”

  For a moment, Leo had no idea what she was talking about, and then he realized that she had never experienced an orgasm before.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It is perfectly natural. It’s what I was trying to do to you.”

  “Well, you did it,” Jill said. “Do it again.”

  And so he did. Finally, Leo knew he could take no more himself without coming. He gently pulled her back around to him, face-to-face. They kissed again, and Jill held tightly to him.

  “Can I go inside you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I think you had better.”

  There was a bit of fumbling, and Leo had to grab hold of a sticky tendril to keep himself still long enough so that he could find the right position. Then he did, and he slid inside her easily.

  After that, all Leo could remember was images. Jill turned into the animal that he had suspected she still was inside. After a couple of his own thrusts, she moved herself up and down his body in a frenzy, clawing into his back to keep them from coming apart. Their motion set them moving through the dangling fibers, getting tangled among them as they went. After a while, they could not have separated if they wanted, so wrapped up were they in the pulp.

  They returned quietly through the mass of fibers to join the others. They parted the last curtain to find Aubry wide-awake. But Aubry, intuitive kid that she was, said nothing. She couldn’t resist giving them a little smile. Leo fell asleep, floating beside the others. He might have imagined it, but as he drifted off, he was sure he could smell a musky odor about him, clinging to his skin. A wild-animal smell that was also, somehow, the smell of home. He liked that. Leo hadn’t had a real home for an awfully long time.

  Fourteen

  For several milliseconds, nary a function was completed by Major Theory’s algorithm. Then he examined the logic of the statement, to see if it were possible.

  It was.

  Then he examined the psychology of his ex-lover to see if it were possible.

  It was.

  Theory lowered his pistol. “What is my son’s name?” he asked.

  “I haven’t gotten around to naming him,” Constants said. “Since I wasn’t planning on keeping him.”

  “What do you call him?”

  “Boy.”

  At the sound of the name that was not a name, the child looked up at his mother. Theory had never seen such empty eyes in a sentient creature before. They were, in fact, not fully formed. Instead of pupils, a series of symbols flashed through them, as if the eyes were a calculator display.

  “I can’t let you go,” Theory said to Constants.

  “On the contrary,” she replied, and pulled the scythe closer to the boy’s throat.

  “You are responsible for thousands of deaths,” said Theory. “And if you get away, you’ll be the cause of many more, in all likelihood.”

  “Yet you will let me go.”

  “Constants, be reasonable.”

&
nbsp; “Oh, but I am being. You are the one with the emotional hang-ups.”

  “Constants, I loved you, but I could never stay with you. You’re very beautiful, but you’re a logic machine.”

  “And you are possessed of higher abilities? These intuitions you were always after. Have you found them, Theory?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Theory took a step forward, and Constants shook her head and pulled on the scythe. The boy gave a single gasp of pain, then was silent. His eyes displayed no emotion. Constants backed away with him, and Theory stopped moving. She backed farther and farther into the darkness of the cave—and then, suddenly, the two of them—boy and mother—were simply gone. Theory ran forward to where they had been and saw the swirling drain hole of a discontinuity in the virtuality. It was swiftly closing and, without thinking, he dived into it.

  He was yanked down by a maelstrom of randomizing information. There were violent tugs at his own periphery to randomize, but he clung to himself and resisted them. Farther and farther he was sucked into the whirl until, in its nether regions, he joined the sides of it and was spun around at a speed greater than he could think.

  Then the spinning stopped, and Theory shot out into a harsh blue sky—alone, falling. He fell for a long time, until he crashed among some rubble and, for a millisecond, lost consciousness.

  He came to in a land of ruins.

  Theory sat up and took a moment to collect himself, literally, from the broken scree about him. Constants had performed a short circuit, a risky operation in the virtuality, and he was obviously somewhere else in Shepardsville, and lucky he wasn’t dead.

  Theory surveyed his new surroundings. The landscape seemed weather-beaten and immensely old. He poked through some of the rubble. There were ancient pieces of code here, broken beyond recognition. But after turning over a larger rock, Theory saw beneath it the clear remains of a corporate logo stamped onto its surface.

  “What the hell,” said Theory, “is Microsoft?”

  It was obviously an old web site, predating even the merci. The World Wide Web had been transposed onto the grist lock, stock, and barrel in the 2600s, and there were remnants of coding stretching back to the dawn of the information age still existing, in some form, in the present. Theory had just fallen into one of those remnants.