Solip:System

by Walter Jon Williams

  A sliver of frozen ammonia lodges in Reno’s heart. He can’t say a word, She looks at him and her eyes widen. Reno knows that she knows. “Dios mio,” she says. Reno can’t think of anything to do but admit the truth.

  “My name is Reno,” he says.

  “My God,” she says, English this time. She pulls away from him and he lets her go. She gets out of the bed and backs away slowly, all shadows and fawnlike eyes and sharp angles that Reno can no longer figure. She runs a hand through her cropped hair, hesitates, then turns and disappears into the hallway. He can hear her bare feet on the soft Chinese carpet.

  Reno stands and walks back and forth and wonders what to do. She knows too much, he thinks, she knows too much. A song. Knows too much, knows too much.

  Knows too much.

  He knows what the ghost brother would tell him, and he doesn’t want to hear it.

  He hears water running. Mercedes is in the bathroom. Reno begins to feel silly standing naked in the dark room with blood trailing down his face. He puts on a dressing gown and steps into the hallway. Mid-twentieth-century paintings hang in shadow on the wall. The bathroom door is closed. He raises a hand to knock. “Mercedes?” he says.

  The door opens before he can knock. In the cold fluorescent bathroom light he can see things gleaming: the knife, blood, teeth and eyes. Mercedes is screaming in Spanish. He tries to protect himself with his raised hand and the Razorware kitchen knife slices his palm. Reno stumbles back and Mercedes is right on top of him. He can feel himself being cut. He strikes out with an open hand, catches her on the side of the head. She reels. Reno goes for the knife, fights her for it. She claws at him with her free hand. He slams her knife hand against the wall. The knife falls and so does a Mondrian, its silver frame ringing as glass shatters. He slaps Mercedes again, sends her stumbling back. She goes down on a sharp-edged hip, jarring. Her eyes fill with tears. He picks up the knife and wonders what to do next.

  There is blood all over the place. Most of it, he realizes, is hers. She cut her wrists with the knife before using it on him.

  *

  Mercedes has collapsed, all fight gone. He throws the knife away and puts his arms around her.”

  “Don’t die yet,” he says.

  “I have betrayed you.”

  He picks her up. She is light as a child. Her blood is slick on his hands, trails on the Chinese carpet as he carries her to bed. “I’ve been working for Viola Ling,” she says. “She wants to destroy you. She thinks you’re dangerous.”

  “She’s right,” says Reno.

  “I don’t know how she found out about me and Uncle. But she knew everything. She told me about the other children. I wanted to kill you then.”

  He puts her on the bed. Call Akinari, he thinks. Have him get the Japanese medic in here. No one else he can trust.

  She looks at him. “Is Uncle really dead?”

  He strokes her cheek, leaves a trail of blood. “Yes.” He hates himself for a liar.

  She closes her eyes. He can sense her slipping away.

  “Don’t die yet,” he says. “I’ve got things to do first.”

  Matted lashes flutter against her red-streaked cheek. Desperation surges through Reno.

  “I’m here to destroy them all,” he says. “After that, we can both die. Together.”

  Her lids open slightly. Reno looks down into twin crescents of glittering darkness.

  In them, he can read assent.

  *

  “She is a danger.”

  “Viola Ling is the danger.”

  “Viola Ling is predictable. Her actions follow a pattern. Your Mercedes Calderón is a wild card.”

  “I can deal with it.”

  “I am not inclined to believe you.”

  Reno represses a shiver. The ghost brother’s voice is like the sigh of wind through naked trees. There is nothing human left at all.

  “Let’s talk about Ling,” he says.

  The purpose of the executive brothel, he knows, is to exorcise passion, on the theory that passion is weakness, and an unwholesome passion can be used against you as a weapon. With Roon, with Reno, the prophylactic failed; Viola Ling has a weapon to use against both of them.

  She has not chosen to use it yet, and Reno knows why. He’s been too successful, and her attempt would miscarry—she’ll wait for one of his gambles to fail and then try to disgrace him.

  The ghost brother’s thoughts, beyond agreement in the matter of Ling, are not further stated. But Reno knows what they are.

  He tells Mercedes never to use the face. He doesn’t have to tell her why; it’s clear she already knows.

  Viola Ling dies over the Pacific Ocean, in a transport headed for Singapore, en route to address a meeting of several affiliates. The pilot’s final transmission indicates an explosion, possibly a missile.

  Just a few months ago the Orbitals would have assumed that saboteurs from Earth were responsible. Now nobody seems to be sure. Is someone gunning for Tempel? Was it an Orbital frigate?

  Reno speaks the eulogy. He praises Ling and promises that anyone responsible will pay for their actions.

  After which there’s a directors’ meeting. Another two squadrons of the Century Series are voted, and there’s not a dissenting word.

  Things are looking too frightening.

  A protegé of van Allen becomes the new head of the Pharmaceutical Division. Mercedes is made assistant to the head of the Biochem Warfare group, which is substantially reinforced, and ordered to report all progress to Reno. Vaccines are developed against known biological agents. Means of delivery are contemplated and developed.

  Reno stands by the door to his apartments as Mercedes prepares to leave for her job. It’s the first time she’s left the apartment in months, and Reno insists on two of Akinari’s bodyguards accompanying her at all times. He can’t be sure what the ghost brother is up to.

  She is in her grey suit, her blue pinstripe shirt. He takes her hands and kisses the silver scars on each wrist.

  “Don’t worry,” she says.

  “I need you. I can’t do any of this without you.”

  “I’ll live,” she says. “For you. For now.”

  She brushes her lips against his and is gone. A matter of months, he thinks.

  A matter of months before Roon can die. Die for good and all.

  *

  “Why are you doing this?” the President of ARAMCO screams into the interface. “We didn’t have anything to do with Ling’s death and you know it. If this goes on we’re all going to destroy each other!” Her face is anguished. “Why are you doing this?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Reno says, and triggers Black Mind.

  Because, he thinks as Black Mind sings across the face, if the Orbitals turn their aggression against one another they’ll need the Earth again. They won’t have the strength to just take what they want; they’ll have to deal with the Earth on near-equal terms.

  Because though maybe the Earth governments can’t run things forever, an Orbital self-destruction might give the battered old planet a breathing space, allow it to renew itself.

  Because, Reno thinks, the Orbitals deserve what is going to happen to them.

  “Get the message?” he says.

  In the eyes of the woman from ARAMCO Reno can read a Yes.

  This one is the last. The last for Black Mind. Everyone can die now.

  *

  The assassin is small, a little woman not even five feet tall, her chest crushed by the impact of a dozen hollowpoints. She lies in a pool of congealed blood on a polished floor of Genoese marble. Mercedes stands with her face to the wall, not wanting to watch, her frame trembling, her face pale. Akinari’s men shot the assassin even as she was lifting her pistol.

  Reno’s pulse speeds, slows, speeds up again. He’s run all the way here, burst out of his office like a madman. It’s lucky there wasn’t a second gun waiting for him.

  Sweat slicks his eye sockets and he keeps wiping it away with the backs of
his hands. He’s more terrified than Mercedes.

  Who is this? Reno wonders. Who is so fanatic a killer as to walk into this suicide situation? She must have known the guards would kill her, kill her even if she succeeded in killing her target.

  A thought strikes him like an arrow. Maybe she didn’t care if she died, he thinks, because there’s another of her. In a tank of liquid crystal in Havana, he thinks.

  Right next to the ghost brother.

  He looks at Mercedes. How can I tell her, he wonders, that I—that another Myself—just tried to kill her?

  He takes Mercedes off the job. In the month she’s been supervising the Biochem division her tasks have almost been completed anyway. She lives with him now, behind a wall of guards and biosensors, in his apartment, beneath the curved sound-absorbent ceiling, among the looted paintings.

  She is more alone than anyone, Reno thinks, more alone than any of the children in the Cordillera Oriental. More alone even than the ghost brother, who has Black Mind brethren to talk to.

  She seems not to mind. She is waiting, and Reno knows for what.

  Reno tries to remember how the world appears to the ghost brother, existence perceived as pure data, the numbers raining down, each data-droplet with its own velocity, its own impact, its own inevitability.

  And far above, arching across the sky, the Solipsystem, bodies moving in orbit about the primary. A reflected rainbow of monsters, alternate points of view, the creatures of Black Mind. Fragments—Reno superimposed imperfectly on the others—the ghost brother augmented, crippled, by alien desires, alien thoughts and abilities.

  Freaks. Creatures created for the single purpose of atrocity, of self-destruction.

  Let it happen, Reno thought. But let it start with the greatest monster of all.

  *

  He speaks to his military commanders. One of the mass-drivers is programmed to drop a ten-thousand-ton rock on Havana, right atop the ghost brother’s crystal tank. If self-destruction is the end, let all the selves be destroyed.

  Perhaps Black Mind exists in a backup somewhere, Reno thinks. Perhaps the ghost brother is backed up, too. But he owes it to humankind to try to destroy a thing that can write itself over humanity itself.

  It will be the first act of the war.

  Thirty hours from now, unless someone else fires first.

  “I can try to get you out,” Reno says. “It’s not too late.”

  Mercedes’ gamine limbs sprawl over the cream-colored sheets. Her head is turned away from him and her voice is muffled by the pillow.

  “The aerosols are emplaced in the ARAMCO and Korolev main habitats,“ she says. “The mutated aseptic meningitis virus, different from the one we used last time, will be triggered at H-Hour minus twelve. Symptoms should begin appearing a few hours before the war begins. One-fifth to one-third the population should be incapacitated by the time the shooting starts. Military installations will receive a dusting of the new Anthrax-XVII spores, which should render them uninhabitable for a period of years.”

  She turns to him. Her eyes gleam with identical chips of cold, brittle lunar light. “Most of the people who will die aren’t our enemies. They’re not executives, they’re just people. They’ll be just as dead as Rock War casualties, and I’m responsible for that. I didn’t turn away from it.” She throws her head back and gives a mad little laugh. He can see the vibrations in her throat. “I don’t deserve to live. I don’t want to live, knowing how many thousands I’ll kill.” She reaches out to caress him, a touch like the paws of a small, desperate animal on his chest. “I don’t want to live without you anyway. So let it happen.” She is weeping now. “Let it happen,” she says.

  His arousal is profound. He reaches for her, despising himself.

  He won’t have to live in Roon’s head for much longer.

  Hand in hand, like children at a fireworks show, Reno and Mercedes sit in the near-dark and watch the apocalypse from his office window. Lights flare in the night, brief, silent, and shattering. Orbital squadrons flicker like fireflies and are gone, become tumbling wreckage. Power stations take hits from kinetic kill weapons and fly apart in awesome slow motion—spinning, crumpled dragonflies. Mass drivers slam rocks into the big stations, producing great Roman fountains of fire; but the results, if any, are difficult to evaluate. The big habitats are well-shielded—it’s the biological weapons that will do the damage there.

  On the Earth’s night side, Reno can see Havana burning. The ghost brother, returned to the fire from which he was born.

  There is a shudder, a tremor so deep, so low in frequency, that Reno can feel his insides clench. There is a fountain of light from the outside. A ten thousand-ton mass-driven meteor has struck the station.

  Reno waits, suspense ticking through his mind. There are no depressurization alarms, no warnings. No fluctuation in the gravity. A glancing blow, or one that failed to penetrate the station’s massive radiation shielding.

  The dimmed lights burn brighter, then dim down again. A laser had tracked across some of the station’s solar cells.

  There’s a hammering on the door. Reno activates his comm unit.

  “Who is it?”

  “Mr. van Allen, sir.” Akmari’s voice.

  “Let him come in.”

  There is an oily sheen on van Allen’s race. His eyes are yellow, dazed. “We’ve lost!” he shouts. “Mohammad’s squadron smashed the Tupolevs, but the Orbital Soviet’s stepped in on the other side—I thought they’d promised us they’d stay neutral! We’ve been wiped out!” He wrings his hands, the first rime Reno has actually seen a human being actually do such a thing. “They’ve declared us war criminals! They’re going to occupy our habitat!” He leans on the desk for support. “We’ve got to run for it,” he gasps. “It’s all over!”

  It’s all part of the plan, Reno wants to tell him. The United Orbital Soviet will not survive its intervention by forty-eight hours.

  Instead Reno presses the button that summons Akinari. The mercenary arrives with two of his men. All are ready for combat: biochem suit, armor, automatic gauss rifles.

  “Give me a grenade,” Reno says.

  Akinari unclips a grenade from his harness, hands it to Reno. Reno feels the weight of it in his hand, heavier than expected. He points at van Allen with his other hand.

  Reno feels in that moment an electric contact between himself and the mercenary, that he and Akinari understand one another very well. His impression is that Akinari knows what he is going to say before he says it.

  “This man is a defeatist,” he says. “Take him into the hallway and shoot him.”

  “Very good, sir,” says Akinari.

  Van Allen screams as hands fall on him. He tries to break away, to beg for his life, and has to be dragged out of the room, his heels tearing at the Navajo rugs. Akinari is visibly embarrassed by the man’s loss of control. The execution, the silent gauss bullet through the head, comes as a relief.

  The first body, Reno thinks, outside his door. When the occupying troops come, there will be more. Akinari will not surrender. In his moment of understanding Reno knew that.

  He puts the grenade on the desk and turns to Mercedes. An explosion, very close, lights her face momentarily. There is a joy there, that and a wild fulfillment. How many others can claim an apocalypse as accompaniment to a suicide? She opens her arms.

  “I’m ready,” she says.

  Had he died when he was supposed to, Reno thinks, he would not have found her. He has been a monstrosity all these months, but she has transformed his existence, made the monster serve love.

  “We have a little time yet,” he says.

  He takes her in his arms, kisses her, lowers her gently to the soft carpet. Lights flare and flicker outside.

  The end, not of the world, but of heaven.

  He remembers his birth into this life, on a bed alone, with holo planets moving in cold silence overhead. Now the planets are afire, and he can see their flames flashing on Mercedes’ face as
she clings to him.

  There is the sound of running feet outside, then cries. Bullets, fired in silence, thud audibly into the steel bulkhead. The Velazquez bounces to the impacts.

  It is time. In silence Reno reaches for the grenade. Mercedes looks dreamily out the window, Earthlight and distant violence glowing on her body.

  How many times, he wonders, has he killed himself today? The ghost brother, the other Black Mind victims, all engaged in a frenzy of mutual suicide.

  Mercedes takes his hand, the one with the grenade, and brings it to her lips. He can feel her lips on the back of his hand and his nerves go chill. He pulls the pin, lets the lever go.

  “Call me Reno,“ he says. She looks at him, surprised, and then her lips, at the very beginning of a hoped-for affirmation, start to form the word.

  the end

  Afterward

  People have always bugged me to write a sequel to my novel Hardwired. What they don’t realize is that the book has two sequels already.

  The first, and accidental, sequel is the novel Voice of the Whirlwind. I had written the novel intending it to be a stand-alone work. When I finished it my editor asked if I could make it a sequel to Hardwired.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Sequels sell better,” I was told.

  This struck me as a morally justifiable reason for altering the work, so I made a few minor changes and an awestruck world was subsequently informed that Voice of the Whirlwind was set in the same future as Hardwired, only 100 years later. It had no characters or situations from the earlier work, just a few references here and there. Just enough to sell it as a sequel.

  Voice of the Whirlwind was, I think, a successful novel. But it was only marginally a sequel, and the world it described was different from that of Hardwired. Hardwired began with the notion, not precisely unknown in science fiction, that the Earth’s space colonies had staged a revolution in order to gain independence from Earth. But in contrast to other books using this idea, Hardwired’s colonies were not after mere political independence: once they had destroyed Earth’s defenses, they found the vision of a helpless planet too tempting to resist. They dominated their home planet and were united, under a loose government called the Orbital Soviet, chiefly by the desire to exploit Earth’s remaining resources in order to build their own economies.