by Peter Watts
So it is no surprise to her when the peacock chirps and regurgitates a paper scroll. On it is calligraphy written in ink bled from solar eels, opalescent and pompous, instructing her to host a hunted general.
Charinda is aware of the price on their head. It cannot be expressed as a sum; the honor and prestige that would come with the general’s death or capture defy integers. She would be granted dominion over worlds. She would be elevated above common memory and made a minor goddess, named and prayed to across Costeya systems.
She sends the general word that she will provide shelter.
The Bone Court orbits Laithirat, a composite skeleton of thorns and fused spines, vertebrae dripping teeth and a jaw poised to gobble up the sky. It is received wisdom that this megafauna specimen was engineered, some geneticist’s fancy gone wild.
Charinda likes to imagine that the beast stood up once upon birth, decanted or perhaps grown in briny mulch, and straightaway fell down dead under its own weight and the terror of being alive.
In the beast’s mouth refugees are disgorged from moth-crafts in tatters, asylum-seekers spilled from spin-ships whose hulls are frescoes of void-scars and entry points. Viruses and malware shed off travelers, latching onto tourist ads and local data-posts in search of new hosts and propagation. Charinda has put a filter on her peacock’s head like a glove, shielding it from the stench of recycled ventilation and nutrients, the reek of politics gone sour and loss as fresh as arterial wounds. They can be contagious, much more so than the malware.
In the beast’s stomach, blank-faced replicants conduct her through checkpoints. She passes through a femur-corridor papered by intelligences with a knack for generating hyper-accurate algorithms at the moment of death: a Laithirat premium export, these seers in a box.
Where the corridor ends and the whispers of intelligences fade, a labyrinth begins.
Its schematics were planned in five dimensions, patterned after two national epics told in synesthetic meter. Charinda navigates by reciting snippets that wreathe her in incense vapors, as of funerals. At intersections of verses she meets a jungle case for a leopard woman, an aquarium for a gilled man. She nods at her friend the Horticulturist, who reclines in an enclosed tropical garden; photosynthetic geckos pulse at her throat, breathing in the place of lungs lost to carnivorous ixora. She exchanges quatrains with the Vice-Tetrarch of Gravity Gardens, who attends on a lower body which rumbles on wheels and exhales steam alphabets.
Charinda finds the general at one of the central exhibits.
The general wears a Tiansong dress with flared sleeves and high collars, a narrow skirt slit just below the thigh. Asteroid jades and exhumed gravity shells depend from his earlobes, and his skin has the look of cracked celadon. Spiders nest in his hair, making neon thread: a work of kitsch, all spectacle.
“Gracious welcome to you, General Lunha of Silent Bridge.”
Lunha inclines his head, silhouetted in the phantom stanzas that charted his path. He recited, it appears, a war-god’s soliloquy. “I don’t currently hold a rank, and Silent Bridge isn’t what it once was.” He is more frayed than his reputation would suggest, fatigue having exacted their price for the endless hours he spent sabotaging Hegemonic outposts and erasing their garrisons. But remorse does not blunt him and the gaze with which he appraises Charinda is sniper-point.
Balancing her options, Charinda takes the general’s hand and brings it to her lips. “Formality gives me an excuse to perform gallantry. In some languages that concept is strictly reserved for men toward women, but what can an idea be worth that does not flex?”
“I’m not always a man,” the general says but returns the gesture, his mouth brief and warm on Charinda’s knuckles. “My thanks for having me.”
“How could I not? A chance to meet a personage so celebrated and, moreover, to kiss his hand—though last I heard you were more often a woman than otherwise. I hope you like the maze. Visitors can enter these frames to touch, talk, or request a sync. An interactive art.”
“They are curious.” The general looks at the exhibit, which contains Olyosha sitting on an ivory chariot. Her arms are chromed plates stylized with solar flares; they are heavy and unsubtle, the way firearm prostheses tend to be. Script identifies her as The Archer.
Charinda’s peacock sings out a few notes, dispersing the last of verse-echoes about them. “You disapprove.”
“Just Olyosha. I can’t imagine the sun archer could hold any significance for her. Perhaps she visited my birthworld during leave or stayed for the length of a deployment, neither of which gives her a connection to Tiansong.”
“Olyosha’s just a romantic.” Charinda sketches a binary flower on the malleable glass. “The maze checks visitors for organic-to-artificial ratio. Only people who are fifty-percent cybernetics, minimum, may enter; the rest are steered back to the exit even if they’ve the poetry correct. I inhabit one of these boxes on occasion. It’s a performance—surrender to the gaze.”
“As I said, I don’t object to the idea. Olyosha served under me for a campaign. Whatever she’s doing now would be an improvement, if only because she’s not causing casualties in the thousand.”
“You’re blunt,” Charinda says as they pass the Duke of River Seven, who has entered the box of a man wearing a veil of membranes and fins. It is lifted: beneath is a raw face, two lidless eyes, a seam where a mouth once was. They kiss, tenderly and openly.
On the way out she straightens the peacock’s feathers the way most straighten tousled clothes. She cups its albino head in her palm. It is terribly fragile.
There was a time when Charinda did not doubt her strength. Then something happened, and she found herself in need of a reconstruction. She applied for an operation from a cyberneticist known to be without equal.
When it was done, her belly was hollowed out. In its place a cage, inside it a peacock.
“You asked for a bird, I gave you a bird,” Esithu said. “Appreciate your luck. There was a woman who wanted a bird and I gave her a beehive. Mind the implant well and it’ll keep you so healthy you’ll never need longevity treatments. I won’t have it said that Esithu does subpar work.”
Charinda had believed the implant would restore her, made her whole again.
The first year it terrified her to leave the house, to be seen with this mark of her mortality singing through her ribs. She tried covering it up with clothes that no longer fit right, but it hurt the peacock to be kept from sun and warmth. Her metabolism became ravenous; she had to eat for the bird too. Sinewy umbilici tethered them to one another. Any distance from it filled her with a panic like drowning, an ache like the accident she didn’t want to remember.
The months went; her isolation grew. She confined herself to her cortices, cultivating and breeding intelligences in ecosystems written to be viciously hostile. Many artificial clusters she encouraged to be nomadic or symbiotic; others she programmed with an expansionist slant. They would take over extant clusters, imposing new hierarchy and subroutines. It didn’t matter who won: under the built-in logic of diminishing resources they all went extinct in the end.
In this way she made them wage war, negotiate treaties, develop primitive poetry. In this way she discovered what they became when they dissolved. It was time-consuming and too individual for mass production, but she was diligent. She saw the potential, and made more.
Sometimes she fed the peacock out of her hand, and found she could be full that way.
By the second anniversary of her operation, she was ready.
Charinda’s house is a stage. It tells of a cluttered life, mildly temperamental: mementos littering the floor, framed stills of friends, personal data pocking and inscribing the projected autumn sky. Aborted prostheses murmur in the walls and swing from the ceiling to the tune of cardiac arrest, casting six-point shadows. Silent intelligences, suspended on the cusp of permanent zeros, bristle within the house cortices.
When there is a new client, she would purge the house to a blank slate.
Windows angled to catch and slant the sunshine, limning the walls in soft dream-light. Empty rooms, empty floors.
Stepping in, Lunha shields her eyes, an affected gesture made more garish by the prismatic reflections eeling down her wrist. Her vision adjusts to sun-glare or darkness effortlessly, Charinda knows: the best the army can provide.
“Your body,” the general says. “Have you had it for long?”
“It’s considered rude,” Charinda says easily, “to inquire. Much as it would be if I asked you why you’re female now when scarce an hour ago you were a man.”
“I recognize the make. I’m not asking as an outsider; my augmens works are extensive.”
“You don’t wear yours openly.” She switches on furniture. Plush chairs and a faceted table unfold, sheathed in haptics and contour sensors. “What brought you to Laithirat?”
“When I left the Hegemony, I found myself troubled by a mathematical burden. One of your predictives should be able to solve that, and I’ve come to negotiate for it.”
“In your hand my oracles would become weapons to render civilizations into history, prosperity into genocide. I’m not interested in abetting you.”
Lunha smiles with a mouth painted and shaped for an idol’s pout. “I don’t need artificial prophets whispering in my ear to carry out war. This burden is of a personal nature. I could give my word that I won’t use your children to scorch so much as a single city block, extinguish so much as one solitary life.”
“A pledge full of loopholes.” Charinda opens a server rack. “I’d like to do a deep scan, just to be sure you haven’t set aside a partition for an intelligence cluster.”
“As a rule, I don’t lie. I was a soldier, not a diplomat.”
“Is that all you are? Have you never aspired to anything else?”
“When I was very little I thought of becoming a scholar, working with classics or ancient history.” Lunha’s voice has turned detached and melodious, as if presenting someone else’s life. “A while later I thought of dance, theater, music. Later still I performed exceptionally well in a certain aptitude test, and discovered that I enjoyed putting my mind to work in that capacity. Tiansong has its own defense force, but joining the Hegemony’s gave me a wider scope with which to exercise my imagination.”
“And so the deaths of billions are tattooed on your fingerprint,” Charinda says, keeping her voice warm, this side of voluptuous. “An engineer with a peacock in her middle isn’t going to scare you. A deep scan, please.”
Lunha raises an eyebrow, but complies. The spiders are discarded to perish on Charinda’s carpet, breaking down to proteins that the house quickly absorbs. Stripped of porcelain coating Lunha is hard muscles, thick thighs and a torso mapped with scars from duels and failed assassins. The scan shows a plated skeleton, filtered digestive organs, and neural enhancers built like constellations to orbit the sun of her thought. Grafted onto that, serpentine and gangrenous, bides the Hegemony’s parting gift.
“Your mathematical burden,” Charinda says, examining that knot of encryption, “appears to be a killswitch.”
“I’ve forced it into a reset loop, but it won’t always hold. I like to imagine a tech executing the termination command over and over.” Lunha laughs softly, eyes half-lidded. “The next one decompiling it, rebuilding it, trying again. The one after that coming to the realization that it’s never going to activate. As problems go, your clusters are uniquely placed to solve it.”
“By prolonging your life at all I’ll be adding to an interminable slaughter toll.”
“Good calculation takes into account both sides of the equation: acceptable losses, a threshold of collateral damage you will not cross. Would you prefer the wars of the universe helmed by commanders who cause carnage for its own sake and trigger supernovae for the adrenaline rush of it? Conflict will happen with or without me. Even if I fell today, even if I was never born. But I’m tidy; many are not.”
“That’s self-serving logic.” Charinda tilts her head; the peacock chirps, baring razor teeth. She has no more love for the Hegemony any other Laithirat born and bred. “What can you offer me?”
“That depends.” Lunha undocks, a hiss of body sockets and ports in release. “Name what you lack or want, and that’ll be our starting point.”
“I won’t haggle, General. There’s one thing I want, and one only. I haven’t any use for fancies, and any essentials I need are already mine. You don’t have to offer up the riches of worlds like dripping sweets or the mastery of star systems like savory meat.”
“Yes?”
“I want to be free of Esithu.”
Charinda’s surgery was performed remotely. She met Esithu afterward at a reception, for the first and last time.
Despite being wanted on most planets under Hegemonic jurisdiction and several not, Esithu walked openly. Their triplet bodies—the ultimate prostheses—spoke and acted with apparent independence, one making conversation with the Duke of River Seven and another with the Vice-Tetrarch. The third sampled frozen fruits wrapped in heated spice pastes, scorched eels wriggling in puddles of chili salt.
“Ah,” the cyberneticist said, looking up. “A celebrity.”
Charinda had brought a bowl of ape ears studded at lobe and whorls with pearly roe, braised in oyster essence. She put one piece to Esithu’s mouth. “In your presence I can’t claim to be that. A satellite, maybe. Lesser, definitely.”
They obliged with a bite, licking unborn fish off Charinda’s thumb. “I’m glad you came, since I wanted to speak to you directly. There’s an individual, famous or infamous depending on your point of view. We’ve a pact, she and I, to stay out of each other’s way and cooperate when short-term goals align: at present such is the case. You’ll notice that I didn’t exact payment for your operation.”
“I was hoping you considered me a charity case.”
“You don’t require my charity,” Esithu said, raising a glass. They did not drink. “Most people would rather I keep my charity away from them—the other side of space-time, for preference. When the day comes you’ll commit yourself to this individual or I’ll shut down your implant. Don’t take it personally. Your specialty singled you out for her purposes, and I hear she’s a polite guest.”
Pressed afterward Charinda would not be able to tell what Esithu looked or sounded like. No security footage, omniscient or personal, captured them. Neither the Duke nor the Vice-Tetrarch could recall what they spoke. There was only the certainty, prickling like thorns under skin, that Esithu was there.
The petals on Charinda’s cheeks deepen in color. Some of them shed free of the stems at her chin, dusting her collarbones in pollen. It’s the season for that, and she doesn’t try to hide them any more than she tries to hide the peacock. In public she attracts stares.
The general does not. Chameleon matrices cover her grid presence and though she wears no physical mods, she goes unrecognized in train lobbies or crowded promenades. There are many on Laithirat who, though no more desirous of Hegemonic rule than Charinda, would eagerly turn Lunha in for those impossible prizes: they owe a Tiansong native little, an ex-soldier nothing.
“Wouldn’t it better serve you to commission a skilled cyberneticist?” Lunha asks as they settle under one of Charinda’s hybrids, a canopy of linguistic fruits and axiomatic fronds, infrared flowers igniting as evening draws on.
“You think I haven’t tried? Not even the best know how to bar Esithu from access, and they’ve all been of the opinion that it’s what I implicitly agreed to.” She plucks a pomegranate, breaks it open for zircon couplets and obsidian epigrams seeded by local poets. The quality has been uneven lately but the subjects have not. A trend for lamentations and famine, ruinscapes and seas blasted fatalist-scarlet. “Help yourself.”
The general picks a mangosteen. It splits open to six plump segments inscribed with astrophysics theories. “Botanic splicing for a hobby?”
“I like trees. I’ve donated these for public use; anyone can enter
data to pattern cultivars. There’s some automatic curation but for the most part it’s unregulated, and I quite like the results.”
Lunha eats the mangosteen segment by segment, variables briefly lighting up her lips and sternum as she swallows. “In theory your predictives can calculate anything.”
“In theory,” Charinda says, rolling the taste of an enjambment on her tongue. The consistency is elastic, pleasantly chewy. “It hinges on what input is fed to it and how much; it depends on the application. If any fool could use them to great success, the universe would be full of miraculous reversals, inexplicable plenty, and we’d all be winners.”
“Do they project results alone, or can they be used to generate a set of circumstances through which a desired outcome may be achieved?”
“Both. But the more variables, the more difficult it is to use. Estimating a result is much easier and takes a smaller cluster.”
Lunha catches a falling petal. Severed from Charinda it curls in on itself, withering to black crumbs. “Might I try my hand at it?”
“I can give you a set.”
“Not so advanced it may solve my little inconvenience, of course. It won’t have to be. I just need to familiarize.”
The general spends the next week in battle simulations. She has requested Charinda obtain the most complex available, scenarios where success is impossible; she plays with handicaps of number and resources, terrain and logistics.
Charinda watches the visuals, as often rapid-fire abstractions as they are animalistic hyper-realism. “You nearly died serving the Hegemony. What was it like when you woke up and discovered yourself a full cyborg?”
Lunha maneuvers one of her buffer hive-states into position. “The reconstruction was cellular, and before my injury I was already more implants than not. I entered officer school when I was young, and standard-issue augmens started a year in. Gradual, with physical therapy to ease the transition. But it was enhancement rather than replacement. Yours is . . . drastic.”
“We weren’t talking about me, General.” In the simulation, human-shaped units blister and shrivel under a warp-sleet. The physics model, Charinda has to admit, is superb. “Did you enjoy your work?”
