Out on Blue Six

by Ian McDonald

  To the passengers it was an all-too-infrequent chance to meet together as a cabal to share visions, frustrations, triumphs, and exhilarations over a bottle or two, a sniff or two, a dermoplastic slap-stik or two, a giggle and a groan and a moan or two, and a privileged ringside view of the grandest spectacle in centuries of Compassionate Society nonhistory: the departure of Tamazooma.

  It had been Angelo Brasil’s concept originally; the gift of the gods working in parallel with the Series 000 gave him the ability to ram himself anywhere in the dataweb and synthesize information with almost instantaneous intuition. And upon one of these low, fast glides through the vacated halls of the Polytheon, he had picked and pecked and beachcombed interesting glittering orts and scraps of information and melded them into something new and shiny and exciting, something like no one had ever seen before. Something that had been perfectly obvious for almost half a millennium, but that had remained unseen and unhailed because no one had the eyes to see it. He took what he had made to the cabal on one of their policy meetings, and they all looked at what he had found, and they, too, had eyes to see, and they exclaimed, “Of course! How obvious! This is what they had intended from the very beginning!”

  And what was so obvious was this: why was each arcology in Great Yu a self-contained, self-sufficient community with its own power plant, its own independent water treatment and recycling plant, and closed air-conditioning system?

  And what was also obvious was that for half a millennium the wingers had been using freegee generators to enjoy nograv sex when the same quantum principles could send ships to the nearer stars.

  And what (in conclusion) they (that is, the departed personalities of the Polytheon) had intended from the very beginning (that is, the first prefabricated cell being welded into its place in the first up-soaring arcology skeleton) was that the arcologies were to be the vanguard of human expansion beyond the city, beyond the walls, in the only direction left to explore. Upward. Into space. The arcologies had been designed to be the first functioning space colonies.

  For six months their wardenship of the Time of Changes had been deliberately slow and subtle. Kansas Byrne’s Media and Arts had heralded the return to much-loved, more-missed Wee Wendy Waif with a team of brilliant new writers, drafters, and satirists, and the explosion onto the streets of literally hundreds of new alternative performing arts groups inspired and illuminated by the late-lamented Raging Apostles. Winston, in charge of castes and subcastes, had quietly suspended the prenatal implantation of tags in a whole generation of citizens: in Power and Light V. S. Pyar was settling down to the replacement of the incredibly archaic and dangerous fission reactors that had kept eighty percent of Yu’s lights burning with new, clean matter/antimatter systems that had been invented, and pigeonholed, two hundred years before. Running through his files of names and numbers, Joshua Drumm was returning children taken on the word of psychofile alone to their parents, reuniting lovers separated by official dictate, and mercifully separating unhappy incompatibles forced into partnership. All state censorship was abolished, the publishing houses could print what they liked; and while they dipped tentative toes in the pool of public opinion, word by word, sentence by sentence, the official Ministry of Pain history of the Compassionate Society was being rewritten and retaught to the children of the new age. Little by little, stone by stone, the arcologies were being turned on their heads, as Courtney Hall had once fantasized.

  And now they felt the time had come to force the pace. Kick the ass. Open the Wall. Uproot the towers and set them tumbling. Time to draw a new horizon, out along the boundaries of the universe. Put a little pain and panic and wonder and yearning and a touch of mystery into the gray streets.

  Dr. M’kuba Mig-15 (who for most of the week operated from a tiny cubby squeezed between computer modules somewhere in St. Paul’s, where everyone thought he was a service engineer while he was actually managing the TAOS Consortium) had volunteered Tamazooma. The Tower of Glass was the most rigorously self-contained of the city’s arcologies, and the most prominent. Its Scorpios were the most outward-looking of Yu’s castes, and four and a half centuries of freegee had perfectly adapted them to life in geosynchronous orbit.

  They’d been very tempted not to tell anyone what they were going to do.

  Almost. Two votes.

  And now the automated tram had made its last run from Tamazooma East out into the darklands. And the darklands themselves were finally truly dark and abandoned: the last sprinkling of streetlights winked out, the last gas-flare had wavered and guttered and gone out; and the denizens of the industrial wastes gone with them, some, reluctantly, to MiniPain retraining schemes, some to the DeepUnder, some back to their Class Tower to take their tentative step in their caste’s greatest adventure. The final pneumatique had pulled out of Tamazooma Central, and the pressure doors had sealed behind it across the tubes.

  Deep down in the roots of Tamazooma, a Universal Power and Light reactor was swinging two beams of matter and antimatter into alignment with each other.

  In the gondola of their airship, the only vehicle permitted to pass the perimeter of pantycars, Courtney Hall popped a bottle of Compassionate Society champagne. The taste for alcohol that Jonathon Ammonier had introduced in her had never left. Not quite the kind of memorial she would have liked for him, but …

  “How long now?”

  “Lift minus five hundred and twelve seconds.” Dr. M’kuba’s hand shone with silver veins where he pressed it to the dirigible’s inner skin, reading the ship’s computers. “Power at one hundred and eighty percent nominal. She could go anytime.”

  “Time enough for another glass, though?”

  “Surely is.”

  Over another glass or three, shoptalk.

  Kansas Byrne wanted Xian Man Ray’s Love Police to tread a little harder on her carefully nurtured embryo art groups. “Keeps them strong if we keep them down. Fat art is no art at all.” Joshua Drumm and Devadip Samdhavi debated ways to rehabilitate six hundred and fifty angel-children into a Compassionate Society already reeling from changes. Dr. M’kuba sketched Angelo Brasil a glowing future of skies filled with orbiting cities like splinters of crystal in the sun, and together they extemporized far-flung science-fictions of a new humanity that would be a symbiosis of man and machine spread across the lens of the galaxy, a race immortal and transcendent in a diversity learned from centuries within the structures of the Compassionate Society and its castes. Courtney Hall outlined her proposals for extending to every citizen the option of refusing the recommendations of the Ministry of Pain and all its multiplexity of Departments, Bureaus, Commissions, Committees, Sections, and Offices: “Everyone has a right to happiness, but also everyone has the right not to be happy should they choose. And that’s what we’re giving them, the right to choose. It may well only be Hobson’s choice, but at least it’s free will.” Joshua Drumm offered the names of potential allies he had hunted through the great psychofile forest into the light of day. The conspirators studied the photocopied lists of names and agreed to consider his proposals. As masters of the universe they were still fledglings, ugly ducklings without even the certain hope of swanhood, wary of even the least mistake with something as huge and delicate as the Compassionate Society.

  “Hell, we should be free to make mistakes!” said Kelso Byrne. “That’s what the Phoenix told us before he departed. Mistakes are an essential part of the process. To err is human. Perfection is for the gods. More mistakes the better, I say.”

  “Sure is the best toy a cub ever got given,” commented Dr. M’kuba, and while they all raised glasses in agreement the dirigible lurched, sending champagne slopping out of glasses and conspirators reaching for support straps.

  “What was that?” someone asked.

  “I think things may be about to happen,” said Angelo Brasil.

  “Oh, shug, look at that!” squealed Devadip Samdhavi. “I’ll never get that stain out. And it’s my best one-piece.”

  Stain an
d all, he still pressed close to the glass with the others for the first glimpse of the something that might be about to happen. The dirigible lurched again: Tamazooma’s drive fields were flinging eddies and vortices for kilometers across the darklands; the fans whined as the didakoi wrestled for control.

  “Hey, would you look at that.”

  The swirl of confused air was being whipped into steamlines and channeled along the edge of the freegee field; the Tower of Glass shivered and wavered behind an almost liquid heat-haze.

  The dirigible dropped violently in an air pocket. Everyone went “Oooh!” and burst out giggling.

  “Forty-two seconds,” advised Dr. M’Kuba. “Forty-one … forty …”

  “I hope they’re all fastened in down there,” said V. S. Pyar.

  “Shouldn’t make a tap of difference,” answered the Scorpio. “Tarn’s got its own independent internal grav field.”

  “Never mind all that,” interrupted Thunderheart. “What you make of this?”

  The zone of repulsion had pushed the encroaching factory-machines away from itself, as if fearing defilement from a profane touch; the machinery was piled in broken, mangled waves around the foot of the Tower of Glass, and even as they watched, the swirlwind stripped away loose scraps and flung them into orbit around the drive field. The lowest hundred or so meters of Tamazooma were ringed by a small tornado of shattered factory.

  “Must be some power can tear apart whole buildings,” commented Kansas Byrne. The dirigible bucked and swayed in the strengthening swirlstorm.

  “That’s nothing,” said Angelo Brasil. “It’ll be throwing that entire arcology into orbit in … fifteen seconds … fourteen … thirteen …”

  They all counted down from ten together.

  “Go!” said M’kuba.

  Nothing happened.

  At first.

  Perhaps a slight rocking, a reeling, a wobbling, a stretching and straining of deep roots, old, bad teeth being pulled. Tamazooma groaned and rocked and everyone thought exactly the same thought: “Oh, Yah, what if we’ve got it wrong, what if the drive field isn’t strong enough and the whole thing goes over on its side?” But the drive field was strong enough; Tamazooma’s teeters and sways were only the severing of its final connections with Great Yu. And then, incredibly, impossibly, Tamazooma tore free from the ground and rose into the air. They had all known intellectually what would happen, but it in no way prepared them for the overwhelming emotion and awe of witnessing the arcology lifting off, straight up, three kilometers of glass terraces and galleries and levels and arches and buttresses and spires passing in front of their eyes, trailing cables and conduits and tunnels and severed pneumatique tubes with its little attendant nebula of spinning junk, up and up and up and up. They stared, overpowered by what they had just done, as it rose, stately and silent as a prayer, and quite unstoppable, until the perpetual monsoon clouds closed behind it and it was lost to view.

  Even as the aftershock of displaced air sent the dirigible tumbling and reeling, they still craned to look up to the place where it had gone, through the clouds into the mystery.

  “Now,” said Kansas Byrne after the long silence, “That’s what I call theater.”

  “Can we do that again?” asked M’kuba. “Like, tomorrow?”

  Angelo Brasil was the last to turn away from the window and the cloud of mystery. “You know, I wish I could have gone with them.”

  And Courtney Hall heard his words and knew that whatever happened, it was going to be good from now forward. There would be mistakes, there would be disagreements and pain and difficulty, there would be doubts and frustrations, and it would all be good. She knew hope. The didakoi pilot swung his abused craft away from the gaping crater where Tamazooma had been and set course for the city of man. Courtney Hall let her colleagues talk and debate about the future, their future, and took time to be herself by the curving gondola window. She looked out at her city, her Great Yu, city of man, wave upon wave upon, wave of gray and silver and black and countless countless lives, all those hopes and dreams and destinations; and she looked beyond them to the distant black line that was the Wall, a smudge along the borderlands of the will. And as she looked at the clouds, the low, gray monsoon clouds, she noted with pleasure that the rain seemed, for the moment at least, to have come to an end.

  Voices Off …

  … CITIZEN TAMBUCO? CITIZEN TAMBUCO? Selma Whiteside here again. Selma Whiteside, MiniPain Childwatch Department. Just to tell you, the Department has reconsidered your case, and though we cannot return April to you as the tests are conclusive that she is just not cut out to be an athleto, you will be able to visit her at her fosterers at any time you wish … Citizen Tambuco, please, there’s no need to cry… Mizz Tambuco …

  Chiga-Chiga Sputnik-kid, Captain Elvis in neon skin-hugger, denizen of the dawn hours when the cablecars sleep in their barns, paramour of the four A.M. TAOS gurls, sits in a Scorpio bar with a Peccary Stinger and wonders, whad de whad de whad de shug I goin’ do now? Because he has hung up his power-wheels and doesn’t know what to do. All the fun has gone right out of riding the wires ever since they stopped its being illegal. …

  “So, there we wazz, talking, and I said, ‘Welllll, whazz new?’ like I mean, new new, not old new, and she said, she said, ‘Like, this is new,’ and I like looked, and well, I never ever seened anyone wearing anything like she wazz wearing down at the club, but like, you know, I kept my manners, meanasay, and said, ‘I didn’t know they’d changed the fashion,’ and she said, well, you just listen to this, she said, ‘Oh, who bothers about the fashion anymore? My designer, she worked this out for me, neat, neh? Says no one has one like it anywhere, it’s designed just for me and me only. Wear what suits you, that’s the fashion, haven’t you heard? Fashion, mah frien’, has gone out of fashion.’ Well, I meanasay, did you ever hear anything like?”

  Mulu the Rainforest:

  Pray for us.

  Mudmother, Soulsister:

  Pray for us.

  Green One; Patroness of Planted Things:

  Preserve us.

  From the sweeping monsoon rains, from the terror of … hang on, hold on, why am I praying this? Every day I pray the same prayer before I take the elevator down for work; pray for us, preserve us, hear our prayer, I mean, just what am I praying to? A computer? That’s all our Mulu the Mudmother is, a pile of bioprocessors, and I expect that to hear my prayers, and answer them, as if it hasn’t got enough to do without listening to the gripes and protests of a trog agrarium worker. Oh, come on, I mean, do you really expect me to believe all this? They’re only machines….

  Hello? Hello? Pantycar Twenty-seven? Regards your report sixteen twenty-four, possible privacy infringement Pendel Mills Flower Market re: religious propagandizing. Official policy as follows: Love Police intervention not required, repeat, not required in disturbances with PainCrime probabilities under twenty-five percent. And this one’s rating twelve point two. All right. Have a blessed day yourselves.

  Dear sir,

  the Bureau of PersonPower Services, Aptitudinal and Vocational Training Branch, is delighted to inform you that, on appeal, your application for Aptitudinal and Vocational Training as a toymaker class 13/B has been granted.

  Your transfer from nonfunctional natural wood furniture construction is effective as from today, and should you wish to avail yourself of any of the facilities offered by the Bureau of PersonPower Services, you should present yourself, with this letter, to Evan J. Jardine at Nagashima Chome 11618, Toys and Playthings Training Center on or before April 27, 452

  Should you have any questions or queries with regard to your transfer, please do not hesitate to contact me, Hester Birkenshaw at the following tellix code …

  SAATCHI & AUGUSTINO: CUSTOM LIFESTYLE CONSULTANTS. NOW, YOUR DAYS EVEN MORE THE WAY YOU WANT THEM. YES, FOLLOWING NEW MINIPAIN DEREGULATIONS OF FAMULUS ROMPAKS AND PERIPHERALS, YOU NOW HAVE EVEN MORE CHOICE OF HOW YOU WANT TO DESIGN YOUR LIFE WITH SAATCHI & AUGUSTINO. COMPATIB
ILITY RATINGS BLOWN WIDE OPEN. BE ANYTHING YOU WANT TO BE! GO ON, BE A DAREDEVIL, TRY IT AND SEE!

  “And it’s seventeen-fifteen and this is Phantomas your famulus, ready to accompany you on that happy path homeward to your well-earned rest with a selection of your favorite music, news, gossip, information, and a preview of tomorrow’s appointments and schedules, all from your personal diary program! But before the weather, a thought for the day: Aren’t you getting a little bit bored of that old number nine ninety-eight tramcar; how about walking? For just ten minutes extra, you could avoid the crush-hour and detour through Celestial Blossom of Divine Harmony Park, where I understand there are some lovely rhododendrons coming into bloom….

  “And now the weather: Looking a little brighter, I do declare, temperature out there in the Big City a pleasant twenty-two, humidity down to seventy percent, probability of rain within the next hour six percent, winds gentle, maxing at twelve kilometers per hour, yes, a perfect evening for a walk. Good evening, good evening, good evening!”

  Thanks

  To my wife, Patricia, for all those little extra ideas that made all the difference when my imagination was flagging.

  To Tim Haffield, for the concept of “tags” and “famuluses.”

  To my editor, Shawna McCarthy, for having the patience of Job in the face of monolithic tardiness.

  About the Author

  Ian McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He used to live in a house built in the back garden of C. S. Lewis’s childhood home but has since moved to central Belfast, where he now lives, exploring interests like cats, contemplative religion, bonsai, bicycles, and comic-book collecting. He debuted in 1982 with the short story “The Island of the Dead” in the short-lived British magazine Extro. His first novel, Desolation Road, was published in 1988. Other works include King of Morning, Queen of Day (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award), River of Gods, The Dervish House (both of which won British Science Fiction Association Awards), the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch, and many more. His most recent publications are Planesrunner and Be My Enemy, books one and two of the Everness series for younger readers (though older readers will find them a ball of fun, as well). Ian worked in television development for sixteen years, but is glad to be back to writing fulltime.