“Everybody,” Sharia said, “makes mistakes.”
Kalypso ignored her. “Why would the luma melt?”
“You never cared about this stuff when Ganesh was trying to teach it to you,” Ahmed teased.
“If it’s hurting Ganesh, I care about it,” Kalypso said. “Liet?”
Liet always took her time answering questions. She appeared preoccupied with some lint she had discovered between her toes. “Well,” she said eventually, “everything else being equal, natural luma is oriented with respect to polarity. That’s why a flyover of this planet shows a grain in the oceans. Although most luma isn’t solid, it’s so pervasive that its magnetic orientation actually shapes the ocean.” She stopped, yawned, stretched. Ahmed’s pupils dilated and he sighed. “We refer to the magnetic substructures as magnetosomes because they resemble the particles of FeO4 found in certain terran archaea and algae. But the scale is entirely different. Each cell of the luma is thousands of times larger than a bacterium, and when it sporulates, it tends to recombine RNA from a variety of what we used to call species. We call them subsystems now because they don’t meet the criteria for species.”
“Does any of this have to do with Ganesh?” Sharia prodded. Liet frowned; she tended to get self-conscious if you pressed her.
“Sort of.” Liet fluffed her platinum hair. “In the process of sporulation, the cytoplasm of the luma cell loses water and becomes a gel in consistency. We can induce sporulation by depriving a given subsystem of essential nutrients, but we can only determine which nutrients these are by complex statistical calculations. The luma may appear uniform, and may function in a uniform way, but it’s chemically and biologically heterogeneous and therefore unpredictable.” She paused again and closed her eyes. Just when Kalypso thought she’d fallen asleep again, she added, “The indigenous luma System is too dynamic to be manipulated using any bio-engineering techniques we’ve ever known: it resists analysis and has to be treated with probability theory. That’s why we need simulations like Alien Life.”
“Yeah, but. . .”
Liet shot upright, talking a blue streak. “OK, listen. When the endospores form, all exchange of genetic material grinds to a halt. Cell membranes cease to exchange information packets. Magnetosomes align electrostatically and if you pass a charge through the luma, it stiffens and will hold its alignment indefinitely. That’s why everything in First depends on the kinetic energy of the well. It would be a lot easier for us to survive if we didn’t live on top of a volcanic explosion. But that heat generates the electrical power Ganesh needs to maintain the structure of the luma. It’s been created by the planet’s natural environment. Luma is custom-made for T’nane just like we were custom-made for Earth. Do you understand?”
“No.” It was Liet’s standard question, and Kalypso’s standard answer. They exchanged little smiles. Ahmed was looking at Liet lustfully. He ran a hand up her leg.
“Damn, you’re smart,” he muttered.
Kalypso said, “Not now, Ahmed. We’re trying to have a discussion here. Liet, how could luma evolve without its own RNA?”
“We think it’s a recording system for historical patterns of heat and nutrition. It confers some evolutionary advantage to its members —this goes without saying. Since it isn’t born, and doesn’t die, per se, we can’t really talk about it in terms of evolution; and even if we could, to ascribe some purpose to it would be to see natural selection backwards. The endospores enable life to survive that otherwise would fry; luma provides a way to organize and handle the unstable heat patterns of this planet. It’s an ordered system. But it has no analog on Earth.”
Kalypso sighed. “So any of our data stored in the luma could get erased or altered in this Crash. Is that right?’’
“Yep.” Liet appeared distracted. “Is there any food?”
“All our history, all the sensory records used in the Dreamer, everything from Earth. Music. All of it, could be wiped out?”
“Depending on how bad the Crash is, and where Ganesh has stored things.”
No wonder Jianni was so mad.
“Still,” Kalypso said, “the Core should remain intact. Ganesh kept accusing me of Core breach, which is impossible for me as a shotgun and difficult for Marcsson as a doze, If the fault was in the luma, why would Ganesh complain about a Core violation? There’s no programming in the luma, so the luma couldn’t attack the Core under any circumstances, because it’s pure data. And the Core would have to violate its own programming to attack itself. Right?”
But Liet was rummaging in search of nourishment and Kalypso knew from experience that her mind had already passed on to something else.
“So what’s the worst that can happen?” Kalypso said. “Jianni’s already starting an evacuation. But what about Ganesh?”
“If the luma melts,” Sharia said, “whatever Ganesh was using it for will be disabled or destroyed. And the Earthmade components will be endangered, too, unless they’re completely heat-shielded.”
“Jianni might try to shut down the reflex points and take manual control of the luma,” Ahmed observed.
“That would be stupid.”
“But if he shuts down the reflex points, won’t that paralyze Ganesh?” Kalypso winced sympathetically.
“Yeah, that’s the whole idea.” Ahmed sounded matter-of-fact. “Safeguard against renegade AI.”
“This kind of fretting isn’t like you, my small and fractious grasshopper. Why worry?” Xiaxiang rose from Kalypso’s bed and craned his neck toward the window. It was dark and warm in the cell: another reminder of Ganesh’s condition.
“Storm,” he said. “You can see it. Look, where that curtain of precipitation is.”
Kalypso knew she sounded querulous. But she wasn’t in the mood to be teased. “I can’t help it if I don’t understand. I’m so tired of Lassare picking on me. She never needs an excuse.”
Sharia said, “Crashing the station isn’t an excuse?”
“That’s not a normal storm,” Ahmed said darkly. “It’s a telltale. Thermal must be getting close. I saw it on the last forecast before G went down.”
“What kind of thermal? How long till it hits?”
Apprehension: the air going stiff with it. Sharia suddenly clapped her hands.
“I know! Let’s play Future.”
They looked at her skeptically. X said, “That’s pretty thin.”
“Yeah, of all times to play Future, Sharia! Ganesh is down, and there’s a storm. . . .”
“All the more reason,” Sharia insisted. “Come on. Somebody start.”
They all looked at each other awkwardly. Nobody said anything.
“Oh!” Liet burst out. “I have an idea. We’re going to have buses.”
“Buses,” they echoed wonderingly.
“Yeah, ’cause, imagine. There’ll be roads. And so many people that a bunch of people might, you know, happen to be going in the same direction at the same time, and so to make it more efficient, we’d have. Well. Buses.”
“Oooh . . .”
“That many people?”
“Bus schedules . . .” mused X.
“You know what?” Ahmed said excitedly. “I’ve always wanted to see a really big bus station, or like those highway things — you know, with those beautiful shapes where you’d have several roads conjoining and they’d all have to interact safely, so you’d design the levels and curves just so. . . . I mean, you’d be working with a variety of materials and you’d need to calculate the stresses—”
“Think of the budget on a project like that.” X whistled softly. “All kinds of complexities with taxes and subcontractors and a little bit of backhanded stuff going on. Red tape. How pretty.”
“Well,” Sharia said, “let’s not forget the basic overpass itself, it was a kind of special ecological niche. I mean, various lichens, snails—”
“Birds,” Liet agreed. “Pigeons. And kids would write their names on the concrete. Cindy loves Tysheem, stuff like that.”
“Stand around smoking in the rain.”
“You could live there,” Kalypso put in.
“I guess . . .”
“No,” she insisted. “People did. You could live in a cardboard box. I mean, imagine. You could be a social outcast, and still live and breathe. That’s incredible!” She looked outside. “We’re all stuck with each other. They weren’t. You could walk away from everything. If you wanted.”
There was silence.
Sharia said, “Well, I don’t know if I want buses. But roads. That’s something else. Imagine all that out there is land, and we could have roads. You could start running and never stop.”
Everybody had seen Sharia running interfaced, sweating and steaming and spitting in the confines of her cell, fogging up the windows with her efforts while Ganesh blew breezes over her and she pretended to be in Kenya or wherever.
“I think I’ll take the bus,” X yawned. “My feet would hurt. Whenever we play Future, we always end up recycling stuff from Earth history. Anybody ever notice that?”
The others had no chance to respond because Tehar dove through the hatch, breathing hard.
“Come on, Kalypso. Get your stuff.”
Sharia raised an eyebrow at him. “News?”
He shook his head. Kalypso stared at the approaching storm. Was Ganesh really gone, or just pretending to be gone? Her parents. . .
“Kalypso. Surface suit. Emergency gear. Now!”
The cell was so small that Tehar could reach across it from the hatchway and shake her. Ahmed was pulling her surface suit out of storage and attempting to shove her legs into it.
“Get her interface, too, Ahmed. Kalypso, move it!”
She shook herself and jumped off the shelf, catching hold of Xiaxiang’s shoulder for balance on the way down. She was trying and failing to be angry with Tehar for his imperative manner. Liet took her thumb out of her mouth and looked back and forth from Tehar to Kalypso. Tehar remained in the hatchway, his body coiled like a cat’s.
“We’ll meet you at the Landing,” he announced to the cluster as he shoved her ahead of him into the crawlway. “If we don’t make it, go without us and we’ll hook up with you at Oxygen 2. Kalypso, put your radio on channel four.”
She complied, flattening herself against the wall to let him get by. Tehar’s sexual pull was always a huge distraction, but never more so than when he was in I Have An Emergency To Deal With mode. She suppressed a smile and followed him up the crawl. There were no voices on channel four. Instead there was a weird sonic flickering: sounds changing so fast and seamlessly the ear couldn’t follow. It was as if Ganesh were playing every sound it had ever recorded, scrambled and in such fast succession that all to be heard was a kind of digital panting.
“What is this?” she said over the ghost-noise.
“Don’t know,” he answered tersely. “Thought maybe you would.”
“You’ve been talking to Lassare. She’s full of—”
“Kalypso, I’ve just been through the rem2ram modules. You’ve routed music through the Dreamer units. Haven’t you.”
Uh-oh.
She stopped climbing, then slithered after him up the tube, momentarily speechless.
“You and your fucking aural fixation.”
“But how could that—”
“Hush. Do as I say, and maybe we’ll get to the bottom of this before the next thermal.”
When they arrived at Unit 5, she scarcely recognized her workstation. Ganesh’s guts were all over the place. Panels were missing. Tools were scattered across the floor.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Tehar said, calling up a screen full of code. “This isn’t going to affect what we’re doing.”
How could he be so cold? That was part of Ganesh dismembered like a reeking corpse.
“I don’t want to Dream, Tehar. You don’t know what I’ve just been through.”
“I’m sorry if you had a bad night,” he said, sounding the opposite. “But you’ll do as I say.”
She was torn. On the one hand, it was always sexy when Tehar used that forceful tone with her. On the other, she had just sworn she was through with shotgunning. Tehar hadn’t the vaguest notion what it felt like to be Kalypso in Ganesh. Witch doctors didn’t normally Dream or even shotgun: they were concerned directly with code. Not only did she not want to Dream, she didn’t want Tehar holding her hand while she did it. He might fuck up, and then where would she be?
“I’m always resolving to do things and then not doing them,” she complained. “You’re not helping me to improve my perseverance.”
He sounded distracted. “Don’t be ridiculous What would you do if you didn’t Dream?”
He had a point there. Her lack of any practical talents was nearly legendary.
“Dunno. Become a demon and make drinks?”
Tehar emitted a bark of laughter. “Almost ready.”
She checked the settings on her face and waited uneasily while Tehar set up his parameters. She wanted to switch on the radio; in the exterior monitor of the face she could see a lot of activity on the waters near the station, especially around the hydroponics perimeters.
To give Tehar some credit, his task wasn’t easy given that Ganesh wasn’t available to guide him. Fortunately, he wasn’t attempting to take her back into Alien Life, which was far too sophisticated to be run manually. He intended to take her into the module where rem2ram was housed, so she could walk him through its convolutions and show him how her node of Ganesh was set up. To do this, Kalypso had to Dream: unlike a witch doctor, she didn’t understand Ganesh’s code from the outside. Her relationship with the system was entirely intuitive, multisensory, and dependent on total immersion. She couldn’t objectify her own experience inside the Dreamer the way a witch doctor could; but then again, Tehar couldn’t tolerate the levels of sensory complexity that Kalypso could. They were a complementary team— or they were meant to be. Tehar was not exactly being her best buddy at the moment.
“Now,” he said. “When you get in, take as many readings as you can so I can fix the position of neural activity across the AI. I’m going to need you to talk me through everything you’re doing and seeing, so I can match your experiences with the code I observe.”
She sighed because he was all business. “Of course.”
The induction sequence started running, a pattern of subtle sensory cues meant to take her brainwaves to the Dream state, where she would be susceptible to Ganesh’s suggestions. She was too keyed up to respond. Her interface kept her at a conceptual distance from Ganesh, which was perfect for shotgunning, but which obviated the ability to truly Dream. After a while it became apparent she was getting nowhere.
“This isn’t going to work, Tehar. I’m still in my body. We need a tank.”
“The tanks aren’t safe.”
“Well, I’m not sleepy. I won’t be able to get into it this way.”
“Just relax.”
“Tehar, I can’t. It’s like trying to pee when you’re really nervous.”
She took the face off. He ran his hands through his hair in irritation.
“You’re not taking this very seriously.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“The whole station’s about to go down, Ganesh is psycho, people are dying, and all you can say is you don’t have to pee?” He was waving his hands around. “I can’t take much more of this, Kalypso. You want to use the tank? Then get in the fucking tank, and if you berk I’m not saving you.”
“Thank you.” She could grow to like this excitable side of Tehar. She blew him a kiss as she climbed in. The Dreamtank had been put back together by the witch doctors, but despite Tehar’s undisguised agitation, she checked every connection before lying back in the fluid and letting the Dreamer take her senses away.
Induction complete, said a voice that sounded like Ganesh. But when she tried to follow, it fled.
She was in the dark, even when she opened her eyes. There were no connection points here, no inter
face fitted to her skull; just the eggshell-smooth interior of the Dreamtank. She reached up to touch the inside of the lid, and it swung open for her. She slipped out of the salty induction fluid, which radiated a faint, familiar smell as it slid off her skin.
Everything seemed all right. This was the ur-system, the Dream interpretation of First that formed a consistent set of reference points for everyone who Dreamed. There was a robe. She put it on. The tank was not crammed into Unit 5 anymore; rather it rested high in the caldera that formed a bubble at the top of the station. The floor was curved like a skateboarder’s paradise, yet riddled with holes as all of the main transit tubes found their source here. The caldera resembled a giant sieve, except that the luma it had been constructed from was thickly veined and marbled beneath its smooth surface, giving the appearance of old flesh pressed under glass.
In waking life, the transparent dome of the caldera would look out in all directions on the brilliant, steaming surface of T’nane; down on the Works that provided the colony’s basic atmospheric and energetic requirements; and up into the grave, somnolent clouds that obscured the distant sun.
But this was Kalypso’s Dream, and there was no sky in it. Overhead stretched a vast pane of ocean: Earthly sea, an impossible, Trinidad blue as warm as the waters where her genetic mother was born. It crowded over T’nane like a flat shield, never curving, never revealing the azure sky it purported to reflect— never ending in land. Its geometry was therefore implausible, elusive and dangerous: this was the first sign to anyone entering Kalypso’s node that she played by different rules.
“OK, tell me what all this shit is,” Tehar said, homing in on the ocean-sky. The usual business of the witch doctors was to patrol and maintain homeostatic adjustments on the environmental nodes — to groom the growing Ganesh — so they weren’t in the habit of working with the Dreamer modules. Tehar’s attitude was a touch cavalier, Kalypso thought, as if her node were too frivolous to be bothered with.
Dreaming in Smoke Page 6
