Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  A pelota match lasts ninety minutes, divided into two forty-five-minute halves. The stadium seats around the playing arena are kept weightless. Of course, most people watch professional pelota games via the merci’s many sports channels.

  Pelota is the solar system’s most popular sport by far, claiming tens of billions of players and fans. The game has acquired a rich history over the centuries. All major games are captured and stored, and can be relived in the virtuality, down to the exact number of droplets of sweat on a striker’s forehead and the same blasting pain in the chest when a goalkeeper deflects a dead-on touch. There are merci channels devoted to providing the best replays culled by experts from the millions of games that have been played, as well as fantasy leagues, where great players of the past are combined into teams for simulated play.

  Numerous modern-day professional leagues exist, both in the Met and in the outer system. Once every four e-years the Sun Cup competition is held, pitting the four champions of the Dedo, Vas, Diaphany, and outer system against one another in double elimination play.

  It is not known what effect the war will have upon the upcoming Sun Cup 3017.

  Twelve

  Receiving the Hand of Tod as a gift from the dying time tower had been such a weird shock, it had taken Aubry many days before she’d even looked at the thing. She’d carried it with her in the bottom of her small travel pack as she’d fled through the Integument of the Met in fear for her very life. At any moment, she expected a pack of DI sweepers to descend upon her, with even the rapacious fighter Jill unable to fend them off.

  Instead, they got away clean. Only after several days on the run did it occur to Aubry that the lack of pursuit might have something to do with the Hand of Tod.

  Time towers were known to have strange effects on the merci. Usually they caused distortion of various sorts within any grist with which they were associated. They appeared to have no control over this consequence of their being, however. And inhabiting one level or another of insanity, they mostly spread fuzzy logic and confusion as a result of it.

  Tod had been different. Although crazy as a coot, in Aubry’s opinion, he had a kind of intelligence—if not a method—to his madness. She’d been around the old tower a great deal, and she’d always gotten the impression that there was a sane man in there somewhere, speaking and gesturing, as it were, through a pool full of murky water.

  The Friends of Tod sensed this as well, of course. They’d built their religion (if you could call it that) upon the idea that Tod’s pronouncements made a certain sort of sense, and the rest of the world was what was out of kilter. It was a religion that attracted a cornucopia of misfits and ne’er-do-wells. It also claimed some of the best scientific and technical minds in the solar system. Oftentimes, Aubry had to admit, she couldn’t tell the two apart.

  Tod gave the hand to me , though. He must have had a reason for singling me out, Aubry had thought at the time (and still thought). She had resisted relinquishing it to the Friends after her escape from Nirvana, and no one had insisted that she do so. She had, however, allowed Alvin Nissan and his team of v-hacks to study it.

  There was no doubt. The artifact had the curious effect of blocking the merci—that is, of blocking instantaneous transmission of information through the grist to anywhere outside of a specifically defined geographical area. There was very likely a new scientific principle involved. The v-hacks were engineers and technicians, and they did not attempt to determine the theoretical underpinnings of the effect. What they did do was to scope out the power and extent of every possible manifestation of the odd property that the Hand possessed. It was obviously related to whatever device the DIED was using to block and localize the merci during their attack on the outer-system fremden forces.

  Two could play at that game.

  Alvin and his v-hacks determined that the Hand of Tod had a very specific range. This area of blockage was about the size and volume of a pelota field. And that had given Alvin—a rabid pelota fan—the idea for the attack on Silicon Valley.

  Aubry puffed her way forward with arm jets. She juggled the pelota ball between her feet with the usual “dribble” of a longtime player. Her dribbling ability was supplied by a very special algorithmic implant. The code had been stolen from one of the best simulation programs on the merci. Such overlaid abilities were never the equivalent of real experience, of course, but, as Alvin said, this was Bastumo—the great Diaphany striker, and one of the best players who ever took to the arena. When his periodic back injuries and frequent victimization by corrupt club management were not conspiring against him, he had been unstoppable.

  “Even with a low-rez, semisentient Bastumo in your pellicle,” Alvin had told Aubry, “you’ll be a demon of a striker.”

  In front of her, the defenders, dressed in red shirts and white shorts, deployed, waiting to meet her. Their uniforms were those of the Dedo’s Maastricht Armature Rangers. Aubry’s own team wore green shirts and black shorts—the “away” colors of Alvin’s beloved Connacht Bolsa Celtics, a team that was a perennial Diaphany premier league powerhouse. The team was physically there , with Aubry. They were ensconced in the grist she carried in the satchel strapped to her side.

  In the regular world, Aubry took out a curiously shaped gun and fired it into the ground, a few feet away from the cliff edge where she stood. She then turned the gun on herself, lining the muzzle up to the small of her back and pulling the trigger.

  There was a sharp sting, and her pellicle shouted alarms and invasion through her convert portion. Aubry grimaced and bore the pain and momentary distress. A monofilament line had just penetrated her body and thickened around her spine. The other end of the line was anchored into the Martian soil where she’d shot the pistol before.

  Aubry resisted the urge to reach back and make sure the line was secured. If she did so, the line, tapering to a microscopic diameter an inch from where it emerged from her back, would neatly slice her hand from her arm as it passed through.

  I’m the beta tester, Aubry thought grimly. Have to trust the engineers. Even worse, I have to trust the moraba.

  The ichor covering the surface of Mars was going to provide the material for her descent into Silicon Valley. When she began to rappel over the cliff’s edge, the line up top was perfectly capable of slicing through the rock and soil until it formed a straight line between her and the anchor point. Aubry would, in that case, form a molecule-sized slit down the edge of the cliff as she rappelled. But that wasn’t going to happen. The constructor grist that coated the filament line was programmed to thicken the line where it came into contact with the horizontal surface. The friction from the thicker line would prevent it from slicing into the ground.

  More important—at least so far as Aubry’s eventual descent was concerned—the constructor grist was especially programmed to recognize moraba.

  Fortunately, moraba covered everything and got into everything. If you took some moraba away, more would flow in to take its place. The grist of the monofilament line would deconstruct the moraba with which it came into contact, and use it to build and then pay out more line. By the time Aubry reached the edge of Silicon Valley at the base of the cliff, she would be connected to the upper surface by what she couldn’t help thinking of as a thin, strong string of snot. It wouldn’t be snot anymore, but superstrong filament. Still, the image stayed with her.

  Aubry walked toward the edge of the cliff to the point where there was tension on the line in her back. She exerted some pressure, and the line payed out, converting moraba to more line. It stayed taut as long as she kept moving forward.

  Aubry had long since given up second-guessing herself after she’d made a plan. That could get you killed very quickly when you were a partisan fugitive. Without another thought, she stepped over the edge and began walking down the face of the cliff. The device worked; the line held. She descended in a horizontal, facedown rappel, the line coiled around her spine forming an angle that held her feet steady agains
t the cliff face.

  This must be what a spider feels like, Aubry thought, as she spins out her web.

  Nearly a half mile below her, the bottom of Silicon Valley yawned. In the satchel around her waist resided not just the virtual attack team. Inside the satchel was the Hand of Tod.

  Packed and ready for delivery, Aubry thought. Then she returned to the virtuality, and to the deadly pelota game playing out in her mind.

  Thirteen

  The truth is, if Li hadn’t been so desperately lonely, she probably would not have kept her discovery to herself. Who was there to tell? She never saw any of her old friends. She was beginning to think she’d been reassigned to Complex B as a perk for Techstock, and not because anyone had any overriding belief in her ability as a physicist. Most of her new colleagues were cold toward her—and most of them had the same vacant look in their eyes as Techstock.

  It was a look she was coming to comprehend. She was beginning to see it in herself when she gazed into a mirror.

  Addicted to the Glory.

  It was a benign addiction, she told herself. Maybe similar to the way people used to be addicted to caffeine. Caffeine improved productivity; it made you more alert. Until the nanotech and the grist pellicle came along and made ingesting stimulants unnecessary, people all over the Met had been grouchy if they didn’t get their wakeup coffee or tea, or if their chocolate supply ran out. The Glory helped you get things done. It made you work harder , not slack off like a narcotic would. So what if it adversely affected the sex drive? The Glory offered compensation in other areas.

  She was feeling more and more of it. Almost as if he knew. Amés. The Director. As if he knew she’d made a major discovery that was going to help in the war effort, and he was stroking her, giving her encouragement. He might not know the precise details, but he was aware of the general tenor of her thoughts.

  Li began to experience the Glory rush once or twice each e-day—even when Techstock wasn’t around. Perhaps especially when Techstock wasn’t around. She felt as if Amés’s enormous gaze was shifting from Techstock to her.

  So why didn’t she tell anybody about her discovery?

  She no longer wanted to share her life with Techstock. He was far gone to…wherever. Gloryland. And she’d notarized a security agreement when she’d come to work in Complex B. There wouldn’t be any publishing on the merci. No acclaim. No offers of tenure. She couldn’t tell her family.

  There was simply nobody she wanted to tell.

  In any case, there were many, many implications to work out. She had to check and double-check her calculations. Most important, she had to suggest some method for experimental verification. At least, she told herself, she ought to. Plenty of theorists hadn’t the foggiest idea how to confirm their work. But Li came from an experimental background. She would feel that she’d failed herself if she didn’t come up with a testable hypothesis.

  I’ll have failed Raphael Merced, she thought. And he’s really the guy I’m trying to please now, she thought.

  She read and reread his final words in The Exiles’ Journey , the section called the “Merced Synthetics.”

  “It might be possible to arrange things in the past more to our liking. As a matter of fact, I do believe I’ve seen signs that somebody is already doing that. I only hope to God that whoever is doing so has discovered the human equivalent of that unique property of my little gravitons. Whoever you are, up there in the future, for goodness sake, make sure you use a bit of judgment.”

  Arrange things in the past more to our liking?

  Did his pronouncement have something to do with her déjà vu algorithm? Li knew intuitively that it must.

  Her father called her with news from the war. Li had almost completely insulated herself from what was happening in the larger world for the past couple of e-years. There was heavy fighting for the moons of Jupiter, with costly but steady advances for the Met forces. DIED forces were concentrating on Uranus’s moon. Pluto was being heavily fortified and readied as a base for massive troop deployment. Everyone expected a major invasion of the Neptune system any time now. Then, when victory was achieved there and when most of the outer planetary systems were finally under Met control, the reckoning would come to the cloudships out in the Oorts. Everybody knew that the cloudships were the money behind the insurrection, her father told her. The fremden rebels were merely their puppets. Some even claimed that entire fight was a product of the big Met banks fighting those of the outer system.

  “And how are you, Chimkin?” Li’s father asked her, using his pet name for her. “Your mother and I can barely remember how tall you are. All we ever see is your head and shoulders on the merci.”

  “I’m fine,” said Li. “I’m working really hard.”

  “Going to win the war for us, Chimkin?”

  “I’m doing my best, Papa. But I can’t really talk about any of that. And I’m kind of busy now, as a matter of fact…”

  “Of course you can’t. Of course you can’t. I don’t mean to keep you.” But that was exactly what he meant to do, Li thought. Hugo Singh leaned back in his chair at home, and his image before her—just a head-and- shoulders shot—tilted up so that Li could see up into his torso, had there been any real flesh and blood within the projection. Instead, there was an oval base to him, like an upturned marble bust or a tree trunk’s cross section. “It’s just that…well, there’s something I’ve been meaning to speak to you about,” he continued.

  “What is it, Papa?”

  “I’m worried about your health. We haven’t seen you in the full virtuality in months. And when I look at you in these quick calls, you don’t look well. You look pale, and your skin is getting too shiny. Have you been monitoring your internals at all?”

  “Not consciously, Papa.”

  “Well, you have to! You can’t trust some half-witted add-on function to do it for you. A good mind inside a sick body uses half its energy worrying at the walls.”

  This was one of her father’s favorite sayings. Li felt a pulse of warm nostalgia on hearing it, even though she still wasn’t sure what her father meant by the pronouncement.

  “I feel fine,” said Li, although the truth was, she had been a bit breathless lately. Her convert portion made a quick scan of her biology. Everything seemed to be churning along smoothly…except there was something odd about her left lung. Slightly reduced CO2 emission, as if her respiration weren’t working up to speed. Nothing life-threatening, or even dangerous, really. She mentally filed away the information for later consideration.

  “You don’t look fine. I want you to get more rest.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Promise me?”

  “Sure, Papa.”

  “And maybe you should think about getting a friend. A boyfriend, I mean. Someone to look after you a bit, since you’re not letting your mother and me keep an eye on your health and happiness.”

  Li had never told her parents about her affair with Techstock. Neither her mother’s Chinese nor her father’s Sikh heritage put much stock in secret affairs with married men.

  “I don’t mean to be distant, Papa. It’s just there are so many things…it’s hard to explain, and I’m not allowed to talk about most of it, anyway. But you and Mama know I love you, don’t you?”

  “Of course we know that,” said Singh. “But the truth is, Chimkin, there are some things that your mother and I need to talk to you about.”

  Her father’s face took on a sad expression that Li had seldom seen. She suddenly felt a tinge of foreboding. She’d been so wrapped up in her little miseries here on Mercury that she’d failed to notice a problem with her parents?

  “What is it, Papa?”

  “I don’t want to speak of it this way.” Hugo Singh leaned forward again and looked his daughter directly in the eyes. “Your mother and I wanted to see you in person.”

  “Is it Harold? Has he gotten in trouble again?”

  “No, your brother is fine. He’s got a job, even. He
’s working in Umberto Barrel at the silo.”

  “That’s good to hear. But, Papa, tell me. You and Mama aren’t having troubles are you?”

  “Not anything new. In fact, we’ve been spending a lot more time together lately.” Her father smiled ruefully, but the sadness still remained in his gaze. “Listen, Chimkin, I really don’t want to get into it here. I was feeling poorly a few months ago—”

  “ You got sick?” Her father had always enjoyed such good health. “What was wrong?”

  “I had problems with some of my…bodily functions.”

  “I see.”

  “My diagnostics said nothing was wrong, but it kept up, and I had some tests done.” Hugo Singh rubbed his forehead and tried to manage another smile. “It turns out I have something called ‘pellicle-induced systemic lupus erythematosus.’”

  The disease sounded familiar. Li tried to remember where she’d heard of it before. “Lupus?”

  “Well, yes. It’s caused by my pellicle, you see. The grist there is…well, it’s been a while since I’ve had an upgrade, and it never was that advanced to begin with.”

  “I could have helped you pay for an upgrade, Papa.”

  “I’m not that poor, Chimkin. It’s just I never thought I needed one.” Her father sighed. “But it turned out that I did. And now it’s a bit too late to worry about that.”

  Li felt a foreboding creep into her stomach. “What do you mean?”

  “My body is rejecting my pellicle, Chimkin. It’s an autoimmune response, they tell me. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to see you in full virtual. Pretty soon, I’m not going to be able to go into the virtuality at all. My grist is going wild—it will stop responding to any control, and I won’t be able to use it at all. Won’t even be integrated with my convert portion. I’ll just be an…aspect. A body. Imagine that. The problem is, my body is busy rejecting my kidneys right now.”