She felt as if something had been stolen from her.
Her mother squeezed her hand. “Come on. Let’s find a new room for you to play in.”
* * *
Every day was unique. Every day Lieserl spent in a new place, with new people.
The world glowed with sunlight. Shining points trailed endlessly across the sky: low-orbit habitats and comet nuclei, tethered for power and fuel.
People walked through a sea of information, with access to the Virtual libraries available anywhere in the world at a subvocalized command. Lieserl learned quickly. She read about her parents. They were scientists, studying the Sun. They weren’t alone; there were many people, huge resources, devoted to the Sun.
In the libraries there was a lot of material about the Sun, little of which she could follow. But she sensed some common threads.
Once, people had taken the Sun for granted. No longer. Now—for some reason—they feared it.
On the ninth day Lieserl studied herself in a Virtual holomirror. She had the image turn around, so she could see the shape of her skull, the lie of her hair. There was still some childish softness in her face, she thought, but the woman inside her was emerging already, as if her childhood was a receding tide. She would look like her mother—Phillida—in the strong-nosed set of her face, her large, vulnerable eyes; but she would have the sandy colouring of her father, George.
Lieserl looked about nine years old. But she was just nine days old.
She bade the Virtual break up; it shattered into a million tiny images of her face which drifted away like flies in the sunlit air.
Phillida and George were fine parents, she thought. They spent their time away from her working through technical papers—which scrolled through the air like falling leaves—and exploring elaborate, onion-ring Virtual models of stars. Although they were both clearly busy they gave themselves to her without hesitation. She moved in a happy world of smiles, sympathy and support.
Her parents loved her unreservedly. But that wasn’t always enough.
She started to come up with more complicated, detailed questions. Like, what was the mechanism by which she was growing so rapidly? She didn’t seem to eat more than the other children she encountered; what could be fueling her absurd growth rates?
How did she know so much? She’d been born self-aware, with even the rudiments of language in her head. The Virtuals she interacted with in the classrooms were fun, and she always seemed to learn something new; but she absorbed no more than scraps of knowledge through them compared to the feast of insight with which she awoke each morning.
What had taught her, in the womb? What was teaching her now?
She had no answers. But perhaps—somehow—it was all connected with this strange, global obsession with the Sun. She remembered her childish fantasy—that she might be like a flower, straining up too quickly to the Sun. Maybe, she wondered now, there was some grain of truth in that insight.
The strange little family had worked up some simple, homely rituals together. Lieserl’s favourite was the game, each evening, of snakes and ladders. George brought home an old set—a real board made of card, and wooden counters. Already Lieserl was too old for the game; but she loved the company of her parents, her father’s elaborate jokes, the simple challenge of the game, the feel of the worn, antique counters.
Phillida showed her how to use Virtuals to produce her own game boards. Her first efforts, on her eleventh day, were plain, neat forms, little more than copies of the commercial boards she’d seen. But she soon began to experiment. She drew a huge board of a million squares, which covered a whole room—she could walk through the board, a planar sheet of light at about waist height. She crammed the board with intricate, curling snakes, vast ladders, vibrantly glowing squares—detail piled on detail.
The next morning she walked with eagerness to the room where she’d built her board—and was immediately disappointed. Her efforts seemed pale, static, derivative—obviously the work of a child, despite the assistance of the Virtual software.
She wiped the board clean, leaving a grid of pale squares floating in the air. Then she started to populate it again—but this time with animated half-human snakes, slithering “ladders” of a hundred forms. She’d learned to access the Virtual libraries, and she plundered the art and history of a hundred centuries to populate her board.
Of course it was no longer possible to play games on the board, but that didn’t matter. The board was the thing, a little world in itself. She withdrew a little from her parents, spending long hours in deep searches through the libraries. She gave up her classes. Her parents didn’t seem to mind; they came to speak to her regularly, and showed an interest in her projects, and respected her privacy.
The board kept her interest the next day. But now she evolved elaborate games, dividing the board into countries and empires with arbitrary bands of glowing light. Armies of ladder-folk joined with legions of snakes in crude reproductions of the great events of human history.
She watched the symbols flicker across the Virtual board, shimmering, coalescing; she dictated lengthy chronicles of the histories of her imaginary countries.
By the end of the day, though, she was starting to grow more interested in the history texts she was plundering than in her own elaborations on them. She went to bed, eager for the next morning to come.
* * *
She awoke in darkness, doubled in agony.
She called for light, which flooded the room, sourceless. She sat up in bed.
Blood spotted the sheets. She screamed.
* * *
Phillida sat with her, cradling her head. Lieserl pressed herself against her mother’s warmth, trying to still her trembling.
“I think it’s time you asked me your questions.”
Lieserl sniffed. “What questions?”
“The ones you’ve carried around with you since the moment you were born.” Phillida smiled. “I could see it in your eyes, even at the moment. You poor thing … to be burdened with so much awareness. I’m sorry, Lieserl.”
Lieserl pulled away. Suddenly she felt cold, vulnerable.
“Tell me why you’re sorry,” she said at last.
“You’re my daughter.” Phillida placed her hands on Lieserl’s shoulders and pushed her face close; Lieserl could feel the warmth of her breath, and the soft room light caught the grey in her mother’s blonde hair, making it seem to shine. “Never forget that. You’re as human as I am. But—” She hesitated.
“But what?”
“But you’re being—engineered.”
Nanobots swarmed through Lieserl’s body, Phillida said. They plated calcium over her bones, stimulated the generation of new cells, force-growing her body like some absurd sunflower—they even implanted memories, artificial learning, directly into her cortex.
Lieserl felt like scraping at her skin, gouging out this artificial infection. “Why? Why did you let this be done to me?”
Phillida pulled her close, but Lieserl stayed stiff, resisting mutely. Phillida buried her face in Lieserl’s hair; Lieserl felt the soft weight of her mother’s cheek on the crown of her head. “Not yet,” Phillida said. “Not yet. A few more days, my love. That’s all…”
Phillida’s cheeks grew warmer, as if she was crying, silently, into her daughter’s hair.
* * *
Lieserl returned to her snakes and ladders board. She found herself looking on her creation with affection, but also nostalgic sadness; she felt distant from this elaborate, slightly obsessive concoction.
Already she’d outgrown it.
She walked into the middle of the sparkling board and bade the Sun, a foot wide, rise out from the centre of her body. Light swamped the board, shattering it.
She wasn’t the only adolescent who had constructed fantasy worlds like this. She read about the Brontës, in their lonely parsonage in the north of England, and their elaborate shared world of kings and princes and empires. And she read about the histor
y of the humble game of snakes and ladders. The game had come from India, where it was a morality teaching aid called Moksha-Patamu. There were twelve vices and four virtues, and the objective was to get to Nirvana. It was easier to fail than to succeed … The British in the 19th century had adopted it as an instructional guide for children called Kismet; Lieserl stared at images of claustrophobic boards, forbidding snakes. Thirteen snakes and eight ladders showed children that if they were good and obedient their life would be rewarded.
But by a few decades later the game had lost its moral subtexts. Lieserl found images from the early 20th century of a sad-looking little clown; he slithered haplessly down snakes and heroically clambered up ladders. Lieserl stared at him, trying to understand the appeal of his baggy trousers, walking cane and little moustache.
The game, with its charm and simplicity, had survived through the 20 centuries which had worn away since the death of that forgotten clown.
She grew interested in the numbers embedded in the various versions of the game. The twelve-to-four ratio of Moksha-Patamu clearly made it a harder game to win than Kismet’s thirteen-to-eight—but how much harder?
She began to draw new boards in the air. But these boards were abstractions—clean, colourless, little more than sketches. She ran through high-speed simulated games, studying their outcomes. She experimented with ratios of snakes to ladders, with their placement. Phillida sat with her and introduced her to combinatorial mathematics, the theory of games—to different forms of wonder.
On her 15th day she tired of her own company and started to attend classes again. She found the perceptions of others a refreshing counterpoint to her own high-speed learning.
The world seemed to open up around her like a flower; it was a world full of sunlight, of endless avenues of information, of stimulating people.
She read up on nanobots.
Body cells were programmed to commit suicide. A cell itself manufactured enzymes which cut its DNA into neat pieces, and quietly closed down. The suicide of cells was a guard against uncontrolled growth—tumours—and a tool to sculpt the developing body: in the womb, the withering of unwanted cells carved fingers and toes from blunt tissue buds.
Death was the default of a cell. Chemical signals were sent by the body, to instruct cells to remain alive.
The nanotechnological manipulation of this process made immortality simple. It also made the manufacture of a Lieserl simple.
Lieserl studied this, scratching absently at her inhabited, engineered arms. She still didn’t know why.
With a boy called Matthew, from her class, she took a trip away from the House—without her parents for the first time. They rode a flitter to the shore where she’d played as a child, twelve days earlier. She found the broken pier where she’d discovered mussels. The place seemed less vivid—less magical—and she felt a sad nostalgia for the loss of the freshness of her childish senses.
But there were other compensations. Her body was strong, lithe, and the sunlight was like warm oil on her skin. She ran and swam, relishing the sparkle of the ozone-laden air in her lungs. She and Matthew mock-wrestled and chased in the surf, clambering over each other like young apes—like children, she thought, but not quite with complete innocence …
As sunset approached they allowed the flitter to return them to the House. They agreed to meet the next day, perhaps take another trip somewhere. Matthew kissed her lightly, on the lips, as they parted.
That night she could barely sleep. She lay in the dark of her room, the scent of salt still strong in her nostrils, the image of Matthew alive in her mind. Her body seemed to pulse with hot blood, with its endless, continuing growth.
The next day—her 16th—Lieserl rose quickly. She’d never felt so alive; her skin still glowed from the salt and sunlight of the shore, and there was a hot tension inside her, an ache deep in her belly, a tightness.
When she reached the flitter bay at the front of the House, Matthew was waiting for her. His back was turned, the low sunlight causing the fine hairs at the base of his neck to glow.
He turned to face her.
He reached out to her, uncertainly, then allowed his hands to drop to his sides. He didn’t seem to know what to say; his posture changed, subtly, his shoulders slumping slightly; before her eyes he was becoming shy of her.
She was taller than him. Visibly older. She became abruptly aware of the still-childlike roundness of his face, the awkwardness of his manner. The thought of touching him—the memory of her feverish dreams during the night—seemed absurd, impossibly adolescent.
She felt the muscles in her neck tighten; she felt as if she must scream. Matthew seemed to recede from her, as if she was viewing him through a tunnel.
Once again the labouring nanobots—the damned, unceasing nanotechnological infection of her body—had taken away part of her life.
This time, though, it was too much to bear.
* * *
“Why? Why?” She wanted to scream abuse at her mother—to hurt her.
Phillida had never looked so old. Her skin seemed drawn tight across the bones of her face, the lines etched deep. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Believe me. When we—George and I—volunteered for this programme, we knew it would be painful. But we never dreamed how much. Neither of us had children before. Perhaps if we had, we’d have been able to anticipate how this would feel.”
“I’m a freak—an absurd experiment,” Lieserl shouted. “A construct. Why did you make me human? Why not some insentient animal? Why not a Virtual?”
“Oh, you had to be human. As human as possible…” Phillida seemed to come to a decision. “I’d hoped to give you a few more days of—life, normality—before it had to end. You seemed to be finding some happiness—”
“In fragments,” Lieserl said bitterly. “This is no life, Phillida. It’s grotesque.”
“I know. I’m sorry, my love. Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Outside. To the garden. I want to show you something.”
Suspicious, hostile, Lieserl allowed her mother to take her hand; but she made her fingers lie lifeless, cold in Phillida’s warm grasp.
It was mid-morning now. The Sun’s light flooded the garden; flowers—white and yellow—strained up towards the sky.
Lieserl looked around; the garden was empty. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
Phillida, solemnly, pointed upwards.
Lieserl tilted back her head, shading her eyes to block out the light. The sky was a searing-blue dome, marked only by a high vapour trail and the lights of habitats.
“No.” Gently, Phillida pulled Lieserl’s hand down from her face, and, cupping her chin, tipped her face flower-like towards the Sun.
The star’s light seemed to fill her head. Dazzled, she dropped her eyes, stared at Phillida through a haze of blurred, streaked retinal images.
The Sun. Of course …
* * *
The capcom said, Damn it, Lieserl, you’re going to have to respond properly. Things are difficult enough without—
“I know. I’m sorry. How are you feeling, anyway?”
Me? I’m fine. But that’s hardly the point, is it? Now come on, Lieserl, the team here are getting on my back; let’s run through the tests.
“You mean I’m not down here to enjoy myself?”
The capcom, in his safe habitat far beyond the protosphere, didn’t respond.
“Yeah. The tests. Okay, electromagnetic first.” She adjusted her sensorium. “I’m plunged into darkness,” she said dryly. “There’s very little free radiation at any frequency—perhaps an X-ray glow from the protosphere; it looks a little like a late evening sky. And—”
We know the systems are functioning. I need to know what you see, what you feel.
“What I feel?”
She spread her arms and sailed backwards through the “air” of the cavern. The huge convective cells buffeted and merged like living things, whales in this insubstantial sea of gas.
“I see convection fountains,” she said. “A cave full of them.”
She rolled over onto her belly, so that she was gliding face-down, surveying the plasma sea below her. She opened her eyes, changing her mode of perception. The convective honeycomb faded into the background of her senses, and the magnetic flux tubes came into prominence, solidifying out of the air; beyond them the convective pattern was a sketchy framework, overlaid. The tubes were each a hundred yards broad, channels cutting through the air; they were thousands of miles long, and they filled the air around her, all the way down to the plasma sea.
Lieserl dipped into a tube; she felt the tingle of enhanced magnetic strength. Its walls rushed past her, curving gracefully. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “I’m inside a flux tube. It’s an immense tunnel; it’s like a fairground ride. I could follow this path all the way round the Sun.”
Maybe. I don’t know if we need the poetry, Lieserl. The capcom hesitated, and when he spoke again he sounded severely encouraging, as if he’d been instructed to be nice to her. We’re glad you’re feeling—ah—happy in yourself, Lieserl.
“My new self. Maybe. Well, it was an improvement on the old; you have to admit that.”
Yes. I want you to think back to the downloading. Can you do that?
“The downloading? Why?”
Come on, Lieserl. It’s another test, obviously.
“A test of what?”
Your trace functions. We want to know if—
“My trace functions. You mean my memory.”
… Yes. He had the grace to sound embarrassed. Think back, Lieserl. Can you remember?
Downloading …
* * *
It was her 90th day, her 90th physical-year. She was impossibly frail—unable even to walk, or feed herself, or clean herself.
They’d taken her to a habitat close to the Sun. They’d almost left the download too late; they’d had one scare when an infection had somehow got through to her and settled into her lungs, nearly killing her.
She wanted to die.
Physically she was the oldest human in the System. She felt as if she were underwater: she could barely feel, or taste, or see anything, as if she was encased in some deadening, viscous fluid. And she knew her mind was failing.
The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Page 79
