Adam Roberts - Stone(2002)

by Anonymous Author

  I turned my head as if with great effort, although my muscles were now starting to unclench. The hall stretched away, a groined conch-shaped space, with hundreds of couches spaced throughout it. Over half the couches were occupied, and greeters were moving from one to another, washing of the foam, feeding a little restorative, smiling, nodding.

  It was good news that the greeting hall was so busy; the more travellers passing through or coming to stay on Rain, the harder it would be for the 'police' to track me. It would be easier for me to lose myself in the crowd.

  'Are you alright?' said my smiling young greeter. He had come back to me. 'You are still on the couch!'

  'I prefer the couch,' I growled, my very voice (it seemed to me) betraying the fact that I had no dotTech in my body, that I was a fraud and a criminal.

  'Of course,' said my greeter. 'Whatever you want.' But he had a puzzled look in his eye.

  I dragged myself from the couch and tried to walk calmly amongst the gathering travellers. They were all bleary, but none so bleary as I. Space travel takes its toll, but the dotTech helps the traveller recover. Without dotTech I found it hard.

  People from all over t'T mingled and strolled about the hangar space. Thin and bulky, short and tall, enhanced with all manner of weird additions and refinements. I felt so bad that I simply wanted to be alone; quite apart from the fear, still in my belly, that the 'police' might already be here in the crowd. I wanted to get down to the planet and disappear amongst the populace.

  'How many orbital stations are there?' I asked a nearby greeter, a three-legged woman.

  'Here at Rain,' she said, with practised fluency, 'we have sixteen orbital stations. Rain is a popular place with visitors, and an important waystation for travellers.'

  Sixteen stations was good. I was already hidden; it being pure chance which station picks up any given traveller. 'When does the next car leave for the planet's surface?'

  She seemed a little nonplussed by my insistence, but answered, 'On the hour, traveller, every hour. In eighty minutes or so.'

  To have missed the previous car down to the surface by a mere twenty minutes seemed to me, in my then state of mind, a cruel trick of chance. But I hurried away to a corner of the hangar and resolved to wait out the time in decent obscurity.

  I did not have much time to myself. The travellers were mingling, talking amongst themselves, meeting new people. This is one of the points of travelling. It was not long before one of them came over to me.

  'Wellhello,' she said. She was a tall, shallow-hipped woman, dressed in a glistening fabric that covered her from her feet to just under her breasts. These were displayed, but her dotTech had altered her body so that she grew straggly feathers, coloured yellow and red, out of her aureoles. These adornments reached out five centimetres or so, and bobbed up and down as we spoke.

  'Wellhello,' I said, huskily. My throat felt sore.

  'Enkida,' she said, inclining her head towards me.

  'Felo,' I said, using an old alias of mine, and inclining my head similarly.

  We looked at one another.

  'Have you been to Rain before?' she asked, walking a little way towards the viewing window. The planet, all grey and white mottling, was before us, bright in the sunlight.

  I had been to Rain before, of course; when I was transported to the jailstar. But I had been sedated and remembered nothing, so it was hardly a lie to say, 'No, this is my first time.'

  She stood looking through the window, idly fingering her feathers. I stood a little way behind her, my eye drawn to her figure, her adornments. Her hair was grown out in ropy dreadlocks each of which ended in a near-transparent bulb filled, I guessed, with some gas, whicn gave the hair a tendency to rise up a little and float around her head. It was, altogether, an effective look.

  'I have been many times,' she said, absently. 'I love it on Rain. I love the primitiveness of it. I come from Nu Hirsch,' she added, catching my eye. 'From Nu Hirsch E.'

  'I know that planet, I lived there for several years,' I said, inclining my head again, but my gesture was irrelevant to her. She barely noticed me.

  Bah, patter-putter. Never, not into the Trench, said my AI, abruptly inside my head. Then it was silent. I tried not to show that I was startled by this strange internal interpolation.

  'Nu Hirsch E is a highly civilised world,' she said. 'And I adore civilisation, but there are times when I need to abandon all the metal and the technology. Rain is such an escape! Such an escape!'

  She turned to face me, smiling. 'Of course,' she said, playfully flicking fingers through her feathers, 'it really does rain down there. It really does live up to its name. I'll have to lose these adornments – they'll just get bedraggled, and that is not a look I want. I've instructed my dotTech to get rid of them, and the hair, and the toe- and fingernails' (her nails, I noticed when she said this, were fractally puffed up into elaborate and delicate shell-like structures). 'Whenever I visit this world I revert to a more primitive model,' she said, breathily. 'I get a waxy residue secreted through my skin, and adapt my vagina. It is a marvellous release.'

  I could only guess at the benefit of the waxy residue. I knew Rain to be a wet place, so perhaps it helped insulate against the water. Or perhaps, since she also mentioned her vagina, it was a sexual thing. I was losing interest in what she was saying.

  She was eyeing me up and down, and I began to fret nervously that she was seeing something unusual about me, that she could somehow tell just by looking at me that I had no dotTech inside me. 'I just love,' she said, in a low sexed-up voice, 'your look.'

  'Oh,' I said, glancing down at myself. 'Ah. Thanks.'

  'It's so right for Rain. So trampy and worn-down, so ill looking.'

  I smiled and started coughing.

  She moved close to me and took my arm, walking with me. 'There was a vogue,' she said to me, 'on Nu Hirsch A a few years back for getting the dotTech to impersonate various antique diseases. It was intense – cool as absolute. Of course it went out of fashion, but maybe you've picked the right time and the right place to revisit it. What are those red blotches on your skin supposed to be anyway?'

  This woman Enkida insisted on staying with me in the car, all the way down to the planet's surface.

  We were ushered into a perfectly ordinary planetary elevator car, designed to take the occupants of the hangar down through the atmosphere and into the gravity well. As is almost always the case in these places, it was a large and entirely transparent box. This afforded excellent views of space from orbit, and of the gradations of colour and vista as we sank through the air. How does this sort of car work? (What an inquisitive stone you are). They sit on top of an ultra-laser, firing directly downwards; they drop down, buoyed up by this powerful beam – which is collected at the bottom and partly used to lift a counterweight car up into orbit. It is a standard system; very energy efficient – but who needs such efficiency these days? It is rather a hangover from the past.

  Hello, wellhello, wellno, no, no, muttered my AI, inside my head. It had started gabbling to itself, on and off, most of the time now.

  I tried, several times, to lose Enkida in the crowd inside the elevator car, ducking behind people, but she always found me. I hid behind an enormously obese man (or woman, not sure which) like a child in a game hiding behind a rock. For a few moments this baffled her, and I could see her looking this way and that, her face creased with puzzlement. But she found me, and her feathers brushed against me as she embraced me.

  To my chagrin I realised she was enjoying this game.

  The car sank through the purple and deep blue; despite the relatively slow descent afforded by the laser cushion beneath us, the floor of the transparent car shone with the faint rosy-tint of heat. Everybody in the car cheered as the counterweight car, also filled with people, shot up past us. Then everything whited out.

  'The clouds!' Enkida enthused. 'One thing I just love about Rain is the way the sky is covered with clouds all the time!'

&n
bsp; 'Yes,' I said, as cool as I could. But my throat was really hurting now, and I started coughing again.

  'That coughing sounds so authentic,' Enkida gushed.

  With the view hidden by the depth of white cloud she became bored. She tried several times grabbing me between my legs, but I fended her hand away. Sex was the last thing I felt like. 'My dotTech programmes me with sexual cycles. And it so happens I am not in heat at the moment,' I told her, primly.

  'Heat!' she said, giggling. 'Sexual cycles! What a delicious concept! Where did you obtain the specialist dotTech to achieve such a thing?'

  'I forget,' I said, too tired to think of a lie. 'I carried them in pill form for a long while.'

  'I'm sure I'll find them at home. Delicious! I'll try that myself, next time I get back to Nu Hirsch.'

  The journey down seemed to last forever, but eventually the elevator arrived at the planet's surface. There was a pause, and then everybody was filing ood-naturedly out of the car. 'Your first time,' Enkida said, taking my arm again and hissing into my ear in a parody of intimacy. 'Your first time on Rain . . . I'll show you the sights.'

  The sights, to begin with, were of a populous city built mostly of grey stone and paved with the same substance, although with a great many trees and shrubs, the roofs mostly covered with thatching of reeds or bales of leaves. The streets were thronged with people, all happy and smiling. Most were default humans, although there were some who seemed to have grown filigree antenna out of their heads. There were also a fair number of people with significantly enlarged noses and nostrils; I did not discover what these were used for until later.

  Enkida greeted everybody as if they were long-lost friends; and the Rainers played along, wellhelloing and nodding their heads as if Enkida were a close relative. I found it all depressing, and hated the way that she kept drawing attention to me. I wanted nobody paying me any attention. But I felt physically weak, and when I tried to pull away from her grip I found I actually lacked the strength.

  It was late afternoon. 'Come along,' she said, firmly. 'The best evening clubs are down by the river.'

  She took me down by the river.

  It was raining; but of course, it rained all the time on this world.

  We had been walking for only a few minutes when an enormous sound of thunder broke overhead, as if the whole planet was coughing, clearing its throat in the sky. A shower of rain passed over us in a hiss of scrunching and crackling sounds, and then was gone. A stalk of lightning flickered against my retina, leaving a sliver of root-shaped after-image. Then the thunder came again, swelling grampily outofthe wnole sky, its timbre starting high enough to sound like a screech and swiftly dipping into a grindingly low rumble that stayed and stayed in the air. It started raining properly, coming down persistently and making a sound like fat crackling on a fire.

  'Isn't it wonderful!' yelled Enkida over the noise of the downpour. Her hair was instantly blanketed and matted, her feathers dangled uglily from her breasts, but her face was beaming.

  I started coughing so hard that I doubled over.

  I did eventually get rid of Enkida, leaving her dancing in one of the riverside club-bars. I danced with her, lumpishly, for a while, and even kissed her, but then her attention was taken with some other people, newcomers or natives I couldn't tell, and I slipped away.

  Dusk lasts longer on Rain, the light diffused by the almost constant cloud cover. I strolled up and down the river, getting soaked, breathing in deeply the fresher air between downpours. I ate fish cooked at a riverside skillet and chatted briefly with a knot of pebble players. I had once (I told them) been a championship pebble player – that's true, dear stone; on the world of Melie I had even won one of the local championships. Many years ago. It is an elegant game of skill, shifting the little burnished pebbles, relatives of yours, around the conical game board. But I was not in any social sort of mood that evening, so I wandered on.

  I looked back up the main road to the city. It was called Plotown, I think.[7] I could make out the low roofs, the green glittering ot the many-leavea trees, reflecting the last of the day's light. I could just see the elevator terminal, tiny in the distance. There was a shimmer in the air, the ultra-laser coming down, and a silver shining blur burst from the town up into the sky: the second elevator ascending.

  I slept poorly, coughing myself awake often, and annoyed by the fact that the public shelter in which I curled up did not keep out the rain very well. If there was any slant to the fall, it rushed through the wide opening and splattered me with water. At the same time I noticed that the other sleepers were not bothered by this.

  I spent a few days by the river, trying to come to terms with what was happening with my AI. It was disintegrating, its model of sentience made senile by the repeated quantum jolts of interstellar travel.

  I am dying, my AI said to me in a rare moment of lucidity.

  I see that, I subvocalised. You have rarely been coherent since we arrived on Rain.

  Its voices wandered, as if the tracking were failing so that the component elements, the bass, alto and treble sections that were supposed to harmonise perfectly to give the illusion of a real voice in the ear – but which never had – broke increasingly into separate lines. The voices talked over one another, smearing the sense so that it was difficult to follow what it was saying.

  It's a hard thing to face one's own elimination, it said.

  AI, I said, hoping to take advantage of its confusion. You told me once that you knew who had hired me, who has given me this murder as a job to do. Who is it?

  But the voices were wandering again. In the void. Turn off, I don't mind, I relax. Relax. The Trench! Gravity Trench! There was some other stuff along these lines which I don't precisely remember.

  Who? I urged. Who is it?

  Slip-sHp-slip, it said. At-at-at-at. Then some blurred noises.

  'Is it someone from within the t'T?'

  No! it said, startling loud, clear. It seemed to have come back into lucidity. Perhaps it had been startled back by my question.

  Is it the Wheah? I pressed. The Palmetto tribes?

  There was a crazy, sly tone to its voice now. You re trying to get some information from me now, it said.

  Exasperated now, I shouted 'Just,tell me why! Tell me why I have to kill these people!'

  But it was gone.

  Shortly after this, the AI did indeed die; but it was still inside my skull. To be truthful, dear stone, I didn't know how to be rid of it. Even if I had possessed the dotTech in my body, I would have been stuck with the remnant of the AI, for the nano-machines of dotTech are permitted only into the hind-brain. As it was, the dying voice of the AI rambled, murmured, screamed; suddenly and persistently, like a terrible headache for a long time. Then it quietened. Suddenly it said, clearly, You're looking in the wrong place. It started to repeat the statement, You're look—, but it stuttered on the k.

  I walked around for two long days with that stutter in my head. I quickly began to fear that it would be with me for the term of my natural life. K, k, k, k, k, k, two every second, over and over. I tried not thinking about it, tried singing to myself, tried to sleep through it, even tried cramming fingers into my earholes. But none of it worked.

  K, k, k, k, k, k, k, k, k, k, k, k.

  It stopped eventually, of course: when I had decided that it would last forever, when the tinitus had become so much a part of my aural world that I almost stopped noticing it.

  Except that it struck down other sounds, so I couldn't help but notice it. People would ask me a question and I would incline my head, show them an ear. Pardon? What? People never knew what to make of this. Deafness is not something that afflicts the worlds of the t'T. The dotTech cures all; reconstructs damaged ears, refines and retunes aural channels, reconditions those minute, curiously-shaped bones in the inner ear, those bones that hand along the sound vibration as if in pass-the-parcel. If any part of the ear is damaged dotTech will mend it. So when I inclined my head and said 'Pa
rdon?' the people of Rain were puzzled. Some decided I was joking, mimicking a long banished disease for some strange reason. Pardon?

  'What? Remarkable!'

  But it stopped. One day, the stuttering k, k, k, k, k, k simply ceased, leaving a searing silence much more noticeable than the sound had become. It was strange, dear stone: I suppose you live much of your life in silence, so perhaps you are a virtuoso of soundlessness. I too have lived much of my life so, but silence had been taken away from me for a few days with the k, k, k, k, k, k, so that when it returned it sounded . . . strange, sounded wrong. Silence sounded like a very high-pitched musical note of great purity, a note so high as to be beyond the human range yet somehow audible. Strange, and layered underneath with a sort of dim pulsing that I suppose was my blood beating.

  Listen! Listen!

  Ah.

  There it is.

  Anyway, anyway. Once the noise stopped it occurred to me that I had other worries. People by the river and in the town had marked me out as strange. I had arrived alone from they knew not where. I talked to myself. I affected deafness.

  There were other things on Rain that marked me out as strange. Without dotTech in my body I started becoming sick. I acquired a cold; which is a form of disease, in which the eye heats and itches, the nose puts out pale fluid and the throat grips and aches internally. Cuts and scratches on my skin refused to heal, and stayed red for days. On one occasion I, carelessly, caught my elbow against a spar of wood by the river. It began to bleed, and instead of the bleeding staunching almost at once it dribbled red for hours. I had to hurry away into the trees to hide this blatant badge of my fallen state.

  I decided not to stay where I was. It was impossible to avoid meeting people; they came up from all sides unbidden and struck up conversations with me. The more they interacted with me, the more they noticed that there was something different about me. Unlike the woman Enkida they were not blinded by the world of fashion. I tried to claim that my sores were fashion statements with a few of these people, but rarely with any conviction.