Adam Roberts - Stone(2002)

by Anonymous Author

  'Have you ever met a Wheah?' I put in. Everybody looked at me. 'I have,' I continued.

  'And?'

  I was going to say, And he never mentioned anything about an invasion. But that, I realised, would be a stupid thing to say. Of course he wouldn't mention an invasion. So I said nothing, and the debate circled around. What should the t'T do? There seemed to be two opinions, optimists and militarists. The militarists wanted the worlds of the t'T to adopt a new fashion (that was the phrase they used, because people such as us can really only think in terms of fashion and vogue and modes) – a war fashion. That way, we would be prepared when the Palmetto fireships, or the Wheah flotilla, drifted into t'T space. Others mocked this ('Prepared? what does that word even mean?'). Most of the people in the group were 'optimists', people who believed so deeply in the t'T ability to adapt and endure that the notion of 'preparation' seemed a bizarre archaism.

  'If they come,' said one person, leaning back and sipping at a glass of eroin.[15] 'If they come, then we'll deal with them. We are, after all, stronger than them. We'll adapt as we need to, take on whichever fashion is appropriate.'

  There was general agreement with this position. As the only person there bereft of dotTech, I suppose I felt less invulnerable than the rest of them. 'Are you certain?' I said.

  Faces turned towards me.

  'What?'

  'How can we be certain?' I said.

  'What,' said Ditle, a chuckle in his voice – this thought had clearly popped into his head as an example of the most absurd feature of a long-vanished way of life – 'do you think they could kill us?'

  There was a silence, as people digested this strange notion. Then a woman squatting by the wall started laughing, a slow pulse of noise. Soon everybody joined her.

  I laughed too, because I realised how ridiculous this very notion was. What if the Wheah were 'invading' – the plain and basic fact of things was that the peoples of the t'T were indeed stronger. Simply, they were. That was all. If I were to push a knife into Agifo3acca's chest, he would die fairly quickly. But I had pushed the knife into Enkida's very heart, and cut through the gristle and stuffing of her neck, and carried her head away and she still didn't die. As I was sitting in that room I had a sudden, vivid picture of Enkida – head still attached, laughing, dancing, flecks of water splashing up around her legs. Then I remembered the gut-sensations I experienced as I killed her, and I felt as if I wanted to vomit. I put my hand to my mouth (the others assumed it was to stop myself laughing) and willed my stomach to calmness.

  This group and its politics: sometimes I would sit observing them as if from a million miles away, they seemed so remote from me. Or I from them. Yet there were ways that even I was drawn into the network of humanity, however hard (hard like you, o stone) that was.

  6th

  Dear Stone,

  Later, after I had drunk a little embre, the discussion disintegrated. Several people went to bed together; others wandered out in search of more social stimulation. Klabier came over and joined me on the couch. She curled her body in against mine. 'I liked your stance,' she said, close in at my ear, 'in the debate.'

  'You did?'

  'It's nice to shake discussion up a little. That's what politics ought to be about. That's the way it used to be, you know.'

  'We are strong,' I said. 'The peoples of the t'T. That part is right, I think.'

  'Your scars,' said Klabier, putting her tiny finger-ends at each point on my face where the keloid skin marked it.

  'Yes,' I said.

  She slid her hand in at the collar of my shirt, found the fabric-switch and it loosened. Delicately, slowly, she began undoing the cloth. It bagged further and further out until the collar line lay around my belly. 'They go all over your body,' she said, touching each scar as if pressing them all like little buttons. 'Dot, dot, dot. Here a line, there a dot.'

  'Yes,' I said.

  Dear stone, how am I to explain to you the shared human sexual moment? To make a creature such as yourself understand the way human beings jab and rub one another. It is a physical, physiological, hormonal, glandular, pleasurable, psychological, symbolic, self-abasing, self-celebratory sort of business. Imagine yourself rattled with another stone, a smooth marble pebble of white milky coloration – imagine that, you and this other pebble cupped between two hands and rattled and shaken together, so that you clack and bounce off one another. That's something like it. Then imagine you and this fellow-stone were tossed together into the furnace, so hot a furnace that your brittly-tough layer of oxidised skin melts away, and the igneous rock-substance out of which you are made goes gluey and runs and deliquesces in the heat; as your lava mixes and flows with the lava of your fellow stone. That is something like it too.

  Or put it another way; a more sociological way. Sex is one of the key recreations in the worlds of t'T. Most fashions come and go, but nearly all of them are oriented around this business of the human sexual encounter: this is what Utopia is like. Take away the stresses and labour of human existence, the illness and fear, the need to do anything in particular rather than any other thing, and one thing is left – the sexual encounter.

  That's how it is.

  'You're a girl,' said Klabier to me, as she unhooked me out of my clothing. She had undone the fabric to its furthest extent, and now it was nothing more than a thin hoop of cord. 'I wondered whether you were male or female; it isn't obvious from outside. But you are a girl.'

  'Don't feel much like a girl,' I said, my head glittery inside with the rush of the embre.

  'No?'

  'I was a man for so long before that, I'd forgotten what it's like having a woman's perspective.'

  'How long a boy?' asked Klabier, pulling off her own clothing.

  'Years and years,' I said, smiling to myself. 'Years and years and years.'

  'So,' said Klabier, putting her hands behind my head. 'And how long have you been a girl?'

  'Oh,' I said. I found it hard to remember; how long had I been in prison? 'Years and years.'

  'Years and years and years as a boy,' said Klabier, kissing me. 'But only years and years as a girl.'

  'Something like that.'

  As we started to make love I was visited with a startling, upsetting memory of Enkida. I saw the blood start out of the wound in her chest and then stop almost immediately, staunched by the miniature action of the dotTech. I heard again the slightly squelchy rasping noise of my knife cutting through her vertebrae. My viscera chilled, and I felt a ghastly lurching tug of nausea. Then, with a sharp pain to my breast, I realised that Klabier was biting me, and I was swept through on a rush of sudden intense physical experience. Everything went away. You see, stone, I had not had this sexual connection with another human being for such a long time; at first it felt weird, invasive and rather unsettling. But with a swerve inside my head, the act suddenly reignited all the emotional and physical splendour of sex, and I got lost inside it.

  It takes me longer to reach orgasm than has been usual, without the dotTech in my body to help along the physiological part of the process.

  As I came for the second time – the AI, wilfully and awkwardly, spoke into my brain: We can't spend much more time lolling about here you know. It didn't blot the orgasm, but it took some of the edge off it.

  7th

  Dear Stone,

  After this I spent several days with Klabier, in the first flush of 'love'. I think lacking the dotTech meant that I was more susceptible to the vagaries of this 'love' than most ordinary people are – the strange combinations of hormones that scuttle through the metabolism. It is all atavistic stuff, and many people get their dotTech to edit it or dampen it down altogether. But without the nano-machines in my bloodstream I was swept away by the full chaotic gush of it.

  One day, she took me hand in hand out on the cables of the crevasse webbing. 'I'm a little wary,' I said. 'It's a long way to fall.' I was thinking: without dotTech it's a fall that would probably kill me. But Klabier had the blithe carele
ssness of the nano-protected. 'It'll be fine,' she said, and she hopped onto the nearest cable. She was beautiful; wearing her clothes in two tight bands around hips and shoulders. Her limbs were as slender and as life-filled as vegetable stalks growing from the ground, her joints fluid, her neck dusted with tiny brown hairs lined up like iron filings in a magnetic field, her lumpy cranium covered in a bristly fuzz that caught the light in a thousand different ways depending on how she turned and twisted. Her body was largely default, although she had got the dotTech to create nipples that could extend to nearly a metre, or retract completely into her chest; she told me these nipples were rich in sensitive nerve cells.

  Now, of course, they were retracted; and I followed her on to the cable, reaching up awkwardly to steady myself by resting a hand against a wire that was strung higher up.

  Klabier scurried along this cable, and hopped on to another one that cut across at an angle. I started to follow her, moving out from the ledge so that there was nothing but blackness below me, a blank sketched over with a mish-mash of lines that were the lower cables. I started wheezing.

  If you fall, said my AI in my head, loud.

  'I know,' I said.

  So what are you doing here?

  'I'm curious.'

  Infatuated.

  'You talk to yourself,' said Klabier. 'I had a sister who did that. I like it . . . I find it endearing.'

  'Great,' I said, my face flushing with the thrill of the compliment.

  'And look – you got your dotTech to make you blush!'

  'Just for you,' I said.

  As I walked along the main cable, thick as my own torso, I supported myself by passing hand-over-hand and not letting go of a higher, thinner guide. 'For balance,' I said to Klabier as she looked at me. She stood, feet together and a look of amazement in her eyes.

  Then she turned and scampered along the main cable, jumping and climbing a cross-webbed wall of ropes. Trying to free myself from the fear, I hurried my shuffling up. Then I crawled up to where the knitted cables provided a climbable surface. But Klabier was away, wriggling and clambering through a dense matrix of lines.

  'Klabier,' I called.

  She's gone, said the AI. You could go back to the ledge now.

  But I ignored the voice. I passed through a small crowd of perhaps a dozen people, sitting like birds on a branch, each one of them to a different cable. They were throwing a ball with a feathery tail that span and fluttered through the air.

  'Don't let me get in the way of your game,' I said, panting and ascending further. 'Don't mind me. Passing through.'

  Higher there were planks laid from cable to cable; umbrella-roofs, pieces of machinery hooked from lines, stretches of fabric like flags or banners dangling down. This was a more heavily inhabited portion of the crevasse-community.

  'Wellhello,' said somebody.

  'Not so well perhaps,' said somebody else.

  By this stage I was sweating with the exertion of the climb and the sweat got in my eyes, so I couldn't see who was accosting me.

  'Badhello,' said the first voice, as if to an enemy. Then I heard the two of them laughing.

  I blinked my eyes, and briefly saw two tall people with bone and hair growths in the shape of letters all over their bodies – OMO over their faces, Es front and mirror-reversed on their chests, Ts and As and Ws on their arms and legs.

  'Wellhello,' I said, pointedly. They were no enemies of mine. 'I'm just passing through.'

  'You don't live here,' said the first.

  But I had caught sight of Klabier, dangling with an arm looped around a cable. Rather than clamber directly past these two unfriendly types I detoured, ran along and diagonally crossed upwards. I reached a cable that ran in a straight line towards her and started along it. It thrummed and vibrated under my feet like a guitar string; other people must have been walking along it at some other point on its length.

  'I wondered if you'd make it,' said Klabier, laughing and kissing me. 'Look.'

  The position she had reached, by a freak of the near-random arrangement of cables, overlooked a sort of shaft through the webbing, right down into the darkness at the bottom of the crevasse. She was leaning right out over this abyss. I wrapped both arms around a cable to anchor myself firmly, and then tipped my head forward to take in the view.

  'You're extremely comfortable with heights,' I said, once I had got my breath back.

  'I grew up on a bird-world,' she said. 'Bird-world?'

  'There are half a dozen or so, away spinwards. Part of the t'T, up in the Sporades. On my world, on the continents where I grew up, there were mostly just thousands of kilometres of flat plains and steppes. Great pylons, built up into the sky. We adapted our arms, lengthened them and grew feathers; flying – or gliding, to be more precise – was an important part of growing up.'

  'So you're not scared of heights,' I said.

  'Look!' she said, pointing. 'Sometimes people come here to dive down.'

  I looked around, and realised that people were taking up positions all around this gap or shaft down through the cabling. On all sides individuals, couples in one another's arms, groups laughing and bonding; all were assembling.

  'Dive down?' I said. 'Why?'

  'It's two-thirds of a kilometres down,' said Klabier, which didn't immediately answer my question. She reached over and put one arm around my chest, pushing her face against mine. 'It's a sport thing,' she said. 'They dive down. They're timed from the minute they go, and have to make their way back up unaided.'

  I shuddered, with fear at the prospect of falling that distance into those black, cold waters, with unnamed things sliding through them. But Klabier's giggle suggested she thought I was shivering with desire.

  'Come, lover,' she said. 'We'll watch, and then we can go somewhere and make love.'

  The diver – a man, naked – was standing, balancing with his legs apart on a single cable. He stretched his arms in front of his body, and I noticed thick black claws on the end of his fingers, and jutting out of his elbows as well. 'Are there limits to the alterations people can make to their own bodies?' I asked. 'I mean if they wish to take part in this sport?'

  'Oh yes,' said Klabier, nuzzling my under-chin.[16] 'I think so. There's a whole chip full of rules, if you wanted to check them. Why – do you fancy doing some diving?'

  'No,' I said, firmly, shuddering again. Klabier giggled again, and held me tighter.

  People, in their various cable perches, were cheering and hooting. The diver raised his arms over his head and instantly everything went silent. He stood for a moment, and then toppled forward, keeping himself absolutely stiff and straight. He upended and dropped quickly away. I could hear the slight swish of sound as he passed through the air, and then he was gone into the darkness. The cheering broke out again, wild and unrestrained.

  Klabier kissed me, and together we threaded our way through the taut, enveloping lines of the webbing. We found a place where three lots of cable ran at slight angle to one another in such a way as to create a sort of cradle. There I lay back, gripping firmly, and Klabier climbed on top of me. My attention was unable to disengage itself from the possibility of falling, however, so I did not enjoy the sex as much as I might. She did, though, twittering and sighing to herself in pleasure. I stared directly up, through the criss-crossing lines of cable that went from wall to wall. In parts it looked like a holographical diagram of 3D space with gridlines marked out into infinity, except that these gridlines were slant, tangled, flying off in strange directions.

  After Klabier had finished, I hugged her hard with one hand, keeping the other firmly gripping onto a cable. 'I love you,' I told her. 'I love you.'

  She giggled at this, hugged me back. 'Silly,' she said.

  We made our way back, smiling, and spent the rest of the day drinking in the bar.

  That night Klabier pushed out her nipples until they were about twenty centimetres long.[17] They were hard, thumb-thick. She put one, then the other, inside me, and ki
ssed and bit at the bumps and scars on my belly. I didn't much enjoy the insertion, but the touch of her tongue was exquisite. I realised that she had had her tongue adjusted by her dotTech also; it was covered in little warty extrusions that seemed to be able to give out tiny shocks, like electricity, but which were probably (I never asked) just miniature thorns darting out to prick and stimulate.

  In the morning, as she went out on the webbing again, I yielded to my AI's bickering, keeping off the wires and instead striding out along the ledge. I grabbed some morning yam, hot and sweaty with yam-flavour, from a stand, and ate it as I went.

  I shall do what you want of me, I subvocalised.

  Finally, said my AI, almost sighing inside my head.

  'Where am I going to?' I asked.

  There's a man lives by himself in a rock-spire not far from Mant-aspiir.[18] This last named site was a famous, immensely tall and slender pillar of rock.

  I climbed to the top of the canyon, and waited for an hour or so. Finally a bird-car was ready to go, carrying people to the chain of mountains of which Mant-aspiir was a part. I took a seat near the back along with a dozen or so individuals. The car pushed itself up into air and hovered for a moment, before extending its spade-shaped 'wings' and rowing itself through the sky. Below me I could see the canyon, clotted with its tendrils of cable linking cliff-face to cliff-face. The sun was up, and the eastern mountains tossed knife-blade shadows over the intervening landscape. We moved slowly, pulsingly, through the air in that direction. Crevasse after crevasse opened beneath us; some heavily populated, some with only a few cables like clothes-lines strung from wall to wall. The timbre of rock shifted from dark red, through a maroon to a sort of blue, speckled with blotches of something far paler that almost glowed in the light.

  'They say it's possible to climb to the very top of Mant-aspiir,' said the person sitting on my left, a corpulent individual of indeterminate gender with a bushy moustache growing where the eyebrows more usually are, and fleshy tendrils hanging from his chin like a catfish.