Adam Roberts - Stone(2002)

by Anonymous Author

  'Really?' I said.

  'Not saying I'll try,' said this individual. Mant-aspiir was so tall that its higher reaches were, more or less, out of the atmosphere.

  S/he said something more, but my attention was distracted by the godlike sense of above-ness that comes with flight.[19] It is one of humanity's most fundamental, most atavistic sensations – the sheer elation of being in the air over one's fellows. I think many people in t'T have forgotten, or no longer have access to, the power of the sensation. But I, statistical freak, throwback that I was, looked down on the tiny dots moving over the ground, or playing in the webbing, and felt a lightness in my heart. People were shrunken to the scale of insects, turned almost into nano-creatures themselves. People playing a throw-ball game in the webbing of one crevasse looked like insects wriggling in a spider's net. The occasional buildings, swim-pools or other features built on the bulges of rock that separated crevasses (and that were generally too brief and stumpy to be called plateaus) had the miniature purity of models.

  The bird-car docked at Mant-aspiir, and its passengers tumbled out laughing, some hugging newly met friends. One couple, who had spent the whole journey chattering to one another, constantly trumping one another's words with higher pitched interjections until they fell into one another's arms laughing, went straight off towards a wadi of green bushes; evidently to make love. I stepped off the car and looked around me, and was struck by the clarity of the Utopia of t'T, the amazing simplicity and beauty of the culture. As if the key to individual happiness was really just as banal as that: a body freed from disease and all the fears and shocks our ancestors endured; a mind devoted to relishing the difference of other human encounters, as wealthy or poor as you want to be, as widely travelled or as stay-at-home as you want to be, as stimulated or static as you want to be. That this was enough. All these people looked to me like magical people.

  I'll pause over this a minute, stone, to try and make it clear to you, because I'm not sure it is even really clear to me. These people stepping off the car in the sunlight that day, looked to me like people from a magical dream. I had had that sensation before, since escaping from my jail: a sick human wandering through a crowd of superhumans, super-strong and super-disease-resistant. I had felt small and inadequate, and therefore set against the world, ready to commit the crime I had been employed to commit. Ready to kill off these people, to draw myself a little closer to them. But as I looked about me now, in the sunshine, I saw them as if they were not people so much as works of art.

  Come along, said my AI, impatient. We've already lost too much time.

  'And why are you,' I said aloud, 'in such a hurry?' A woman turned her head to look at me, thinking I had addressed her, but turned away when it was clear I had not done so.

  You'll have all the time in your life to fritter away on Narcissus after you have done what you agreed to do.

  I made my way along a well-trodden path. It branched and I followed my AI's direction, up a series of flattened levels, to some steps. Then I walked the spine of a narrow ridge, the path littered with stones; distant relatives of yours, in all their knuckly, clutching, egg-like loveliness. By this point I was alone; except, as ever, for the relentless twittering of my AI in my head.

  That one, it said, directing my eyes towards a sharply angled spire of rock. It jutted straight off the back of the rock formations like a huge tapering finger, a serrated and attenuated dorsal fin from the back of the world itself. Hurry up, climb it, get to the top.

  I looked around; the landscape was interrupted all about me with similar narrow knife-like peaks of rock, jutting at various angles to the vertical, of various heights and thicknesses. The pale blue rocks were scaled with dashes of white. The sun was high in the sky. Behind me, the enormous over-towering of Mant-aspiir itself was pooling a mess of shadow at its base. I rotated myself slowly on one heel, drawing my body round with the other foot, to take in the splendour of this vista.

  Come along, no time for sightseeing, said my AI.

  'I no longer believe in you,' I told it. 'You are a figment of my imagination, not a proper AI at all.'

  Figment! it replied, in a tone of disgust.

  'You're the result of psychological trauma, deriving from many years of dotTech deprivation and imprisonment. I imagine you, hallucinate you. You're one part of my mind talking to another part.'

  Perhaps I should not bother to believe in you, said the AI.

  'That's exactly what I am saying!' I said. 'No AI talks in those sorts of terms. I dream you. That's it. That's it.'

  It wasn't I who killed that woman on Rain, said the AI, sly now. You did that. There were no voices in your head then.

  'That was a different,' I started saying. Then the words dried in my mouth. Different how? I thought of Enkida, laughing and dancing. I thought of the sense-drained expression of her severed head. Her flesh, made empty of awareness as rocks, or stones, or trees.

  Besides, my AI went on, wheedling now. If I am a figment of your imagination, how do I know to direct us to this particular spire of rock? It pulled my eyes round, like a magnet, so that I was staring at the peak once again. The quality of the stone's blue colour deepened as it rose.

  'I wish you wouldn't,' I said. 'Please disengage control from my motor cortex.'

  No, that can't happen I'm afraid, it replied. The pathways are hard-wired into your brain tissue now. Built up of plasmetals and extraconductors.

  'You don't have to use them,' I pointed out.

  I do. That is how I am programmed.

  'To turn me into an automaton!'

  No, I can't do that. My control is limited, and I'm often fighting your own conscious impulses as well as your autonomous nervous system even for that. Better that you do what you agreed to do, and then you can be free.

  'Once I've done the killing,' I said. 'Will you leave my head then?' I was worried by what it had said about being 'hard-wired' in there.

  According to you, it replied, tart, I don't exist anyway. How can something leave unless it exists first? If it doesn't exist, it isn't there in the first place in order to be able to leave.

  I decided not to get involved in discussing this sort of metaphysics; instead I started whistling a tune that I recalled from my childhood, as loudly as I could.

  I climbed the cut-stone stairway on the back of this forty-five-degree angled promontory of rock. There were no handholds, and as I got higher the prospect of falling (without dotTech in my body to preserve me after impact) became more and more alarming to me. I went up and up; the air thinned and stretched with a chill. The ground slipped away below me, and the sky seemed to come closer. But eventually I reached a wide-spaced opening, a sort of doorway, rimmed with carefully embedded scarlet tiles.

  'Wellhello,' I called inside. Go in, urged the AI. Go on.

  'This is the man you want me to meet? He's in here?' Not really a man.

  For some reason I hovered on the threshold, unwilling to go further inside. 'A woman,' I said, gripping the jamb of this doorway and looking down the thread-like avenue of stairs I had just climbed dropping away from me. In the time it had taken me to climb up the sun had shuffled a little further round the sky, and the shadows on the broken ground at the foot of the rock spires were more shaped.

  'A woman, then.'

  Not really a woman either.

  'Androgene.'

  Not that neither.

  'Riddles.'

  Go in, go in.

  I tipped my head right back, and looked along the remaining reach of the rock spire. It seemed to be vanishing for miles and miles, the perspective effect exaggerated by the tapering of the edifice itself. The rock's pale blue freckled with white contrasted the sky's deeper blue.

  I stepped through the door. It was shadowy inside, and my feet scraped through a crunching and rattling carpet of debris. Ahead of me was a serried display of cloth banners dangling from the ceiling.

  'This individual,' I hissed to my AI. 'She, he, it, has something
to help me. Something I need?'

  There, said the AI, directing my eyes over to a figure sitting in a sling-backed, long-necked chair.

  I stepped towards him; but the floor really was ankle deep in a rustling layer of dry shells, or plastic fragments, or torn up card, or something. Walking produced a swooshing, dragging noise; more wading than walking.

  'What is this?' I asked, irritable, looking down, and pushing aside the banners that dangled from the ceiling. It was quite dark inside this space.

  Tag-matteo is the individual's name. You are walking through a floor-full of insect carapaces.

  'What?'

  A famous collection, as it happens. Tag collected the shells and carapaces from a million insects. Once upon a time[20] he catalogued them as a form of art, but latterly he took to simply littering the floor with them. I'm not sure if that was art as well, or something else.

  I reached the couch-chair in which this Tag-matteo was sitting. 'I've never heard of him,' I said aloud.

  I have. If I'm nothing more than a voice in your head, then you must have heard of him, or I wouldn't have either. Do you see?

  'I'm not going to play those sorts of games with you, AI. Who is this Tag-matteo?'

  Somebody who was a man, and a woman, and for a time an androgene, but not now, for bless your heart, he's dead.

  Dead. I was going to kick the word back out, as a retort, but I found I couldn't say it; but enough of the intention to speak it registered in my vocal cortex, because the AI answered, almost mockingly.

  Are you shocked? You?

  'How did he die?'

  He grew old. He died. Not even the miraculous dotTech can keep a person alive forever.

  'Why is he sitting here? Shouldn't the body have been disposed of – I don't even know what they do with the dead on this world.'

  Sometimes they do what they have done here. He asked for this, to be left alone to mummify. The air up here is dry and cold, and mummification has taken place.

  'And?'

  And he'll sit here for many years. Maybe centuries. There are many rooms like this on this world, places carved out by individuals who requested to be left there after their death. I can tell you how old he was when he died, if you like.

  I was leaning forward, peering at the flesh. I don't know what I expected, dear stone. I think something leathery, something creased and plasticky looking. But his skin was perfectly smooth, if a little drawn. His eyes were closed, his mouth shut, and his nose pinched in around the bridge. But he still had his hair, growing in blue tufts all over his ochre skin. His arms were draped over the shape of the armrests, his palms closed over the ends and his fingers (he had nine fingers on each hand I noticed) dangling down. The fabric of his one-piece had been loosened a little, and the neckline sagged to show off a hairless but equally taut and smooth collarbone. It occurred to me then that, possibly, the dotTech stayed in his body long enough to help it mummify swiftly and cleanly, before oozing out of his pores or dropping from his nose to drift away on the wind. But I didn't know.

  'How old?' I asked.

  Nine hundred and ninety. And I can tell you how long he has sat here, in this chair, undisturbed, if you want to know that.

  'Did the dotTech help him mummify?'

  Why do you ask?

  'I suppose I'm curious. They're programmed, aren't they, to preserve our health. To keep human beings alive for as long as possible and healthy for as long as possible. Doesn't their responsibility for us end with death? Helping somebody mummify themselves might be beyond their programming.'

  It's hard, said the AI in a curious tone, to comprehend the nano-machines, you know. It's not really accurate to talk about them being programmed'. That makes them sound like binary processors, computers on a small scale, and they're not. We don't really understand them, is the truth. They are their own thing. They live their own lives, solving problems, reproducing.

  Something in this piqued me. 'We made them,' I pointed out. 'Humanity I mean. Come to think of it, we made you – designed you and built you, and all the AIs. We did the same with the dotTech, fashioned these nano-machines to swim in our bloodstream and preserve us.'

  You're right.

  'So why are you talking like that?'

  Like what?

  'Playing games again,' I said, standing up straight. 'You were going to tell me how long he has sat here like this?'

  Sixty-nine years, give or take.

  'Hey. That's a long time.'

  I know lots of things about him. I could tell you about his first love affair. About his time on Branda. He travelled into the realms of the Wheah – how few people in t'T can boast as much? He had an insatiable appetite for finding things out, something unusual amongst the t'T I'm sorry to say. He lived as an experimental artist for forty years, on a commune on Variationen. His speciality was arranging thousands of tiny particles in space, nudging each one into position with a pinpoint laser, making complex patterns that looked like holograms but were actual material things. Very painstaking. He parented four children; all of them still alive, although the first he parented is now in his nine-hundreds. Or maybe her nine-hundreds, I'm not sure about that.

  'You don't know everything about him then.'

  Oh, but I know so much. I know that he developed a persistent sexual peccadillo, a desire to have partners bite at his feet, his toes and his feet, during sex. He always started the day with a pellet of sugar. He used to love sneezing, you know? He got his dotTech to leave his nasal mucus membrane for half an hour a day, and then he would sniff up dusty irritants and sneeze and sneeze. He loved the sensation.

  Sneezing! Dear stone, since the dotTech had abandoned me I had sneezed thousands of times. Personally, I hated the experience; the shuddering loss of control.

  He spent many years studying the Gravity Trench. Many years. He was fascinated by that phenomenon.

  'Like Agifo3acca,' I said.

  Yes.

  'How do you know all these things about this person?' I asked. 'How can you possibly know any of this stuff – know how to direct me to this place, to . . .'

  I'll tell you something else, the AI said, cutting across me. Something nobody knows about except – well, except you when I tell you. A secret.

  What sort of secret?

  A programme. A very special thing. He thought he died and took the secret into death with him. But it's in there. It was directing my eyes, and moving my hand out, in its eagerness. I was bending forward.

  'Stop!' I said, and froze.

  A moment passed.

  Sorry, said the AI. I guess I got carried away. But if you relax, I'll just direct your hand to the right place. You'll never find it otherwise.

  I breathed in. 'OK.'

  My hand moved again, rummaged through the carpet of old insect parts. The shells, carapaces, glinting deep-blue fragments, dusty black hemispheres, arcs of chitin. They felt crackly, fragile, against my hand. The AI withdrew my hand from the mass and I stood up again.

  'What's this?'

  Take it to the light. Have a look.

  I went over to the doorway, and stepped outside into the sunshine. In my hand was a tiny thorax, its iridescence green, mottled with dust. How, I subvocalised, did you know – out of all those millions of insect remains – that this was the thing I had to pick up?

  I just knew.

  What is it?

  Information. Great wealth. Take it with you. Pocket it away, take it to Nu Fallow when you go.

  What sort of information?

  I can't tell you.

  'Don't be stupid!' I burst out. 'You bring me to this planet – direct me to this location upon it – give me the life history of this person – pick out this packet of information processing from amongst millions of discarded insect carapaces. You can do all this, and yet you cannot tell me a simple thing about what the information actually is?'

  It will build you something.

  'It's a construction programme?'

  A complex a
nd brilliant one.

  'Like the ones that people use to build themselves spaceships and space-platforms when they travel to an uninhabited system?'

  Something like that.

  'So what will it build me? A spaceship?'

  I cannot tell you.

  Don't be ridiculous. Don't be so ridiculous.

  Listen to me Ae. This is how it has to be. I can't tell you anything more about it, only that it is supremely important. I can, however, promise you this: there will come a time when I can tell you – after you've completed the job you've been hired to do. After that I'll explain the whole thing, including the mystery of why I wasn't able to explain before. Alright?

  I sat on the ledge formed by the stairs outside Tag-matteo's room – his mausoleum, more precisely. The thin, bright air was fresh against my face. I had before me a splendid view over the up-down landscape of rock and pathways steepled with dozens of spires.

  'I'll tell you, AI,' I said. 'I am disinclined to allow this taking over of my motor reflexes. Do you see?'

  We should be getting going. Take a bird-car back to Ru-denetter, and then into orbit.

  'What is this all about?'

  What do you mean?

  'This crime. I need to know more, AI. You know what I need to know. There is much more here, isn't there? Much more that you know and that you're not telling me.'

  This conversation can't go anywhere.

  'I want to know who has employed me. Do you see? I want to know why they want me to murder the population of a whole planet.' The archaic word murder seemed to be picked up by a sudden breeze that whispered it back at me.

  Probably best not to think about it in those terms, said the AI. That'll only make it harder for you to do the job.

  'I want to know why it has to be the planet you've chosen for me. What is it about that particular place? I want to know about the cultures that live there, about the peoples I am going to destroy.'

  That will make it harder too. Best not to think about them as people at all. Think of it as a job to do.

  'Tell me.'

  Can't.

  'Won't?'

  Listen, Ae. You must believe me – must trust me. If there were any way I could tell you these things you want to know, I would do it. But there is a crucial reason why I cannot. Of course you want to know what this reason is, and . . . not trying to outrage you, but. . . I simply cannot tell you. But eventually I will tell you everything. You must complete the charge, that's the first thing. Then I'll tell you everything.