Finally she turned to look at me. 'Oh I don't mean like that. If you were an ordinary person, I could certainly have feelings. I haven't been faking, of course I haven't. I don't want you ever to think that I've been faking.'
'What do you mean?' I said, a horrible realisation starting to dawn on me. 'What are you talking about?'
'Of course I'm with the "police",' Klabier said. 'You surely have worked that out by now. This last week I wasn't with an old lover. We called together a number of irregulars and had a meeting about you. That's where I was.'
'The "police",' I said. Looking down I had a vertiginous sense that I was about to fall, and gripped the balustrade more firmly. I had quick-fire images of prison, of going back to what I had been before. And, after days of silence, my AI finally grumbled back into life.
There, it said. Now — I told you not to come with her.
'We thought it best,' she was saying, 'to let you come here. You seemed so keen to come here. We thought we'd let you go where you wanted, follow you, keep an eye on you. We wanted to find out what you were planning. But it hasn't happened, has it? Whatever you were expecting, hasn't happened.'
'The "police",' I said again.
She came a half-step closer. 'You're a unique person, you really are. I affiliated with the "police" because I was fascinated with you. There are so few people like you. Except in history texts, of course.'
'Klabier,' I said. There was so much I wanted to say to her, but only those two syllables came out.
'We hoped that by staying with you, we might get to the bottom of what you're involved in. You are involved in something, aren't you?'
'Klabier,' I said again. It was all I could think of to say.
'You could hardly have broken out of the jailstar without help.'
The word jailstar was like a stab at me, even though she didn't mean it to be.
'Please,' she said. 'Tell me. You can just tell me, can't you? We have had something special, something loving, haven't we? That must mean something to you. So tell me: who is it you are with? What are you planning? You talked of a job you had to do for somebody, that when it's over you'll be free. What is the job? Who is it for? Is it the Wheah?'
I closed my eyes, and opened my mouth, ready to say something. I didn't know what I was going to say. But instead of words, I started crying. It was so dreadful a shock. Klabier was 'police', and I was going to spend the rest of my life in a jail. I couldn't bear it.
Kill her, said my AI, hot and close in my ear. Kill her, kill her.
'Jasba,' she said, her voice full of infinite tenderness. 'Are you crying? Are you crying?'
She came and put her arms around me. I smelt her smell, felt the exquisite, sensual pressure of her flesh against mine. I reached out and put my arms around her back, and linked the fingers together. I was crying hard now, sobbing so much it shook my chest like hiccoughs. 'There there,' said Klabier, in my ear. 'Don't cry. Love, love, don't cry.'
I heaved with my arms. Maybe she sensed my muscles tensing, or maybe – knowing my history – she was simply expecting something along these lines, but immediately she lurched to my right and wriggled to try and get free. I hauled with all the might in my arms, but she was pulling in the other direction and I wasn't strong enough. My foot came round and hooked behind her calf, and with a swift jerk of the leg I was able to unbalance her. She started to sag backwards, and I took a step hard forward pushing her over and pivoting on one heel. Together we spun round and she struck the balustrade with her back, just below her shoulder blades. I pushed on, and drove her body physically up and over the balcony rail. She was grunting, and was slapping and punching at my face and head with her free hands. But I was possessed. With a final effort I twisted one last dragging push, and Klabier went over the edge. There was a shh sound, like fabric being swished over fabric, and she was gone.
I was panting hard now, and my face was wet (with my own blood, I discovered later, where she had broken my skin), but I leant forward to look down. I saw her body dwindle to nothing, and then stop. The thud came up to my ears a moment later. The dots on the pale square stopped their random movement; then they started creeping, all of them, towards the place of impact.
What are you standing here for? barked my AI. Come on, you can't wait here.
It was right. Still gasping, I hurried to the elevator. It took me to the ground in less time than it had taken Klabier to fall; but with a calculated inertial pattern that allowed for a deceleration that would not harm me. I stumbled out, coughing and gasping, and rushed away through the back entrance of the building.
Klabier, I told myself, would not be dead. She would be badly harmed, but the dotTech would save her life. It might take a few weeks to regain full health, but she would survive. I didn't know if that was true, though. Maybe a fall from such a height would make paste of human flesh. Maybe even the dotTech could not heal that.
Not to think of that.
Come on! snarled my AI. We must get away, away.
I hurried into another building and out the back; then down a series of stairways at thirty degree angles to one another. This brought me out on the main thoroughfare I had walked up and down with Klabier only a few hours previously. It was still busy.
On! Come on!
By the time I had made my way to the end of this my lungs were burning and my breath was short. There was a broad square, and ghostly in the dawning light was a rack of carts, each with their Haüd-machine pullers. I stumbled up to the nearest of these.
'Take me away from here,' I gasped.
'Certainly citizen,' said the machine. 'Would you care to climb aboard the cart?'
'No,' I said, breathing hard. 'No cart. I want you to carry me on your back.'
The machine hesitated; this was not a usual request. But it said, 'Very well citizen,' and let go of the cart rail.
The gel of the machine formed itself into a rugged board for me to clamber up. 'Yes,' I said, grasping it around the neck. 'That's it. Piggy-back me away. I want you to take me east along the coast for a kilometre.'
'Yes citizen.'
'Then I want you to turn inland and carry me through the mountains.'
'Through the mountains?'
'That's right. I want you to carry me south. As fast as you can – do you understand? As fast as you can.'
'Very well, citizen.'
The Haüd-machine sprouted long, spindly legs from its gel base, raising itself and me with it in the process. Those legs! They may have been three metres long. Then, in a series of enormous, loping strides it started away, running hard and fast and tireless towards the sea. In less than a minute it was at the head of the beach, and turning to the east. I clung on to the back of the machine, trying to regain my desperate, hurting breath.
Dawn came up, and the light strengthened. The Haüd-machine turned away from the sea, and galloped with its long paced strides up into the valleys and broken ground of the mountain range. And all the time I was saying to myself; she's not dead. The dotTech will not let her be dead. She's alive, she's alive.
Interlude
What was going through my head as I was carried over those sandstone peaks, through gullies and valleys, lulled by the regular lope of the Haüd-machine that bore me, under the swooning white clouds and the green sky? I close my eyes, dear stone, and I can remember it all. The scent of dry startwood, the crackling burr of insects, the wishing-hush of the wind in my ears.
'Might I ask, citizen,' my Haüd-machine enquired, with exemplary politeness, after several hours of travelling, 'where we are going?'
'To the south,' I said. 'To the south.'
'Do you have a more precise destination?'
'Elevator cities, in the south,' I said. 'I want a city from which I can get into orbit.'
'You could have done that from where you were, citizen.'
'No,' I said. The machine was not programmed to contradict me. We hurried on. 'In that case,' it said after a little while, 'might I suggest either Nu Hi
rsch Original, or Nu Hirsch Prime? They are both within a few hours travel from here.'
The landscape swept past me.
'Somewhere further away,' I gasped. I was really finding it difficult to breathe. My lungs seemed smaller than they needed to be to get air into them.
'Further away, citizen?' queried the Haüd-machine. Its enormous spindly legs were flashing bright green in the sunlight as they pounded beneath me. 'Nu Hirsch Capital?'
'Yes,' I said. I did not want to go to the most obvious place. 'Can you go faster?'
'It will be less comfortable for you, citizen.'
'Do it.'
Its stride increased. I was trying to work out what I should do; but every time I tried to think of that, images of Klabier's dwindling body kept occurring to me. Why had she made no sound? Wouldn't anybody scream, falling from that height, dotTech or no?
Just the fluttering of her smart fabric. Her body had become so tiny so very quickly. The wet sound of her impact had arrived a heartbeat later than the visual image. It was as if I had done this thing to myself, not to another person at all.
I know what you're thinking of, said my AI. I think I hated my AI at that moment. I started slapping my own head with the flat of my right hand, insane, trying to hurt the circuitry that was buried inside there.
'Citizen?' asked the Haüd-machine. 'Are you alright?'
That's not going to do any good you know, said the AI. You might as well stop doing that.
'I hate you,' I sobbed. 'I hate you.'
'Citizen?'
I'm sure she'll recover, you know. Not that you really care. Not in your heart, I think. You've just worked yourself into a state.
'You're inhuman!'
'I am an artificially constructed Haüd-machine,' said the machine, without breaking its stride. 'Your observation is correct.'
It wasn't I who pushed her off the balcony, said my AI levelly. You did that.
'You made me!'
No, I didn't.
'Your voice was in my head.'
We both know, I said nothing.
I cried for a little while, but the thing about tears, dear stone, is that they cry themselves out. It is a form of emotional evaporation. I don't think I wanted to stop crying; it felt as if I lacked the necessary depth of feeling. But I did cry myself out.
When I had stopped, I clung like a baby to the back of the machine. Even its plastic-enchipped gel felt comforting to me at that moment. I felt, if I am truthful, enormously sorry for myself.
You can't stay here, not on this world. You should never have come here in the first place. I did tell you not to come here, you know. If you think back you'll recall that I told you that.
'Shut up.'
One of us had to think practically. You should have gone straight to Nu Fallow, without the woman.
'Shut up.'
Don't be like that. None of this would have happened if you'd done what I advised.
'You're no AI,' I said, loudly, shouting my revelation into the empty air. We were passing through a dusty, sandy defile, I remember; and at the end of it my machine-carrier leapt up piled boulders like mighty steps, jarring the words as they came out of my mouth. 'You're some sort of Wheah device. You are a group of Wheah warriors, sitting somewhere nearby, shadowing me, speaking directly into my thoughts through some sort of transmitter device.'
If you consider, said the AI, you'll appreciate what an unlikely explanation of things that is.
'If you're not,' I challenged. 'Then who are you?'
Then my AI said something that brought me up short. It said: Who do I sound like?
I thought for a while, my body trembling in time to the footfalls of the Haüd-machine. 'Who do you sound like?' I repeated. But it was a way of ending the conversation between us for that day, because the answer was very clear to me, had been clear to me from the beginning. I didn't need to say it; the AI didn't need to say it either. It sounded like me. That was who it sounded like.
I went to Nu Hirsch Capital, and from there went into orbit. From there I flew to Tere and back to Nu Hirsch, and on to Schiiss. I was trying to throw them off the scent. It seemed pointless to try and avoid what I was to do. I had, I believed, tracked down the real murderer, the people who were operating through me. The question of motive still remained, but even with that – the why – I could guess something. War was an antique; its rules and laws were unfamiliar. But any student of history could point to any number of atrocities committed by warriors. It was what warriors did.
I had still not absolutely decided to do this murderous thing for the Wheah; but I – as secretly as I could, hoping that I was thinking with a non-vocalised part of my brain, and then burying the thought away from myself – resolved to go to Agifo3acca. My rendezvous with that Trench-obsessed Wheah had been long preordained; and I decided that I could find out from him what the Wheah were actually planning.
Just before the foam slewed up around me in orbit at Schiiss, my AI spoke again: You have the insect carapace, don't you?
Yes, I subvocalised sulkily.
Just check for me, would you?
I groped in my pocket, and there it was; a nodule of hard material, like plastic.
Childhood
1st
Dear Stone,
Did I tell you about my childhood? I can't remember. The time is so peculiarly straightened here – distorted in odd ways. I may begin repeating myself, doubling over my narrative. Would you become angry if. I did that?
How kind you are.
I come from a world named Terne. My world is mostly covered with an interconnecting series of oceans. There are two large polar oceans, and then a dense network of linked seas too sludgy really to deserve the name. The saltwater there is so densely inhabited by a variety of tendril-plant that in the fruiting season it was possible for a human being to walk over the water, providing they weren't too heavy. It was in spring, when the seas changed colour, as the flowering section of these plants emerged orange and red. The rest of the time the seas gloomed with dark purple, the native form of chlorophyll. The native vegetable was called Drüd, I remember; and it grew downwards in threads that could that could reach four or five hundred metres. The seawater itself sloshed through a sluggish maze of delta pathways as the Drüd flourished or died out, finding new pools of nutrient or draining the water of all minerals and starving itself to death. The landforms on this world – my homeworld, 'the World' we called it – were actually compacted masses of this same Drüd. Originally the whole world had been covered in ocean; then when portions of Drüd had formed tangled floating platforms, new strains of the plant had evolved. These grew denser and denser, clogging together into islands, and then into continents thousands of kilometres across. The pressure of growth killed the plants that made up the body of the land, compacting and mummifying them. Currents and the sheer weight of growth kneaded landmasses, throwing up low hills and chains of stumpy mountains. Then, from the composted relicts of the original plants, new plants found a rich soil. Tall grasses, billowing bushes and slender trees. The landscape of my home – all organic, genuine, none of it plastic or artificial like the confines of my prison.
Childhood.
The family structure on Terne was a complex matrix. This was traditional. Two mothers mixed genetic material with the help of their dotTech. This same nanotechnology produced three identical eggs from the plasm, and sperm from three different fathers fertilized them, the three foetuses being carried in the wombs of different women, or sometimes a single woman. The three resulting children were raised by the commune of five, or six, adults who had contributed to their production, unless they were all biologically born in the default gender female, in which case they were raised just by the two, or three, 'mothers'. It is complicated, I know.
My own family was a traditional one; I was born a daughter with a sister and a brother, and raised by a group of five through the first years of life. These are my earliest memories; playing in the sunshine with other chil
dren. Shepherding the large ants of Terne through heaped up alleyways of mud, prodding them with a long stick of Drüd to make them go in the right direction. These native ants were twelve-legged, with speckled cream-coloured bodies. We children would scoop out grooves in the mud with our thumbs and make the creatures run up and down them.
I remember walking near the seaside, and falling through a place where the crust of embedded plant matter was too thin to support me (we called such places quicksteps). I remember the gloopy, smelly chill of the water sliding all the way up around me as I slipped down, swallowing me whole. I remember opening my mouth to scream, and sucking in some of this salty water; and in the instant before the dotTech dampened the sensation I remember the horrible jab of pain that marked the entry of the water into my lungs. There were people with me – my sister, I think, and some others. They reached through the vegetation into the water and hauled me out, and the dotTech helped me expel the water painlessly enough, blurting it out of my mouth. But that instant of panic stayed with me.
My sister. I haven't thought of her for many years. Her name was Olev Gennaio astar-jo. I do not give her two family names, because she shares those with me.
On Terne it was considered a good thing that children remain children for several decades. Development was allowed to follow its infant trajectory, the default growth pattern, until the age of ten; then the nano-machines halted it. The dotTech manipulated pituation, fiddled with cellular development and stopped growth dead at that age. Stopped it dead – dead it certainly seemed to me. Easy to overstate, but it was a kind of death, a physical stasis.
The orthodoxy of my culture was that a child should live a dozen years as a boy and a dozen years as a girl, the better to be able to choose maleness or femaleness in adulthood, so as to base the choice on the experience of living in the gender rather than the sexual associations of it. Long-delayed adulthood! There were several other orthodoxies on that world – that an adult should commit to one gender or another and work through life with it (I know of other worlds where people shift between male and female with the regularity of moon cycles). Another was that sex was an adult affair only. Afterwards, when I was a full-grown man, I travelled to a world near Nu Hirsch where the opposite was true; children were given sexual prowess and possibility by the dotTech at seven and encouraged to explore erotic life to the near exclusion of everything else for several years. That culture found that human beings wearied of sexuality after so intense an exposure at so early an age, and mostly turned their adult energies to other things. On my world the view was completely otherwise. Children were kept sexually immature until they were forty or even older; only then did the dotTech take them through accelerated puberty and usher them into the world of sexual intercourse.
Adam Roberts - Stone(2002) Page 19
