Asimov's SF, September 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Maria picked up the pieces of the broken pot, already regretting her temper. Alessandro had always done his best; it was no fault of his if angels could surpass him. Yet he should at least listen to her.

  “They are angels,” she said. “They neither eat nor drink, nor fill chamberpots, nor show their face. They hide their light behind robes and veils."

  “Oh, you mean the easterners.” Alessandro smiled. “They explained why they wear all that—it's one of their customs. They're staying in the new wing, aren't they?"

  Maria nodded.

  “Then come along, and I'll show you something."

  Alessandro strode out of the room, and Maria followed him upstairs. To her surprise, he stepped through the servants’ door, into the narrow back corridor. Maria's eyes took a moment to adjust to the dim evening light coming through windows at each end of the long passage.

  She bumped into Alessandro when he stopped in the middle of the corridor. He fumbled along the wall, and swore under his breath. After a long minute, she saw him remove a slice of stone. He pointed to the gap, and made way for her to look.

  The block of stone had been hollowed out into a spyhole. Maria pressed her face to the wall and gazed through the tiny gap. She saw the visitors’ apartment beyond, the familiar chairs and fireplace. The occupants were putting things in smooth grey cases—a spyglass, some books, a small sculpture of Christ.

  And then she saw that the angels, alone in their room, had removed their veils. Each deformed face, blotched green and blue, had only a pit for a nose, and no chin at all. The brows bulged forward, with narrow slits for eyes.

  Leprosy, thought Maria as she staggered away. She had never seen a leper, but had heard rumors of the hideous deformity it caused. Yet how could angels be diseased?

  “They're not angels,” she whispered.

  “Of course not,” said Alessandro. “But I'm curious to see whether the Chinese are really as yellow as they say.” He stepped to the spyhole.

  Moments later he fell back, his mouth hanging open and his face ashen with shock. “My God, they're not human. They're devils!” The slice of stone clattered from his hand to the floor. “Demons in the Palace! Go and fetch Father Niccolo."

  Maria didn't move. Alessandro pushed her, saying, “Hurry up! We're in mortal peril of our souls. We need Father Niccolo to cast the demons out."

  Maria's thoughts whirled. The creatures behind the wall were hideous, but were they demons? Could devils touch a statue of Jesus? Could demons heal her daughter?

  If Father Niccolo cast them out, would her daughter lose the speech they had given?

  In that moment, Maria knew she didn't care whether the visitors were angels or demons or Chinese. When Alessandro shoved her again, she pushed back with such force that he fell to the floor.

  “Nobody is fetching Niccolo,” she said, her voice husky with rage. “These foreigners healed my daughter. Niccolo wouldn't even pray for her. He said she was mute because she was born in sin—as if I could insist on marrying every drunken ambassador who grabbed my ass. As if a servant can say no!"

  Alessandro said, “Do you want your daughter to grow up a witch? If devils touched her—"

  “Better a witch who can talk than a servant who can't. And do you suddenly believe in witchcraft, after you sneered at toads and spells?"

  “I believe in what I see—and I see demons."

  The doctor began to struggle to his feet. Maria pushed him back down. They scuffled, Maria trying to prevent him crawling past. But Alessandro was far stronger. He landed a painful blow in her stomach, and inched down the corridor.

  Maria grew desperate. She kicked Alessandro, then scrabbled about on the floor, searching for the fallen slice of stone.

  Alessandro stood up and rushed past her. Maria ran after him. As he opened the door to the stairway, she bludgeoned his head with the stone.

  He fell like a broken puppet. Maria felt a stab of guilt, and she shoved her hand under his shirt, relieved to find his heart still beating. Panting with effort, she dragged Alessandro across the corridor into one of the empty staterooms, where no one would discover him for a while.

  Then Maria, sick with worry, ran down to the basement. She found Cristina lying peacefully in bed. Her daughter smiled. The red spot on her throat had faded to a dull flush.

  Was that a witch's mark? If they were demons, what else might they have done?

  Maria tore the shift from her daughter's body. Cristina squirmed in protest. “Lie still,” said Maria, “and let me look at you."

  In the faint glow of the few lamps in the servants’ quarters, Maria examined every inch of Cristina's flesh. Rumor said that Satan gave witches an extra nipple to feed their familiars. But Cristina still had only the two she was born with. Maria recognized every mole and freckle on her daughter's skin. Other than the mark on her throat—which looked like any ordinary bruise—nothing had changed.

  Maria sighed with relief. “Lord, forgive me for doubting you,” she said.

  Cristina put her shift back on. She gazed inquiringly at her mother, but Maria didn't want to say what she had feared. Why frighten the child with silly talk of demons?

  And yet—the thought wouldn't leave her mind. She remembered all the sermons she'd heard, all the talk of how devils could appear and tempt people into sin. Maybe they'd tempted Galileo into sin, and made the Church frown upon him.

  She had to find out who'd cured her daughter. She had to know whether it was a tainted gift.

  Maria returned to the spyhole upstairs. There she saw that the visitors had finished packing, and had donned their veils once more. They picked up their grey cases and left the apartment.

  She walked to the servants’ door, opened it a crack, and watched the robed figures descend the main stairs. She followed them at a cautious distance. To her surprise, they didn't head for any of the front doors that led onto the courtyard. Instead, they departed the Palace by the back, and entered the gardens.

  Maria kept pace behind them. The evening had darkened into night, and low clouds covered the city. The strangers carried a lamp that showed them the path. Maria had rarely entered the gardens—chambermaids had no duties there, and servants were not allowed to loiter—so she watched where the figures walked, and tried to follow. Terraced lawns and flowerbeds descended the hillside. Maria stumbled down steps that she could barely see. The figures drew further ahead.

  Their lamp dimmed. Ahead, Maria heard the sound of leaves rustling in the wind. The trees obscured her view. She rushed forward, trying to catch up, and fell painfully as she tripped over something in the dark. She had lost the path. The black night had swallowed her up.

  Maria climbed to her feet, and trod more slowly and carefully. But when she left the clump of trees, she saw only distant yellow specks, the lamps and candles in houses at the edge of the city. Somewhere down there lay the Porta Romana, the southern gate of Florence.

  She couldn't see the robed visitors who had cured her daughter.

  Maria sat down to rest on the grass, damp with evening dew. She felt no desire to rush back to the Palace. Indeed, after beating Alessandro senseless, there was no way she could return to her old life. Servants could not strike their masters like that.

  But all over Florence, chamberpots needed emptying—all across Tuscany and the world. And when Cristina could speak, the promise of a better life lay somewhere ahead.

  After a while, Maria saw a dazzling white light south of the city. It rose into the air, slowly at first. Then the bright starry light rushed up through the clouds and disappeared into the heavens.

  Maria smiled. “So they were angels,” she said.

  Copyright © 2006 Ian Creasey

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  POST- SINGULAR

  by Rudy Rucker

  Rudy Rucker's most recent nonfiction book was about the meaning of computation: The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality
, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy; the paperback is out from Thunder's Mouth Press this fall. The author's latest SF novel is Mathematicians in Love, which gives life to some of his ideas about computation, not to mention parallel worlds, and toppling an evil government. It will be out from Tor Books later in the year. Rudy is currently working on a novel, Postsingular, which uses the current tale, as well as “Chu and the Nants" (Asimov's, June 2006), as back-story. He tells us he spends an inordinate amount of time writing and photographing for his blog: www.rudyrucker.com/blog.

  1.

  The Singularity happened when, encouraged by his business backers, President Joe Doakes sent an eggcase of nants to Mars. Nants were self-reproducing nanomachines: solar-powered, networked, capable of gnatlike flight, and single-mindedly focused on transforming all available material into more nants. In a couple of years, the nants had eaten Mars, turning the red planet into a Dyson sphere of a duodecillion nanomachines, a three-millimeter-thick shell half a billion kilometers across, with Earth and the Sun trapped inside.

  The stars were hidden by giant ads; in daytime the ads were a silvery background to the sky. Doakes's backers were well-pleased. And behind the scenes the nant swarm was solving a number of intractable problems in computer science, mathematical physics, and process design; these results were privily beamed to the nants’ parent corporation, Nantel. But before Nantel could profit from the discoveries, the nants set to work chewing up Earth.

  At the last possible moment, a disaffected Nantel engineer named Ond Lutter managed to throw the nants into reverse gear. The nants restored the sections of Earth they'd already eaten, reassembled Mars, and returned to their original eggcase—which was blessedly vaporized by a well-aimed Martian nuclear blast, courtesy of the Chinese Space Agency.

  Public fury over Earth's near-demolition was such that President Doakes and his Vice President were impeached, convicted of treason, and executed by lethal injection. But Nantel fared better. Although three high-ranking execs were put to sleep like the President, the company itself entered bankruptcy to duck the lawsuits—and re-emerged as ExaExa, with the corporate motto, “Putting People First—Building Gaia's Mind."

  For a while there it seemed as if humanity had nipped the Singularity in the bud. But then came the orphids.

  2.

  Jil and Craigor's home was a flat live-aboard scow called the Merz Boat. Propelled by cilia like a giant paramecium, the piezoplastic boat puttered around the shallow, turbid waters of the south San Francisco Bay. Craigor had bought the Merz Boat quite cheaply from an out-of-work exec during the chaos that followed the nant debacle. He'd renamed the boat in honor of one of his personal heroes, the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters who'd famously turned his house into an assemblage called the Merz Bau. “Merz” was Schwitters's made-up word meaning, according to Craigor, “gnarly stuff that I can get for free."

  Jil was eye-catching: more than pretty, she moved with perfect grace. She had dark blunt-cut hair, a straight nose and a ready laugh. She'd been a good student: an English major with a minor in graphics and design, planning a career in advertising. But then in her early twenties she'd had a problem with pseudocoke abuse. Fortunately she'd made it into recovery before having the kids with Craigor, a son and a daughter, seven-year-old Momotaro and five-year-old Bixie. The four of them made a close-knit, happy family.

  Although Jil was still hoping to make it as an ad designer, for now she was working as a virtual booth bunny for ExaExa, doing demos at online trade fairs, with her body motion-captured, tarted up, and fed to software developers. All her body joints were tagged with subcutaneous sensors. She'd gotten into the product-dancer thing back when her judgment had been impaired by pseudocoke. Dancing was easy money, and Jil had a gift for expressing herself in movement. Too bad the product-dancer audience consisted of slobbering nerds. But now she was getting close to landing an account with Yoon Shoon, a Korean self-configuring-athletic-shoe manufacturer. She'd already sold them a slogan: “Our goo grows on you."

  Craigor was a California boy: handsome, good-humored, and not overly ambitious. Comfortable in his own skin. He called himself an assemblagist sculptor, which meant that he was a packrat, loath to throw out anything. The vast surface area of the Merz Boat suited him. Pleasantly idle of a summer evening, he'd amuse himself by arranging his junk in fresh patterns on the elliptical pancake of their boat, and marking colored link-lines into the deck's computational plastic.

  Craigor was also a kind of fisherman; he earned money by trapping iridescent Pharaoh cuttlefish, an invasive species native to the Mergui Archipelago of Burma, and now flourishing in the waters of the South Bay. The chunky three-kilogram cuttlefish brought in a good price apiece from AmphiVision, Inc., a San Jose company that used organic rhodopsin from cuttlefish chromatophores to dope the special video-displaying contact lenses known as webeyes. All the digirati were wearing webeyes to overlay heads-up computer displays upon their visual fields. Webeyes acted as cameras as well; you could transmit whatever you saw. Along with earbud speakers, throat mikes, and motion sensors, the webeyes were making cyberspace into an integral part of the natural world.

  There weren't many other cuttlefishermen in the South Bay—the fishery was under a strict licensing program that Craigor had been grandfathered into when the rhodopsin market took off. Craigor had lucked into a good thing, and he was blessed with a knack for assembling fanciful traps that brought in steady catches of the wily Pharaoh cuttles.

  To sweeten the take, Craigor even got a small bounty from the federal Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force for each cuttlefish beak that he turned in. The Task Force involvement was, however, a mixed blessing. Craigor was supposed to file two separate electronic forms about each and every cuttlefish that he caught: one to the Department of the Interior and one to the Department of Commerce. The feds were hoping to gain control over the cuttles by figuring out the fine points of their life cycle. Being the laid-back kind of guy that he was, Craigor's reports had fallen so far behind that the feds were threatening to lift his cuttlefishing license.

  3.

  One Sunday afternoon, Ond Lutter, his wife Nektar and their high-functioning-autistic ten-year-old son Chu came over for a late afternoon cook-out on the Merz Boat. They were a less happy family than Jil's.

  Jil had met Ond at work; he was the fired engineer who'd put a stop to the Nantel nants, now elevated to Chief Technical Officer of the reborn ExaExa. The awkward Ond thought Jil was cute—in a nice way—and the two little families had become friends. They got together nearly every weekend.

  “It's peaceful here,” said Ond, taking a long pull of his beer. He rarely drank, and even one bottle had a noticeable effect on him. “Like Eden.” He leaned back in his white wickerwork rocker. No two chairs on the Merz Boat were the same.

  “What are those cones?” asked Nektar. She was talking about the waist-high shiny ridged shapes that loosely ringed the area Craigor had cleared out for today's little party. The kids were off at the other end of the boat, Momotaro showing Chu the latest junk and Bixie singing made-up songs that Chu tried to sing too.

  “Ceramic jet-engine baffles,” said Jil. “From the days before piezoplastic. Craigor got them off the back lot at Lockheed."

  “The ridges were for reducing turbulence,” said Craigor. “We sit in an island of serenity."

  “You're a poet, Craigor,” said Ond. The low sun illuminated his scalp through his thinning blonde hair. “It's good to have a friend like you. I have to confess that I brought along a big surprise. And I was just thinking—my new tech will solve your problems with generating those cuttlefish reports. It'll get your sculpture some publicity as well."

  “Far be it from me to pry into Chief Engineer Ond's geeksome plans,” said Craigor easily. “As for my diffuse but rewarding oeuvre—” He made an expansive gesture that encompassed the whole deck. “An open book. Unfortunately I'm too planktonic for fame. I transcend encapsulation."

  “Planktonic?” said Jil, smi
ling at her raffish husband, always off in his own world.

  “Planktonic sea creatures rarely swim,” said Craigor. “Like cuttlefish, they go with the flow. Until something nearby catches their attention. And then—dart! Another masterpiece."

  Just aft of the cleared area was Craigor's holding tank, an aquarium hand-caulked from car windshields, bubbling with air and containing a few dozen Pharaoh cuttlefish, their body-encircling fins undulating in an endless hula dance, their facial squid-bunches of tentacles gathered into demure sheaves, their yellow W-shaped pupils gazing out at their captors.

  “They look so smart and so—doomed,” said Nektar, regarding the bubbling tank. She had full lips and she wore her curly brown hair in a fat ponytail. “Like wizards on death row. They make me feel guilty about my webeyes."

  “I had a dream about angels coming to set the cuttlefish free,” said Craigor. “But it's hard to remember my dreams anymore. Bixie wakes us up so early.” He gave his daughter a little pat. “Brat."

  “Crackle of dawn,” said Bixie.

  “You finally got webeyes too?” said Jil to Nektar. “I love mine. But if I forget to turn them off before falling asleep—ugh. Spammers in my dreams, not angels. I won't let my kids have webeyes yet. Of course for Chu—” She broke off, not wanting to say the wrong thing.

  “Webeyes are perfect for Chu,” said Nektar. “You know how he loves machines. He and Ond are alike that way. Ond says he was autistic too when he was a boy. I'm the token normal in our family. As if.” She blinked and stared off into the distance. “Mainly I got my webeyes for my job.” Now that Chu was getting along pretty well in his school, beautiful Nektar had reentered the workforce as a cook in an upscale San Jose restaurant. “The main chef at Ririche talked me into it. Jose. He's been showing me the ropes. I can see all the orders, and track our supplies while I cook."