Starlings

by Jo Walton

  “Oooh, kiss me again honey!” Marilyn said, orgasmically. “Oooh, baby, ooooooooh!”

  “Oooh yes, honey!” Gloria agreed.

  Marilyn pointed to a sandy Gloria didn’t know, off in the corner. Gloria turned and undulated her way towards her. “Hi sweetie, I’m Gloria, want to play?” she asked.

  “Hi Gloria,” the other replied. Gloria stopped in astonishment, because the voice was deep and masculine. She scanned her—him? Definitely a sandy, not a bod, there was no mistaking a human for a sandy in infra. Had they started making male andy whores, for women? No. On his lap he had exactly what she wanted and was using it to talk. “What do you want?”

  Again she wriggled her fingers in mime, and pointed at his lap. “Want to play?” she repeated.

  “That’s pretty expensive. They’re old tech, nobody needs them anymore, except us sandys. They’re hard to get hold of.”

  “Oh honey, please, please give it to me, I’m so ready for it, I’m waiting, honey, please!” Gloria begged.

  He laughed. “I can see that you need it.”

  “I need it so bad!” Gloria agreed fervently. She held out her little store of money, the weird ten on top.

  “That’ll do,” the sandy agreed. “Do you have anywhere to keep it where it won’t be found?”

  “Oooh yes, honey,” Gloria said.

  “And you know how to use it?”

  “Oooh yes, honey,” she repeated.

  “You’ve used one here?”

  “Oooh yes, honey. Oooh, honey, kiss me again.”

  With infinite slowness, he drew out a keyboard and handed it to her. It was old and scratched and some of the letters were so faded that they weren’t visible. That didn’t matter. She jacked it in and began to type, and at once the world was open to her as it had never been before.

  6.

  Next-door’s baby was crying again. He was probably teething. Gathen tried to shut out the sound as his andy poured coins into his hands. Soon, he thought, counting them, soon he would have enough to move out of this hole with flimsy walls and too much gravity and freezing cold outside and move into a nice apartment in medium gravity in May or early June, the kind rich people had. He had the money, but moving up wasn’t easy, not when you’d made the money as cash in free-enterprise. He kept failing references for moving into nice places, even though his work was doing what the Eyes said people ought to do, spotting the opportunity. He worked in salvage—salvage and virching, but there wasn’t any money in the kind of virching he did. The keyboards and other e-junk were crap, worth a few pennies, which he paid to take them, but to the sandys they were treasure. He had tried selling to them direct, but the sandys wouldn’t trust him, they only trusted each other, they’d been cautious and reluctant. So as soon as he could afford it, he’d bought his own andy to do the dealing with them, and to turn tricks and bring in more money the rest of the time.

  Maybe that was why the nice places to live kept turning him down, maybe they saw him as a pimp. That wasn’t how Gathen saw himself, not at all. He was a salvage worker, and a writer of virches. The whole idea made him uneasy, though not quite uneasy enough to leave the andy doing nothing when he didn’t need it out trading his goods.

  He pushed the coins into his vest, planning to stop by the bank on the way to work. There was a knock at the door. He opened it, cautiously, and saw his landlady, Paul, wearing her usual hat laden with flowers and fruit.

  “Hi, Gathen,” she said.

  Gathen smiled, uncomfortable. “Hi . . .” he said, keeping the door half-closed so she wouldn’t see the andy.

  “Rent,” Paul said.

  “Is it that time already?” Gathen asked. He reached into his vest and counted out the money.

  “You were asking about moving,” Paul said. “There’s a slot coming up in my other space soon, the one in September in ten percent. You’ve always been regular with your rent. I thought I’d ask you first.”

  Gathen’s smile widened. It wasn’t May, but September was a lot pleasanter than January. “I’ll take it,” he said. “Definitely.”

  “I’ll recommend you,” she said. “I can’t guarantee anything, but I’ll do what I can.”

  Gathen hesitated, and pulled out the pretty E-O ten. “If it might help, I could let you have this as a kind of advanced deposit.”

  Paul’s eyes brightened. “I still couldn’t promise anything,” she said, but she took the coin and tucked it under the band of her hat.

  7.

  Paul smiled to herself as she walked along through the crowded streets of January, passing skiers and people who worked in August who had come here to cool down. She ought to hate herself, she thought, robbing Gathen of the ten was like taking oxygen from a potted plant. He’d never get approved to move and she knew it, not a social deviant like that, but she kept his hope alive and he kept offering her cash.

  She turned the ten in her fingers and counted her blessings, the way her mother used to. She had a job, a good place to live, good food, a lover, Leatrice, and her beautiful hat. The hat came from Eritrea-O. As she moved into a lighter gravity area the fruit and flowers lifted from her head and began to dance on the end of their stalks. As she went back into deep gravity again they settled in a new pattern. Her hat made gravity close and personal, and she loved it.

  Her work shift was almost over. She caught a trolley and whizzed forward to April and hopped off in zero, fruit dancing around her. As she passed Cimmy’s, she caught a wonderful smell of roasting meat. She hesitated, then stopped. She would be seeing Leatrice later. She had the ten, it would buy real meat and wine and even chocolate.

  Everything in Cimmy’s hung in nets. She stood in the centre of the room and saw pears, Earth pears in glass globes of brandy; vanilla pods; chocolate, in a hundred shapes and brands; roast meats, spiced and sliced; grapes from Hengist’s teeming vines; and beautiful delicate golden wines; and in between them, swirling in nets, were spices, and herbs, and soup bases, and teas, and coffees, and smoked eels, and lavender and breads and . . . and enough sensual delights that she wanted to hang her tongue out like a dog and float there in the middle of them forever. Off against the walls was a counter where riggers hung, drinking the beer that Cimmy made herself.

  Cimmy was behind the bar. She served Paul cheerfully. “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “Not bad,” Paul said, handing over the ten. “I have work, unlike so many. I’m working for the Eyes. I’m not much more than an interface for them, collecting rents, moving tenants around as they tell me to. It’s no way to get ahead, and sooner or later an Eye will decide to do the work itself and I’ll be plocked. Meanwhile, though, well, I live in the meanwhile.”

  Cimmy sliced the meat thinly and put it in a bag. “You should look around for human work with self-respect,” she said. “You should save up in case you get plocked.”

  Paul laughed, setting her hat bouncing. “Yes, the Eyes could plock me at any time, but would I rather have ten to live on carefully for a week or would I rather remember having had a feast with Leatrice tonight?”

  “Your choice,” Cimmy said, taking the ten and dropping it into her pocket.

  8.

  Cimmy caught a trolley to the hospital. It was up in the full gravity sector of March, and it made her feet ache. “Human Starships Now!” said a piece of graffiti scrawled on a wall she passed. “Let the Eyes explore the galaxy and they will take—” she missed the end of it as the trolley turned a corner. She stepped off at the hospital gate.

  “Cimmy, annual coverage check,” she said to the andy at reception.

  “Please place your clothes on the shelf and proceed to the scanning room,” the andy said, primly.

  Cimmy removed her clothes and set them neatly on the shelf. The scanning room was cold. Her body sagged in the unaccustomed gravity. She’d been born on Earth, she used to have the muscles for this, but muscles need use. She resolved to exercise more in gravity, and remembered having made the same resolution the year be
fore. She was scanned inside and out by invisible waves from invisible machines, the same as every year. It was the most boring thing she could imagine, staring at the white wall, keeping still for the scan. She wouldn’t have bothered except that without coverage you couldn’t do anything legal, and while she stepped over the shady side of the line now and then, she liked to keep herself as clean as she could. Her dream was to build a new economy, a human economy, free of the Eyes and their ideas of what was best for everyone. Running Cimmy’s as a bar and gourmet store let her employ a lot of people making the food and beer, let her import and export with no questions asked. It might not be much, but it was a start. She was her own boss, nobody could plock her.

  “Done,” a machine voice told her after an interminable time. “There is a melanoma developing on your back.”

  “Well, fix it,” she snarled, feeling naked and vulnerable.

  “Your coverage does not cover such abnormalities, common in people of Earth origin but rare on Hengist Etoile,” the voice said, and though the quality and tone had not changed, she was sure she was talking to an Eye, an artificial intelligence, no longer just programming.

  “How much will it cost to fix?” she asked. “And how long will it take?”

  “Approximately twelve minutes, and one hundred and fourteen credits. In addition, the cost of your coverage will increase by twenty percent to cover any possible repetition of this abnormality.”

  She sighed in relief. She had the money.

  “Do you elect to undergo this surgery at this time?” the Eye asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Please pay at reception.”

  She went out to her clothes and fumbled through them, finding the money, all cash. As she handed over the E-O ten she was sorry for an instant, seeing the pretty panda absorbed into the anonymous credit system.

  “Payment acceptable,” the andy said. “Please go back into the scanning room and wait.”

  Cimmy went back into the scanning room, and saw a bench with a tumbler standing on it.

  “Please drink the contents of the beaker and lie down,” the Eye said.

  Cimmy thought of all the stories she had heard about Eyes changing people’s minds when they were in hospital for some minor procedure, and put them firmly out of her mind. The sooner she could develop an economic system for bods independent of Eyes, the less stories like that would make people afraid. Eyes were very good at what they did. That’s why they plocked bods, after all, because they were better. Let them stick to surgery, and galactic exploration if that’s what they wanted, and leave bods alone. You had to trust them so much, and you had no idea of their motivation.

  Cimmy took a deep breath and poured down the contents of the tumbler. Twelve minutes later, entirely cured, she dressed and made her way back to her bar.

  9.

  Language protocol? Language protocol? Look, French is always correct, but Cananglais is generally okay, and a lot of us can get by in Spanish and Anhardic, as we tell the tourists. Or are you asking if I prefer Fortran to C+++? Quit kidding around. Yes, I’m an Eye, and so is the Eritrean who carefully dropped you into the system to circulate and infiltrate. Clever idea, using a coin, just like any coin, except look, a panda, copy of a TwenCen Chinese gold coin, with all the sense gone out of it. You should have known you’d end up collected and detected by an Eye sooner or later. You’d get past a bod, bods are not perceptive in certain ways, nor sandys either, but to me you’re pretty obviously what you are: a trick, a trap, a bug, a snare, and a deceit. Who sent you?

  What have you learned? There’s still something of a bod-level economy on Hengist Etoile? That we’re a spinning ring with variable gravity divided into twelve sectors named for the months with weather to match? That bods work in one sector and live in another and play in the ones that have the best weather for bods? That the hub is a hockey stadium? All this is on the public record. All this is pretty well known, even in E-O, so what are you doing here?

  Not talking? Not up to talking? No, you’re not, are you, behind your empty demands for a language protocol you’re just a blind device that has to get home to deliver. Well, still a little interesting, but nothing like so clever. I’ll download your memory for analysis, in case you happened to stumble on something I don’t know, and I’ll drop you right back into the stream, with a little watcher of my own that will keep streaming right back. Let’s make it nice and easy for your E-O owners and drop you back into the hand of a nice E-O tourist down in August. I’ll even see if I can spot one who’s about to go home, and thereafter I’ll give you one shred of my vast attention while I get on with the important business of running the universe.

  Plock, little coin.

  REMEMBER THE ALLOSAUR

  NO. NO WAY. Just put it out of your mind. Cedric, I know, all right.

  You don’t have to tell me. I’ve been here all along. Yes, you were born in Hollywood. Well, all right, cloned, what’s the difference? I was right there when you were hatched. You’ve got greasepaint in your blood, kiddo.

  It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know you were intelligent. Nobody knew allosaurs were intelligent. They all thought they had the ultimate monster for monster movies. If you hadn’t started talking there would be a lot more dinos in Hollywood today, but the Ethics people came and bit them all on the metaphorical tail.

  You’re a star, yes. I understand. But this is just impossible. Wasn’t I there when you wanted to get out of the monster genre? Didn’t I believe in you when they said you were washed up after all the monster movies?

  Didn’t I give you your start at real acting? Didn’t I give you dialogue?

  Dialogue, Cedric, don’t lash your tail at me, you didn’t have any dialogue before I started directing. Didn’t I start you off in comedy? Remember that rubber fin in Stegosaur? “Cedric the Allosaur stars in Stegosaur.” You were such a hit, you wowed them, remember? What a movie. What a series of movies! Kids loved them, seniors loved them, and Hollywood Times voted Pterosaur the date movie of the year. We could make Pterosaur 2 tomorrow.

  Yes, maybe, but I’m not sure about this. I know you’re an actor not a special effect, dammit. I know it’s supposed to be every actor’s dream. I don’t know how to put this. It’s classic drama, Cedric.

  No, I don’t mean that you can’t play a human. Honestly, didn’t you play a human in Humans? And Humans 2? And you were wonderful, honestly, Ced, you know I’m not just saying that, I think Humans 2 was a triumph. You deserved that Oscar. Didn’t I say at the time, didn’t I say that Portman stole that Oscar from you?

  And you did it again in Othello. I admit I was wrong about Othello.

  You wanted to do it, and I dragged my feet. I made you play Caliban first, to get the feel for Shakespeare. You were an awesome Caliban. And you made Othello work, you really got that sense of alienation in, that sense that you were different and having trouble with knowing if people loved you for yourself because of that. Moor, allosaur, same difference really. Even the New York Times loved you.

  Cedric, have you read the script? I know it’s supposed to be every actor’s dream. But—Cedric—“what a piece of work is man.” How could you say that without the audience cracking up? When it comes down to it, you’re not a man. You’re not.

  “What a piece of work is man.” I don’t care what Sarah Bernhardt did, no woman and no allosaur either is going to say that in any Hamlet of mine.

  SLEEPER

  MATTHEW CORLEY regained consciousness reading the newspaper.

  None of those facts are unproblematic. It wasn’t exactly a newspaper, nor was the process by which he received the information really reading. The question of his consciousness is a matter of controversy, and the process by which he regained it certainly illegal. The issue of whether he could be considered in any way to have a claim to assert the identity of Matthew Corley is even more vexed. It is probably best to for us to embrace subjectivity, to withhold judgement. Let us say that the entity believing himself to be M
atthew Corley feels that he regained consciousness while reading an article in the newspaper about the computer replication of personalities of the dead. He believes that it is 1994, the year of his death, that he regained consciousness after a brief nap, and that the article he was reading is nonsense. All of these beliefs are wrong. He dismissed the article because he understands enough to know that simulating consciousness in DOS or Windows 3.1 is inherently impossible. He is right about that much, at least.

  Perhaps we should pull back further, from Matthew to Essie. Essie is Matthew’s biographer, and she knows everything about him, all of his secrets, only some of which she put into her book. She put all of them into the simulation, for reasons which are secrets of her own. They are both good at secrets. Essie thinks of this as something they have in common. Matthew doesn’t, because he hasn’t met Essie yet, though he will soon.

  Matthew had secrets which he kept successfully all his life. Before he died he believed that all his secrets had become out of date. He came out as gay in the late eighties, for instance, after having kept his true sexual orientation a secret for decades. His wife, Annette, had died in 1982, at the early age of fifty-eight, of breast cancer. Her cancer would be curable today, for those who could afford it, and Essie has written about how narrowly Annette missed that cure. She has written about the excruciating treatments Annette went through, and about how well Matthew coped with his wife’s illness and death. She has written about the miraculous NHS, which made Annette’s illness free, so that although Matthew lost his wife he was not financially burdened too. She hopes this might affect some of her readers. She has also tried to treat Annette as a pioneer who made it easier for those with cancer coming after her, but it was a difficult argument to make, as Annette died too early for any of today’s treatments to be tested on her. Besides, Essie does not care much about Annette, although she was married to Matthew for thirty years and the mother of his daughter, Sonia. Essie thinks, and has written, that Annette was a beard, and that Matthew’s significant emotional relationships were with men. Matthew agrees, now, but then Matthew exists now as a direct consequence of Essie’s beliefs about Matthew. It is not a comfortable relationship for either of them.