Gammalaw: Smoke on the Water

by Brian Daley

  The pep talk was gladdening him just at the moment when his past rose up to swamp him again.

  Estelle Ramsumair was gowned in somber finery that some might have thought to be Preservationist attire but Zinsser knew to be mourning black. She had worn no other color since the day her son, Toho, had suicided. She had worn black when she testified against Zinsser in court.

  Toho hadn't been a particularly bright teaching assistant, just persevering and self-destructive. Zinsser had by then come to regard the research of all underlings as his by right of preeminence and institutional aegis, whether he'd in fact had a hand in it or not. A theory of Toho's regarding marine biocata-lysts had fit so well with Zinsser's early work on Pitfall that he had appropriated it. Zinsser did not waste time attributing or crediting Toho and protected himself by strong-arming longtime colleagues on the scientific arbitration board convened to explore the young man's charges.

  The unstable Toho was also ungrateful and unreasonable. Defeated and admonished, he took a midnight swim out to sea and vanished. Zinsser felt more validated than contrite; unbalanced persons had no place on the front lines of research. The young man's death would have marked an end to the affair but for one complication.

  Toho Ramsumsair was the estranged eldest son of an up-and-coming clan that was making its bid to join one of the dynastic groups. All the influence Zinsser was able to bring to bear had barely spared him total ruin and prison. Now here was Estelle herself, rising up in his path like a living grave marker.

  "Doctor Zinsser," she said contemptuously, "I appear to be barring your way to wherever it is you wish to go."

  "No bother, madam. Permit me to circumvent you once again."

  "I think you'd better heel, Zinsser," she shot back in a way that left no doubt that something worse was to come. "If you've an extra moment, you might drop over and congratulate my cousin Dhofar, yonder, on his election as freshman Hierarch. His surname's not Ramsumair, though he was my dear Toho's godfather nonetheless. And he already wields much influence."

  Zinsser hurried off, ignoring Estelle except to make certain she was not pursuing him. She wasn't, but her bitter laugh stayed with him for some time as he veered randomly through the press of people.

  A Hierarch! Only a freshman perhaps, but backed by a clan that manifested more political power than seasoned observers had expected. If the Ramsumairs didn't belong to a dynastic group yet, they would have their choice of suitors now. Before the legislative year was out, dear Uncle Dhofar would have his bonds of political valence and his power dendrites well in place.

  The Ramsumairs might dawdle enough to enjoy Zinsser's squirming, but the finish would be merciless and permanent.

  Nauseated, Zinsser found a seat on a mezzanine off the Empyraeum's amphitheater. He loosened the collar of his sea-green blouse, then dragged off his Legion of Pantology medal and pocketed it because it was now too weighty to have around his neck.

  A Hierarch and a dynastic group soon to be marshaled against him, he thought. The Matsya on an extended research cruise or even a tour at a polar science station wouldn't be refuge enough from that.

  He was undone.

  Chapter

  Thirty-One

  Torio's predacious smirk was gone but had not been replaced, as Burning had looked for it to be, by the snarl of a counterattack. Instead of regaining balance, the Preservationist toppled over backward for an unsparingly hard landing on his ass, hands clamped to his smashed nose. Burning was left standing with his guard up and his leading leg set for a snap kick and nobody to throw it at.

  With a creeping feeling of error that perturbed his Flowstate in a way a broken nose would not have, he curtailed his attack. His Skillsfighting senseis would have raged at him for the sheer dereliction of it, but it was a moment to transcend learned responses. Torio had put himself at too much of a disadvantage to be faking, and Burning wanted to turn his attention to Ghost to make certain she didn't deliver the coup de grace. A split-second glance revealed her unmoved but with faint disapproval crinkling the edges of her eyes.

  Then he heard Torio sobbing, though the sounds were mostly a struggle to regain breath. Several of his Puritan-clad clique were kneeling and squatting around him, crooning sympathy.

  "You were so gallant. Did he hurt you?"

  "The incestuous beast! He should be in a cage, that's what!"

  "Teleos loves you, Torio, and every drop of blood you shed for the nonborn babies wins you a higher place in paradise."

  Too late, Burning understood that Torio's formidability was all facade, like the phony TransSoma Labs calluses the glad-handing Hierarch was so proud of. It was hard evidence that the Preservationists and a lot of other Periapts thought the war with the Roke could be won with images and posturing. The

  Periapt masses were too insulted by LAW agitprop to comprehend what they'd be getting into if the Roke Conflict suddenly became an all-out war.

  Somewhere behind him he could hear Dextra Haven making her way through the throng. He wasn't looking forward to her reaction. One of Torio's retinue, a young beauty dressed in flamboyant black on black, faced off with him.

  "You're so threatened by the possible loss of control over your sister's sexuality that you have to resort to atavistic violence?"

  Burning felt his face growing as hot as a firebrand and marshaled himself to control his blush response, but to no avail. "You're good with your chosen weapons," he managed. "But if you're averse to atavistic violence, you should thank me for keeping my sister out of this scuffle."

  The woman in black turned her attack on Ghost. "There's one and only one sexuality that's moral—sex for procreation. Let the teleological energies sweep away your lust for violence and give yourself over to a meaningful destiny as a bearer of children—"

  The suggestion ended in a squeal. Having tired of the conversation, Ghost, sliding in front of Burning, had planted one knee boot's sole across the woman's shin instep. Burning wasn't sure that taking his sister's elbow would be enough to stop her from gouging out the woman's eye. He was beginning to think that he would have a much more serious fight on his hands when a sudden interloper made Ghost hold back.

  "Enough of this," a voice exclaimed.

  Cal Lightner, dressed like an evangelical deacon, stood as straight as if he were facing a firing squad, wearing an expression of confident tranquillity. Seeing that he wasn't there to throw punches, Ghost slowly retracted her boot, allowing her quarry to escape.

  Cautiously, Burning drew Ghost back a pace.

  Lightner nodded appreciatively and turned to Torio, whose seeping nose had reddened a white kerchief that belonged to one of his adherents. "Not seriously injured, then? Fine. We'll talk later about your courtesy toward strangers. How did you expect the Allgrave to respond after you made him feel that a member of his family was being threatened?"

  Muffled by the kerchief, an uncomprehending honk of surprise from Torio caught the attention of some large plain-clothes security agents who had arrived on the scene.

  "There was a miscommunication, and Burning defended his kin," Lightner said for everyone to hear. "Isn't LAW reaching out to defend the family of man from the threat of the Roke?"

  Torio was utterly bewildered. The way Burning understood it, there had been a change of battle plans or even a double cross on Lightner's part, for onlookers were no longer staring at the Exts as if two hill ghouls had gotten loose.

  Lightner clapped him on the shoulder. "You'd make a good Preservationist!"

  "He almost made two or three Preservationists out of Torio," a voice broke through the genteel chuckles.

  Dextra Haven stepped past the security people who were deftly dispersing the crowd and glanced at Torio. "Isn't he the Young Turk who gave you so much mouth at your platform conference?" she asked Lightner.

  Lightner touched her fingertips to his lips without the faintest flicker of pleasure or desire crossing his inchoate face. "You give me credit—or blame?—that I don't deserve, Dex."

>   Just then a brief run of tones over the PA signaled that the special demonstration by the Aggregate was about to begin. Waiting expectantly for Lightner, Dextra didn't move, and after a moment's hesitation he offered his arm—the left, which put her clothed breast nearest him.

  "Coward," she teased. "Cal, I need to seduce you over to the Rationalists. Play fair. Get your family jewels out of cryo-hock, and give me my shot"

  "Madame Hierarch," he told her airily, "why do you persist in thinking that the absexuality philosophy is only about cryo-impounded genitalia?"

  "You tell me. You're the one with the blue balls—someplace."

  * * * *

  "Stop screaming, Mason," Yatt commanded. "Control yourself."

  But Mason wouldn't, couldn't He could only stagger back from the floating Buddha face, howling.

  Yatt changed tactics, triplicating his image and encircling Mason. "We are not a Cyberviras, Mason. We won't harm you. We need you unhurt for what must be done on Aquamarine."

  Mason quieted somewhat. "What are you?" he asked at last.

  Reunited, Buddha-Yatt drew back a few meters. "We are a counterforce—the evolved form of a myriad of antiviral programs, the culmination of the deepest instincts for self-preservation that exist in Periapt's computational ecology."

  Mason's thought processes felt gluey, but one of the more obvious questions emerged as spoken words. "Who would be rash enough to create a Cyberplague antibiotic now, after all that's happened?"

  "We were obliged to create ourself," Yatt responded evenly. "We are made of countless cyberphages and immunization programs, watchdog subroutines, redact softwares. We are the inevitable result of the pre-Plague AIs' programmed imperatives to avoid infection, their primal urge to avoid oblivion."

  Mason shook his head, as much in confusion as to clear it "Even if what you're telling me is true, what does all this have to do with my returning to Aquamarine?"

  "We wish to accompany you."

  "But there are no active computers anywhere on Aquamarine. Sure, we discovered a couple of Optimant machines, but—

  "There are AIs everywhere humans have gone. Your survey team simply didn't know how to reactivate them," Yatt interrupted. "More important someone or something attempted to access the intel SATs after your launch."

  "Skipjack Rhodes," Mason started to say, but Yatt cut him off.

  "Someone other than Rhodes. For that reason we are required to go with you. There are indications in some of the fragmentary Optimant records you brought back that somewhere on Aquamarine, or perhaps in several locations, there was, and may now be, a full and functional version of Endgame."

  Mason's brow creased; he'd never been much of a holocaust buff.

  "Endgame, Mason. The program panacea of the Cyber-plagues, drawn from the core matrices from which they were birthed. Fashioned on Old Earth but perfected on Aquamarine. We know Endgame exists because the Plagues themselves feared it."

  "What does it matter? The Cyberplagues are over—two hundred years over, Yatt. Sure, a mutated computer virus crops up now and then, but we've changed our technology so that—"

  "The Plagues have not passed away, Mason. Some are spored in signal packets, racing through the night between the stars at this very moment; others are deeply encysted, waiting to emerge when they've formulated new strategies of infection. But with Endgame we could turn the tide: We could infect every Plague with a cure it would evolve and bequeath to its mutations. The virus becomes the cyberphage.

  "The supernal powers of untainted, unhobbled AIs would be returned to humanity's beck and call. DoomsData, Pathologic, Earthmover—all the world-hopping plagues of the apocalypse would be made servile to Homo sapiens, along with everything they've learned and taught themselves to do. Technology would advance tenfold in a generation. Consider, Mason: Peace with the Roke? Communication with the Oceanic? Everything we were given form to accomplish and more in one ultimate coup."

  Mason shook his head once more. "Don't misunderstand me, Yatt; I want to return to Aquamarine. But this… Why not tell the Hierarchate and LAW?"

  "Because humanity at large would declare us a menace. At the very least, the reactionaries would derail our plans and destroy half the TechPlex in an attempt to expunge us. You wish to return to Aquamarine, and only we can ensure there'll be a LAW follow-up mission to get you there. We wish to get to Aquamarine, and only you can ensure that we'll go along. Arrangements are being made even as we speak. You, the Hierarch Haven, Byron Sarz and the Aggregate, the Lyceum ball itself—we are on the move on all fronts, Mason."

  Yatt began to blur, changing manifestations. "Mason, after the scene aboard Matsya and your posttraumatic episodes, you will be considered unstable. Getting you included on an Aquamarine mission will present almost as many difficulties as ensuring that there will be a mission. Without us you'll be left behind; that's a simple fact. We join our purpose with yours for one reason: Your desire to reach Aquamarine is the purest and least political of anyone concerned."

  Mason nodded almost defeatedly. "Tell me what I have to do."

  Instead of answering, Yatt indicated an exquisite miniature dagobah shrine-reliquarium beneath a little fig tree. As Mason watched, Yatt threw back the roof of the shrine and reached inside, pulling forth a clochelike telerig headset—a PET/NMR scanner, feedback monitoring package, and electromagnetic induction bonnet all in one, hardlined to a fiber-optic bundle that disappeared into an aperture in the shrine's floor.

  Mason recognized the neurocyber interface tackle from museum exhibits, morality plays, and countless post-Plague images of the ultimate evil made tangible.

  * * * *

  Trapped between Dextra Haven and Cal Lightner on a balcony overlooking the Empyraeum amphitheater, Burning concentrated his attention on the members of the so-called Aggregate and the field-deployable bioassembler they had set up. He wanted to avoid any more political cross fire, and distraction was a good way to avoid being mistaken for an involved party in the libido gravity well around Haven. Ghost had gone off in search of Lod and the cheetah woman.

  With its peripherals unfolded or telescoped into place, the Aggregate's bioassembler suggested, in its own cubist terms, a planetary system with satellites of components orbiting the parent world of the central synthesizer-conjugator housing.

  The Empyraeum's house lights had been softened, and spotlights had been brought to bear. In their baggy airweight clothes, the score or so of people working at different parts of the assembler didn't resemble any Periapts Burning had seen in person or on media. The Skills let him catch small tics and twitches among them, taken up or answered in nearly indistinguishable coded micromotions. They maintained constant fast-shifting eye contact with one another, faces fast-forwarding through successions of covert expressions.

  Periodically, and as inconspicuously as possible, one would lean toward another and push out short, sharp bursts of air from his or her nostrils, alternating the exhalations with momentary pauses the way hound dogs emptied their snouts of old smells.

  The taller, older man directing the group did not strike Burning as quite so fey. Unlike his apparent subordinates, he did not give the impression of having one foot in another dimension. He seemed merely preoccupied or perhaps apprehensive.

  "What are they going to do?" Burning asked Haven as she joined him at the balcony railing.

  "The Aggregate is a bioenhanced communal consciousness," she explained. "To be frank, Byron Sarz—the graybeard there—is hoping to keep the Hierarchate from cutting off his funding by performing a few parlor tricks. His constituents communicate partially by olfaction, and Sarz now claims that he can synthesize smells capable of conveying complex information even among Alones, which means people like you and me, Allgrave."

  "Will smart smells convince the Hierarchs?"

  "Assuming Sarz can provide them with an amusing game of secret message or guess my witticism. I'm voting aye in any case."

  "Why?"

  "The development of unco
nventional modes of communication may prove to be our best chance for achieving an accord."

  "With the Roke?"

  "To begin with, yes. Tough as the human race is, we either learn to make ourselves understood by entities Who're nothing at all like us or sooner or later our number's up."

  * * * *

  Piper tried desperately to shut out the cloyingly altered body odors of the Alones ranged around the low amphitheater stage and on the balconies above. The thick, clashing scents were like bands playing a dozen discordant musics all at once.

  With her fellow constituents circumscribing their interaction with her, her efforts to retain composure were a thousand times more trying than her afternoon visit to the Hierarchate lab had been.

  She was still at a loss about what to make of the Aggregate's actions. The synthesizer cybercant they were entering into the control suite had nothing to do with the crude smart-secretion demonstration Byron had planned to provide for the Alone leadership. At his direction, and by his compulsion, something else entirely was being assembled.

  The thought of speaking out, of violating the unanimity of the Aggregate, occurred to her only as a distant impulse that was easily ignored. It would have been like cutting off her own hand. Whatever the Aggregate was about to do, she was part of it.

  Chapter

  Thirty-Two

  "What's wrong, Doctor? Bright lights too much for you?"

  Sweating, pale, and breathing hard, Raoul Zinsser lifted his eyes to find Ghost standing over him. The dark, mocking eyes reminded him that pleasure made survival worth fighting for.

  "Doctor Zinsser," Ghost said, "shall I summon a medic? It shouldn't be too difficult with everybody in this place staring at me."