by Tony Daniel
Introducing the Met
The Met is the system of space cables, tethers, planetary lifts along with all the associate bolsas, sacs, armatures, and dendrites that comprise the human inhabited space of the inner solar system. The Met, at its widest, extends 186,000,000 miles from the sun, but it is far bigger than that in actuality. It has been calculated that if all the cables of the Met were laid end to end, they would reach out of the solar system and another AU or so (the distance from the sun to the Earth) toward Alpha Centauri. While the Met is long, it is thin. None of the space cables averages more than a kilometer in diameter. When seen from a vantage point above the planetary ecliptic near the asteroid belt, the Met shines like a spiderweb, wet with dewdrops, hanging in space between the wheeling planets.
Eighteen
By the time Claude Schlencker was eight years old, he had come to despise Shakespeare. First, there was the smell of the must and mold on the pages of his father’sComplete Works . It had gotten wet sometime during the move, and was three e-months in a trunk before being unpacked. The dank atmosphere of Polbo Armature didn’t help matters either. The family’s two-room flat constantly leaked, and the humidity controls had long since given up the ghost. And if you didn’t have humidity control in Polbo, you sweated like a pig all year long. The armature was an agricultural complex, and the atmosphere was determined by the needs of the plants, and not the humans who tended them. Of course, the more affluent could afford to have their bodies adapted to take into account the heat and the constant hanging mist. Claude’s family was, to say the least, not among the more affluent. His mother was a quality-control monitor at the workstation, and his father was a trimmer—one of the humans who must still be employed to cut off the lower leaves of vegetable seedlings in the greenhouses. It was not a job for a robot, and besides, a robot would get bored with it.
Delmore Schlencker was not bored with his job, he was furious at it, and at his life in general, including his wife and son. The Met was just being constructed, and he’d left Earth determined to make something of himself on the newly forming Mars-Earth Diaphany. He’d taught literature in junior college for a year until he’d lost his job because of (he claimed) cutbacks and faculty politics. There had been no help forthcoming from his family (Claude’s grandfather, whom he’d never met, was a policeman somewhere in Europe—the details were unclear), and Delmore had had to take whatever work he could find. He’d met Claude’s mother, Janey Beth, when she corrected one of his mistakes at the greenhouse. The baby had quickly followed, and Delmore, now in his late thirties, was stuck, stuck, stuck.
For him, Claude was both the cause of all his problems and his only hope for some escape.
Each night, from the time the boy was six, Delmore had had him deliver lines from Shakespeare while he, Delmore, drank himself to sleep. Despite his drunken state, Delmore had a near-perfect recall of the lines of the plays, and when young Claude made a mistake, well then the boy must be made to learn the lines.
Claude remembered one night in particular when his father had gotten a new bottle of real whiskey from the liquor store in the habitat and had polished off two-thirds of it in an hour and a half. Claude was delivering the Joan of Arc monologue fromHenry VI, Part 1 . His father insisted that he only learn the female’s parts entire, since that was the way young actors in the bard’s own time came to the stage. Boys were women, until they earned their dramatic stripes, and then they were allowed to play men. In the play, Joan was meeting with the Duke of Burgundy to try to win him back to the French cause (he had been siding with the English). All this meant next to nothing to young Claude, but he dutifully remembered the facts as well as he could. Once he had been beaten even after delivering a faultless scene because he later could not explain what it all meant.
“Besides, all French and France exclaims on thee,” Claude said, having reached the point in the monologue where Joan is appealing to Burgundy’s patriotism. “Doubting thy birth and lawful proficiency—”
And with that mistake, substitutingproficiency for the correctprogeny, something inside Delmore seemed to have broken open, like a swollen wound that suddenly splits and spills out its cankerous fluid. Claude later reasoned that it was not the mistake, but the words, which set off his father. Delmore had often doubted Janey Beth’s claim that Claude was actually his, and not the son of another worker whom his mother had occasionally seen. Claude never found out this other man’s name, but he liked to imagine that the story was true, even though, in his own squat form and round face, he bore a striking resemblance to Delmore.
Delmore suddenly rose from his chair and loomed over Claude. For a moment, Claude didn’t realize what was happening, that he had made a mistake.
“Progeny,” Claude said in a low voice.
“Progeny!” his father screamed. Claude immediately covered his head with his hands. There was nowhere to run. His father locked the door. It was probably his hands over his face that prevented Claude from being immediately knocked unconscious by his father’s blow. Delmore had struck him with the butt end of the whiskey bottle. Claude reeled, and his father hit him again on the shoulders. The bottle broke against Claude’s shoulder blade, and the jagged glass cut into his back. The remainder of the whiskey spilled into the wound and burned like fire. Claude sank to the floor, whimpering, and this angered Delmore even more.
“Get up,” he called to his son. “Be a fucking man, for the love of God.” When Claude failed to respond, Delmore kicked him, laying him out flat on the bare concrete floor of the flat.
“Shit, shit,” he heard Delmore grumbling, and he risked a peek to see that his father was examining the ruins of the bottle. “Fucking glass,” his father said. “It’s made of fucking gristless glass.”
Delmore reached down and pulled Claude up by his hair. He held the boy between his knees and put the broken whiskey bottle in front of Claude’s face, inches from his eyes. “See what you did?” Delmore said. “See what you did, you little bastard.”
And then Delmore had torn Claude’s shirt from his torso. Still holding the boy firmly between his legs, he spun Claude around so that his back was to his father. Then, using the sharp edge of the bottle, Delmore began to carve into his son’s back. In all, he made nine score-marks upon Claude, each time pressing a little harder, cutting a little deeper. And with each pass of the bottle, he spoke the wordprogeny, as if he were a patient teacher and Claude was a difficult student for whom he only wanted the best.
Finally, it was over. But it wasn’t. Delmore made his son once more stand before him and recite from start to finish the speech of Joan of Arc to Burgundy. Claude concentrated. He concentrated as hard as he ever had on anything in his life.
And, it was as if a cold breeze passed through him. As if the flat were air-conditioned and its air dried. Claude’s hands, bunched into fists, uncurled. And the words came—all of them. He delivered the monologue flawlessly.
After that, Claude seldom made mistakes when memorizing or delivering Shakespeare, and his father beat him for other reasons. But he had discovered something that night, something that would always stay with him. It was a power of concentration. After that, no matter how bad the circumstances became, Claude never panicked or forgot anything. He concentrated. And the cool, dry air would course through him, and he would be able to perform whatever he was called upon to do.
Claude did not tell his mother about the cuts on his back the next day. He knew what she would say: “Why, Claude, what did you do to yourself?” And it was about a year later that he woke up one morning to find that his mother was gone. She had left the armature, and it wasn’t until many years later that Claude knew what had become of her. He was left under the tender ministrations of his father until he was fifteen years old. By that time, Claude had learned Shakespeare backwards and forwards, including the sonnets.
When Claude turned ten, his father got him an after-school job working the greenhouse, trimming leaves alongside Delmore. With his smaller hands, Claude was faster and
more accurate than his father, but he always took care to work at the same pace, and never to outdistance him. Delmore kept Claude’s wages and gave the boy an allowance, which he was constantly cutting off for weeks at a time as punishment. At such times, Delmore would blame the withheld money on a computer foul-up.
“It looks like those computers hate you,” his father would say to Claude. “I wish I could do something about it, but my hands are tied.”
Claude imagined the “computers” as small imps who burned his money and bathed in the flames. The image had come from one of the books Claude had read in the school library. He could not bring such “trash” literature home, but he found that he could devour an entire book, if it was of a medium length, just in the library period he was given at school. He was, of course, proficient at remembering the details. Claude knew what real computers were, and how to use them. But by the time he was eleven, they began to disappear, and Claude was given lessons at school on how to interact with a new kind of computer, which wasn’t really a computer at all. You kind of “thought” your way into it, and, instead of you working on it, in a way, it worked on you. At least, that is the way Claude began to picture it. It wasn’t until several e-years later that his new kind of computer began to be called the grist.
Claude liked this new way of doing things very well, and his teachers told him that he had a special talent for it. One of his teachers, Mrs. Ridgeway, even put him into a special program, and soon Claude was writing his own simple computer programs. At first, he only made pretty displays and cool-looking rooms that he could explore. But soon he began to write programs that would do things around the classroom. Usually these were simple tasks such as collecting and distributing papers and tests. He always wrote programs to please his teachers—particularly Mrs. Ridgeway—and never his fellow students. Claude didn’t get along with most of the other children in his classes. In fact, he often felt that he hated them for taking time with the teachers away from him. He had been told that this was not a very good way to feel, but he couldn’t help it. Sometimes, when no one was looking, he would pick out one of the students who was smaller and dumber than him and he would punish the other, just as he’d learned from his father. But he never did this to a smart kid, no matter how small the child was. If you were smart, you shouldn’t get hit.
Claude didn’t like math class very much. He was actually quite good at it, but his teacher was a decaying old man who had missed the horizon of the rejuvenation procedures in use in the day, and was growing old and feeble while those merely ten years his junior were going to live fifty more years. He took his disappointment out on his pupils, who, if predictions turned out correctly, might very well live to be two hundred e-years or more. He liked to assign his class extremely tedious operations for homework, some of which could not be solved even with the aid of computers unless they were extremely powerful calculators. One of these problems was to factor the product of the two largest prime numbers known to humanity (the students were forbidden to look up these primes). No one was expected to get the right answer, but everyone was expected to turn in a sheet of attempts that contained at least two hours’ worth of work.
With his memorization and recitations, along with his part-time job at the greenhouse, Claude had no time to do his homework at home. He usually completed it in study hall at school. But this would take longer than the one hour the students were allowed in study hall. Claude had no idea what original prime numbers might be, but he was determined to avoid missing his Shakespeare at home and receiving a beating as the result. He decided he must somehow solve the problem using his computer skills.
Claude had read an introductory book on the grist in the library, where the basic principles of quantum computing were explained for the layman and the Merced Effect was described. Mrs. Ridgeway was covering some basic stuff in his Rationality class that Claude already knew, and he found his mind drifting to the problem of factoring the product of the primes, which was due tomorrow. His drifting turned to worry and his worry to anxiety. He imagined his father with the whiskey bottle, with his belt, with Claude’s mother’s old hairbrush. And then came the “air-conditioning” feeling. In that cool mental space, Claude realized what he ought to do to solve the problem.
That afternoon, after he finished his other homework, he set to work with the grist. He had learned that each molecule of grist was not a simple on and off switch, but was actually the end product of an infinite number of on and off switches. Mrs. Ridgeway had talked about an “original” computer and many virtual computers, like ghosts, doing calculations in many “possible worlds.” Claude had decided that in one of those possible worlds, he, Claude had accidentally factored the number his math teacher had given him and gotten the right two prime numbers. While Claude had been creating “virtual rooms” with the grist, he’d occasionally had to make a light source. At first, he’d been stymied when he thought he had to program each photon of light that would come out of a lightbulb. But there was a helper program that used the photons exactly like Claude was considering using the factoring. You told it the pattern you wanted, and it calculated all the possible paths of light to give you a stream of light that was not just simulated and not-quite-right, as had been the old virtual reality, but was completely true to actuality. That was, in fact, actuality by another means. Claude saw that he could modify this program and give it the “pattern” he was looking for—two prime numbers. And, as it had with the light, the little program used the quantum physics of grist to do the work of infinite parallel processes. These processes Claude represented in one of his virtual rooms as a pattern of light on the floor. Just as with light, the wrong answers, those that didn’t fit the pattern, canceled one another out. Charles watched as the two prime numbers he was after formed on the floor, as if they had been in the virtual room all along, but were now merely coming into focus. He wrote them down, then left the virtuality of the grist. Back in actuality, he had a whole speech fromTitus Andronicus to memorize, and only fifteen minutes left of study hall.
Claude’s math teacher was angry at him the next day. He accused Claude of having looked up the two biggest primes on the merci (although it was called the “Web” back then, and was a much different thing). Claude felt a bit chagrined because he had not thought of this obvious way to get around the problem. But he explained his method to his teacher, and the old man had to grudgingly admit that the boy was onto something. The next day, he mentioned Claude’s solution to Mrs. Ridgeway. She mentioned it to the director of the school, and Claude knew he had a big problem. The school director wanted to call in Claude’s father and discuss with him the possibility of enrolling Claude in a special school after he turned thirteen. Out of the armature. On Mercury.
The director of the school even thought that the prospect was important enough to make a personal visit to Claude’s apartment, to visit his father.
Nineteen
The director of Claude’s school was named Getty. He was the son of the chief engineer in the armature and had grown up with the Polbo Armature growing up around him. He took a special interest in the social conditions of the working poor in what he liked to think of as “his” bolsa. He had been into some of the worst neighborhoods, working in his off hours on community projects and generally making sure conditions were tolerable for all—water, sewage, plenty of vegetables. Getty had always thought it a scandal that many of the greenhouse workers regularly ate processed pabulum imported to the Armature when the place was crammed full of all the vitamins and minerals a human body would ever need. He considered it his personal mission to make sure that everyone had the means to eat right, and he was astounded that the “Vegetables for People” campaign that he headed was not more successful at changing bad habits. Getty considered it to be his mission to finish what his father had started, making the Polbo Armature a clean, fresh, living, and growing space for all.
And so he was completely taken aback when he saw the living space young Claude had been exi
sting in. The flat had not been cleaned in years and when, with a grunt, Delmore Schlencker waved Getty in and showed him to a chair, Getty detected the distinct odor of rotting meat. Getty, himself a macrobiotic vegetarian, shuddered at the thought of the substance from which the smell must be rising. Nevertheless, he remembered himself and his purpose in coming. But he must get this over with as quickly as possible, or he was surely going to pass out from the stench. He quickly informed Schlencker of Claude’s new option to study on Mercury.
“Sounds goddamn expensive,” Schlencker had answered. “We have not got that kind of money. Unless you’re thinking of getting me a raise?”
“There is a scholarship available,” said Getty. He could feel his new somatic adaptations working under his skin, adjusting his body temperature so that the heat in the flat wouldn’t cause him to break out into a sweat.
“There is, is there?” replied Schlencker. The man stood up—even standing, Schlencker was barely taller than was Getty sitting down. “Would you like a bit of wine?” he said.
Getty imagined the vile vintage the man probably had available. Something out of a carton. He shook his head “no.”
“Well, then,” said Schlencker, and left the room. He returned with a glass in his hand and with what Getty recognized as a very respectable Rhein white. It was cool from the refrigerator and was already forming a condensing sweat that ran over Schlencker’s hand as he poured himself a glass. What was this man, living here, doing with such good wine? It didn’t seem right to Getty. Like brie on a . . . a—Getty searched for an image from his youth, something common and bad—brie on ahot dog ! That was what this man was. Getty suppressed a gag at the thought.
“You all right?” Schlencker asked him.
Getty took a deep breath. Mistake.
“I’m fine.” He coughed. “Little something in my throat. Now about that scholarship . . .”