by Tony Daniel
Schlencker took a sip of the wine, swirled it in his mouth, then swallowed it. Getty watched the man’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed, like a piece of detached gristle. He had to get out of this place!
“Well, we’re just going to have to see what the boy says,” Schlencker finally replied. “I’ll have a talk with him tonight.” Schlencker finished the remainder of his wine in one gulp. “He’ll let you know in the morning what his decision is.”
For the first time in a very long while, Claude missed a line from one of the sonnets that evening. He had heard Mr. Getty from the next room, and he was nervous as to what his father’s decision would be. He never found out. When he flubbed the line, Delmore took to him with his belt. It hurt like hell, but this time Claude withstood it and did not cry.
Be a man. Justify your privilege of doing Caesar, of learning Lear.
Claude realized that he had been growing. He would soon be bigger than his father. Maybe that, too, was why the beating didn’t hurt so much. It only took an hour or so for the stinging to subside enough for him to get to sleep.
In the morning, he informed Director Getty that he and his father had talked it over and they had decided that maybe the special school was not such a good idea right then. That he needed more time among his peers so that he would not get too big a head about his own importance. Getty, relieved that he would not have to deal with Delmore Schlencker anymore for the time being, accepted Claude’s decision.
Twenty
For the next three e-years, Claude followed the same routine every day. Mrs. Ridgeway did her best to provide him with special instruction in programming, and the old math teacher, Hudo, died and was replaced by a young man who immediately saw Claude’s potential and set him to studying calculus while the other students laboriously worked through algebra—something Claude had mastered quickly, and soon grown bored with. More and more, he felt himself to be a separate being from the other students. He made no real friends and only stayed out of fights because he was known to strike back with vicious abandon and a disregard for any rules of honor, as it was practiced among the boys.
Not only was he growing physically, his body was changing in other ways, as well. One day, while working in the greenhouse snipping at the plants, his fingers slipped and he sliced into his thumb. The pain was intense and exquisite and, much to his surprise, Claude felt something odd happen in his pants. When he went to the toilet to check himself, he found that a sticky liquid had encrusted his underwear. Claude had, of course, read about such stuff during library period, and was quite aware of what had happened. Thewhy was a little puzzling.
“Well,” he said to the toilet bowl, “I guess I’m a man now.”
After a little experimentation, Claude found that it was not necessary for him to break the skin to make himself come. It was the pain that produced the pleasure, and pain could come in less visibly damaging forms. Following this discovery, Claude masturbated by jamming wooden splinters under his fingernails—he’d found this created maximum arousal in the most reproducible fashion—and only occasionally resorted to a burn or a puncture when he was, as it were, in the highest throes of passion.
By his fifteenth birthday, Claude was taller than his father by half a foot and outweighed him by a good ten pounds. Delmore was drinking more than ever, and the good Rhein wine and whiskey was a thing of the past. He bought his liquor wholesale from a moonshiner who worked in the greenhouse and had a still in one of the back rooms. Claude continued his Shakespeare, but he knew that the next time Delmore made to hit him, he would have a little surprise for his father. The thought of killing his father had become one of Claude’s favorite fantasies, and he now carried an extendable knife with him whenever he went to recite the immortal lines of the bard before Delmore.
But Claude never got the chance. One evening, after they’d both come home from work, Delmore had gone into the bathroom, taking his bottle of liquor along with him. About five minutes later, Claude heard a cry.
“Oh shit, oh no!” screamed Delmore. Claude rushed into the bathroom to find his father on his knees, bent down by the toilet. The bowl of the toilet was bright red with arterial blood.
“I’ve busted a gut. Ah God, I’m ruined!” cried Delmore. Claude watched in fascination as his father crawled out of the bathroom and into the living room, leaving a trail of blood behind him.
“It’s all coming out of my ass,” his father moaned. “I’m bleeding out of my ass.”
Delmore turned around three times in the living room, as if he were a dog preparing to lie down. Then he collapsed in a puddle of his own blood. After a moment, Claude bent down and felt no pulse in his father’s neck.
Amazing, he thought. He sat down in one of the living-room chairs.
“No Shakespeare tonight,” he said.
Claude thought about this fact for a while. And then he thought of all the nights in his life that would suddenly be empty of obligation. If he wanted them to be. He could do anything he wanted now, and no one could stop him.
Twenty-one
Roger Sherman knew something was terribly wrong when his ex-wife contacted him through the grist. They had not spoken in months.
“And to what do I owe this honor?” Sherman said. There was more acid in his voice than he had expected. The split had been his fault, after all. There was no way any woman with sense would have stayed with him during his black period ten e-years ago.
“I wouldn’t bother you while you’re on duty, Roger, but I think this may be important.”
“What is it, Dahlia?”
“Something is happening at the hospital, and I wanted your input,” Dahlia continued. With practiced ease, he let himself slip entirely into the virtuality so that he could talk to Dahlia face-to-face. Instantly he was a hovering presence in the New Miranda hospital emergency ward.
One of Dahlia’s aspects was working near a bed where a raving woman was being strapped down by orderlies. Dahlia quickly laid a hand on the woman’s head and—Sherman knew—sent tranquilizing algorithms swarming under the woman’s skin and into her grist pellicle. This kind of direct grist-to-grist intervention was something only doctors were licensed to do in the outer system.
“More than fifty thousand bland camels through the needle of destiny,” the woman screamed. “I saw it! I saw the brick fall!”
Then the tranquilizers began to take their effect.
“I saw it, I tell you.” The woman’s eyelids began to droop. “There isn’t anybody who says that man can’t cook . . .” And she was asleep.
“What is wrong with her, Dahlia?” Sherman said. Nobody in the hospital heard him, of course, since he wasn’t really here. He was speaking convert-to-convert in the virtuality with his ex-wife. The bodily aspect that was an emergency-room doctor in the hospital continued to minister to her patient. There was lots more to Dahlia, besides—both here on Triton and elsewhere, on the moons of Jupiter. Sherman’s ex-wife was a full-scale LAP, after all.
“I was hoping you could help me with that,” Dahlia answered, a voice in his ear. “This is the fifteenth patient who has been brought in today with exactly these symptoms. Incoherent babbling. Partial loss of motor control.”
“I still don’t understand why you called me.”
“These people’s Broca grist is going haywire,” Dahlia said. “It’s a very rare condition.”
“Have you ever seen it before?”
“Once—and that was a nano lab tech who got into some very bad grist. The etiology was quite clear.”
Sherman turned his attention back to the patient. She was asleep now, but various muscles in her neck and jaw continued to twitch.
“Fifteen,” Dahlia repeated. “Has something gotten loose from the military base?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m talking about military grist, Roger.”
For a moment, Sherman considered the possibility. But the safeguards at the base were rigid, and he made sure they were completely enfo
rced. Suddenly, Sherman felt a great weariness descend upon him.
“Oh no.”
“What did you say?”
“It’s begun.”
“What are you talking about, Roger.”
“This is an attack.”
“An attack?”
“From the Met, Dahlia.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Sherman pulled himself partially from the virtuality. He gazed up into the dark blue Triton sky. “I’ll have Major Theory send you all the information we have on this sort of weapon.”
“A weapon? So it is military grist.” Dahlia was now only a voice in Sherman’s ear. She might as well have been on the other side of the solar system. I guess that was always the problem, Sherman thought. But then his mind turned to practical matters.
“I have to go.”
“Roger, why would anyone do such a thing?”
“Communications warfare.”
“Surely you’re . . . exaggerating.”
“Maybe so. Maybe it’s a coincidence that the Broca grist of fifteen people went simultaneously haywire.”
“Is there an antidote?”
“No.”
“What?”
“No known antidote. Dahlia, I have to go.”
“But Roger, it’s your damned Army that—”
“I have to go.”
He cut the connection. He supposed he’d angered and hurt her once again. There was too much to do to worry about that. He had given her the information she requested. That should be enough.
It had never been enough.
Twenty-two
Sherman took a hopper from the base and navigated his way through New Miranda by a series of leaps from one landing pad to another. The leap pads were laid out in a seemingly erratic order, but Sherman was familiar with them and knew the best pattern to get himself home quickly.
New Miranda was a city of spires. The neo-Gothic religious leanings of the first settlers had combined with the low gravity of their new world to produce an architecture that was unique and, at times, breathtaking. There were some apartment buildings here and there, but for the most part each resident on Triton had his or her own spire, that is, families and familiar units did. There was plenty of space, and the power from the Mill produced an abundance of energy to power construction grist, which was the simplest and most efficient nano in the first place.
In most of the spires, the first five floors were fully pressurized and protected. They were usually given over to gardens and fountains. New Miranda billed itself as the “Garden City,” and there was a friendly competition among the more affluent residents in that regard. Of course, this led to a few aesthetic horrors. But there was a professional class of elite gardeners who were strongly influenced by the Greentree priest (and gardener) Father Capability, and many of the gardens were justly regarded as works of art. These were another tourist attraction on Triton, along with the nitrogen rains outside.
We seem to like going to extremes, Sherman thought as he completed another bounce in his hopper. Above the fifth floors was where most of the citizenry lived. These quarters could rise up for many hundreds of feet, and it wasn’t uncommon for a spire to have thirty or more floors, although the people normally lived in only a small portion of it. The spires were lit from the ground, and there were lights in a few windows. Once or twice a year, ice vulcanism near the south pole produced geysers of carbon ash that shot up into the atmosphere for miles. The ash was carried toward the equator as a thin, black dust. The bottoms of the spires were gray or white, but their tips were always coated with a matte black ash, as if they were great pens that had been dipped in a graphite ink. Even with the twinkling lights here and there, from above, New Miranda appeared rather ominous. The streets were barely bigger than sidewalks. Everyone traveled by hopper, or stayed at home and traveled through the grist.
With eleven bounces, Sherman was home. His final bounce was extremely precise (with calculations handled by his convert portion) and landed him, with a small attitude correction, on a small pad extended from the side of his and Dahlia’s spire. Even though it was more of a tower, Sherman still thought of it as “the house.”
Sherman lived on the thirty-third to the thirty-fifth floors. The truth was, he confined himself to a couple of rooms on floor thirty-four. Sherman had spent the last ten years as a bachelor, and every year he seemed to require less personal space. But, on Triton, every citizen of a certain standing was required to keep up a garden. What had once been civic duty had become a pleasure to Sherman, thanks to his friendship with Andre Sud, who had been tending Sherman’s garden until he’d gone on sabbatical over a year ago. Sherman’s garden was on the first five floors, and it was considered one of the prime gardens on Triton—at least ithad been when Andre was the gardener. Lately it had been going to seed. The priest whom Andre had gotten to replace himself, while a nice woman, just didn’t have Andre’s genius.
A small airlock was in place between the house and the landing pad. Sherman entered the e-mix of his home, went to the kitchen, and poured himself a glass of Merlot.
He took a sip, considered the glass. He finished off the rest of the wine in one gulp, then shunted into the virtuality.
Tonight was the New Miranda Town Meet—called into emergency session by the mayor. Sherman had a hell of a report to deliver.
They weren’t going to like it.
The New Miranda Town Meet occurred nightly—that is, every Tritonian night, which lasted two and three-quarter e-days. The mayor and chief recorder were the only people who must be physically present in some form, and the rest, like Sherman, attended in the virtuality. The virtuality was crowded and smoke-filled. There was an air of tension owing to the emergency nature of tonight’s session, but this did not keep the local politicians from their usual pleasantries and rituals. Somehow this provided a bit of comfort to Sherman. No matter what happened, he could never imagine these undisciplined outer-system democrats turning into the toadies who served Amés’s Interlocking Directorate.
He had timed his entrance to avoid some of the preliminaries, and he popped in just as the discussion was turning toward external affairs—and the coming confrontation with the Met. He was on the right-hand side of the Free Integrationist section, in his customary hard-backed chair.
“I might add,” continued the current speaker, “that there are good reasons to pay the information tariffs, even if they are not just, at the base.”
Sherman leaned so that he could look around the tall man who sat in front of him and saw that the speaker in the well was Shelet Den, a member of the Motoserra Club. The Club members could all trace their ancestry back to Uranus’s Miranda, and some of them went back to the original Argentine commune whence the Miranda settlement had originally come.
A chorus of disapproval rose from the Free Integrationists, and others, but Den bulled onward.
“Those of us who have been around these parts a bit longer, those who have more of a stake in this fair moon, are able to realize that there are times when you have togo along to get along. The Met buys our goods and, I might argue, selling them power and semi-ore is, in a way, a tax uponthem . After all, no one truly has a right to the bounty of nature. It should be enjoyed by all.”
What an amazing cookery of logic, Sherman reflected. He hadn’t imagined that Motoserra aristocratic communalism might be used to justify a fifty-five percent tax on all prime-rated merci events and shows.
“Why don’t we just give them our lovers, too!” shouted a Free Integrationist wag. “Give ’em your wife, Shelet! Share and share alike.”
“I am merely saying—” But a bell sounded, and Den’s time was, mercifully, up. Someone passed Sherman a cigar, and he dutifully fired it up.
The next speaker was a Free Integrationist, and Sherman felt a glimmer of hope—which, upon seeing who the speaker was, quickly died. Mallarmé de Ronsard was F.I., true, but he was also a cross member of the local tribe of Neo-Flare poets, the Eig
hth Chakra. Although most people choose to represent themselves in the virtuality with the same face they had in actuality, one could, of course, choose anything. De Ronsard manifested himself as a burst of shining golden light outlined with a red corona. In the center of the light was a black hole in the shape of a heart.
“I should like to begin tonight with a poem I wrote expressing our solidarity with our free-convert brothers and sisters and against the tyranny of a law that keeps them enchained. Ahem.”
De Ronsard proceeded to recite a poem:
“Freedom, writhing like the tendrils of the dawn
Burns this pale coating of skin,
This rubber of concealment,
From our frame of reason, and we stand
Revealed.
Under the skin we are one,
And we shall rise with the dawn
Of new hope, new light, together,
And shall, hand in hand,
Show the very sun a thing or two
About brightness.
And blind those—”
Here, de Ronsard became more agitated and the golden light turned bright yellow.
“—Blind those who oppress our choice by the rays of light,
The particles of hope,
Bursting forth from our own eyes.
Bursting with this new dawn
Of freedom!”
De Ronsard paused, and Sherman fought an urge to sneeze. All that talk of the sun, perhaps, combined with de Ronsard’s iconic presence.
“Freedom is the destiny of every sentient being,” de Ronsard continued. “Be they flesh. Or be they algorithmic. Be they anything that lives and breathes.”
He’s just insulted every free convert in the room, Sherman thought. Sherman happened to know that one of the free-convert colloquialisms for a bodily aspect was a “breather.” But a quick check showed that de Ronsard was actually speaking in the Arts dialect of Basis, so the fault might lie with the translating grist, and the insult be unintentional.