A huge craft loomed at the base of the bluff. A cargo vessel probably; far too large and certainly too slow. Beyond lay an array of robot communications vessels, without the bubble of a life support system. He rejected those, too, ran on.
She surged behind him. They kept electromagnetic silence now.
His breath came faster and he sucked at the thick, cold air, then had to stop for a moment in the shadow of the cruiser to catch his breath. Above he thought he could make out the faint green tinge of the atmospheric cap in the membrane that held Gray’s air. He would have to find his way out through the holes in it, too, in an unfamiliar ship.
He glanced around, searching. To the side stood a small craft, obviously Jump type. No one worked at its base. In the murky fog that shrouded the mud flat he could see a few men and robo-servers beside nearby ships. They would wonder what he was up to. He decided to risk it. He broke from cover and ran swiftly to the small ship. The hatch opened easily.
Gaining lift with the ship was not simple, and so he called on his time-sense accelerations, to the max. That would cost him mental energy later. Right now, he wanted to be sure there was a later at all.
Roaring flame drove him into the pearly sky.
Finding the exit hole in the membrane proved easier. He flew by pure eye-balled grace, slamming the acceleration until it was nearly a straight-line problem, like shooting a rifle. Fighting a mere sixth of a g had many advantages.
And now, where to go?
A bright arc flashed behind Benjan’s eyelids, showing the fans of purpling blood vessels. He heard the dark, whispering sounds of an inner void. A pit opened beneath him and the falling sensation began—he had run over the boundaries this body could attain. His mind had overpowered the shrieking demands of the muscles and nerves, and now he was shutting down, harking to the body’s calls. ...
And she?
I am here, in love. The voice came warm and moist, wrapping him in it as he faded, faded, into a gray of his own making.
She greeted him at the station.
She held shadowed inlets of rest. A cup brimming with water,
a distant chime of bells, the sweet damp air of early morning.
He remembered it so well, the ritual of meditation in his fleet training,
the days of quiet devotion through simple duties that strengthened the mind.
Everything had been of a piece then.
Before Gray grew to greatness, before conflict and aching doubt,
before the storm that raged red through his mind, like—
—Wind, snarling his hair, a hard winter afternoon as he walked back to his quarters. ...
—then, instantly, the cold prickly sensation of diving through shimmering spheres of water in zero gravity. The huge bubbles trembled and refracted the yellow light into his eyes. He laughed.
—scalding black rock faces rose on Gray. Wedges thrust upward as the tortured skin of the planet writhed and buckled. He watched it by remote camera, seeing only a few hundred yards through the choking clouds of carbon dioxide. He felt the rumble of earthquakes, the ominous murmur of a mountain chain being born.
—a man running, scuttling like an insect across the tortured face of Gray. Above him the great membrane clasped the atmosphere, pressing it down on him, pinning him, a beetle beneath glass. But it is Fleet that wishes to pin him there, to snarl him in the threads of duty. And as the ship arcs upward at the sky he feels a tide of joy, of freedom.
—twisted shrieking trees, leaves like leather and apples that gleam blue. Moisture beading on fresh crimson grapes beneath a white-hot star.
—sharp synapses, ferrite cores, spinning drums of cold electrical memory. Input and output. Copper terminals (male or female?), scanners, channels, electrons pouring through p-n-p junctions. Memory mired in quantum noise.
Index. Catalog. Transform. Fourier components, the infinite wheeling dance of Laplace and Gauss and Hermite.
And through it all she is there with him, through centuries to keep him whole and sane and yet he does not know, across such vaults of time and space ... who is he?
Many: us. One: I. Others: you. Did you think that the marriage of true organisms and fateful machines with machine minds would make a thing that could at last know itself? This is a new order of being but it is not a god.
Us: one, We: you, He: I.
And yet you suspect you are ... different ... somehow.
The Majiken ships were peeling off from their orbits, skating down through the membrane holes, into my air!
They gazed down, tense and wary, these shock troops in their huddled lonely carriages. Not up, where I lurk.
For I am iceball and stony-frag, fruit of the icesteroids. Held in long orbit for just such a (then) far future. (Now) arrived.
Down I fall in my myriads. Through the secret membrane passages I/we/you made decades before, knowing that a bolthole is good. And that bolts slam true in both directions.
Down, down—through gray decks I have cooked, artful ambrosias, pewter terraces I have sculpted to hide my selves as they guide the rocks and bergs—after them!—
The Majiken ships, ever-wary of fire from below, never thinking to glance up. I fall upon them in machine-gun violences, my ices and stones ripping their craft, puncturing. They die in round-mouthed surprise, these warriors.
I, master of hyperbolic purpose, shred them.
I, orbit-master to Gray.
Conflict has always provoked anxiety within him, a habit he could never
correct, and so:
—in concert we will rise to full congruence with F(x)
and sum over all variables and integrate over the contour
encapsulating all singularities. It is right and meet so to do.
He sat comfortably, rocking on his heels in meditation position.
Water dripped in a cistern nearby and he thought his mantra,
letting the sound curl up from within him. A thought entered,
flickered across his mind as though a bird,
and left.
She she she she
The mantra returned in its flowing green rhythmic beauty and he entered
the crystal state of thought within thought,
consciousness regarding itself without detail or structure.
The air rested upon him, the earth groaned beneath with the weight of continents,
shouting sweet stars wheeled in a chanting cadence above.
He was in place and focused, man and boy and elder at once,
officer of Fleet, mind encased in matter, body summed into mind
—and she came to him, cool balm of aid, succor, yet beneath her palms
his muscles warmed, warmed—
His universe slides into night. Circuits close. Oscillating electrons carry information, senses, fragments of memory.
I swim in the blackness. There are long moments of no sensations, nothing to see or hear or feel. I grope—
Her? No, she is not here either. Cannot be. For she has been dead these centuries and lives only in your station, where she knows not what has become of herself.
At last, I seize upon some frag, will it to expand. A strange watery vision floats into view. A man is peering at him. There is no detail behind the man, only a blank white wall. He wears the blue uniform of Fleet and he cocks an amused eyebrow at:
Benjan.
“Recognize me?” the man says.
“Of course. Hello, Katonji, you bastard.”
“Ah, rancor. A nice touch. Unusual in a computer simulation, even one as sophisticated as this.”
“What? Comp—”
And Benjan knows who he is.
In a swirling instant he sends out feelers. He finds boundaries, cool gray walls he cannot penetrate, dead patches, great areas of gray emptiness, of no memory. What did he look like when he was young? Where was his first home located? That girl—at age fifteen? Was that her? Her? He grasps for her—
And knows. He cannot answer. He does not know.
He is only a piece of Benjan.
“You see now? Check it. Try something—to move your arm, for instance. You haven’t got arms.” Katonji makes a thin smile. “Computer simulations do not have bodies, though they have some of the perceptions that come from bodies.”
“P—perceptions from where?”
“From the fool Benjan, of course.”
“Me.”
“He didn’t realize, having burned up all that time on Gray, that we can penetrate all diagnostics. Even the station’s. Technologies, even at the level of sentient molecular plasmas, have logs and files. Their data is not closed to certain lawful parties.”
He swept an arm (not a real one, of course) at the man’s face. Nothing. No contact. All right, then—“And these feelings are—”
“Mere memories. Bits from Benjan’s station self.” Katonji smiles wryly.
He stops, horrified. He does not exist. He is only binary bits of information scattered in ferrite memory cores. He has no substance, is without flesh. “But ... but, where is the real me?” he says at last.
“That’s what you’re going to tell us.”
“I don’t know. I was ... falling. Yes, over Gray—”
“And running, yes—I know. That was a quick escape, an unexpectedly neat solution.”
“It worked,” Benjan said, still in a daze. “But it wasn’t me?”
“In a way it was. I’m sure the real Benjan has devised some clever destination, and some tactics. You—his ferrite inner self—will tell us, now, what he will do next.”
“He’s got something, yes. ...”
“Speak now,” Katonji said impatiently.
Stall for time. “I need to know more.”
“This is a calculated opportunity,” Katonji said off-handedly. “We had hoped Benjan would put together a solution from things he had been thinking about recently, and apparently it worked.”
“So you have breached the station?” Horror flooded him, black bile.
“Oh, you aren’t a complete simulation of Benjan, just recently stored conscious data and a good bit of subconscious motivation. A truncated personality, it is called.”
As Katonji speaks, Benjan sends out tracers and feels them flash through his being. He summons up input and output. There are slabs of useless data, a latticed library of the mind. He can expand in polynomials, integrate along an orbit, factorize, compare coefficients—so they used my computational self to make up part of this shambling construct.
More. He can fix his field—there, just so—and fold his hands, repeating his mantra. Sound wells up and folds over him, encasing him in a moment of silence. So the part of me that still loves the Sabal Game, feels drawn to the one-is-all side of being human—they got that, too.
Panic. Do something. Slam on the brakes —
He registers Katonji’s voice, a low drone that becomes deeper and deeper as time slows. The world outside stills. His thought processes are far faster than an ordinary man’s. He can control his perception rate.
Somehow, even though he is a simulation, he can tap the real Benjan’s method of meditation, at least to accelerate his time sense. He feels a surge of anticipation. He hums the mantra again and feels the world around him alter. The trickle of input through his circuits slows and stops. He is running cool and smooth. He feels himself cascading down through ruby-hot levels of perception, flashing back through Benjan’s memories.
He speeds himself. He lives again the moments over Gray. He dives through the swampy atmosphere and swims above the world he made. Molecular master, he is awash in the sight-sound-smell, an ocean of perception.
Katonji is still saying something. Benjan allows time to alter again and Katonji’s drone returns, rising—
Benjan suddenly perceives something behind Katonji’s impassive features. “Why didn’t you follow Benjan immediately? You could find out where he was going. You could have picked him up before he scrambled your tracker beams.”
Katonji smiles slightly. “Quite perceptive, aren’t you? Understand, we wish only Benjan’s compliance.”
“But if he died, he would be even more silent.”
“Precisely so. I see you are a good simulation.”
“I seem quite real to myself.”
“Ha! Don’t we all. A computer who jests. Very much like Benjan, you are. I will have to speak to you in detail, later. I would like to know just why he failed us so badly. But for the moment we must know where he is now. He is a legend, and can be allowed neither to escape nor to die.”
Benjan feels a tremor of fear.
“So where did he flee? You’re the closest model of Benjan.”
I summon winds from the equator, cold banks of sullen cloud from the poles, and bid them crash. They slam together to make a tornado such as never seen on Earth. Lower gravity, thicker air—a cauldron. It twirls and snarls and spits out lightning knives. The funnel touches down, kisses my crust—
—and there are Majiken beneath, whole canisters of them, awaiting my kiss.
Everyone talks about the weather, but only I do anything about it.
They crack open like ripe fruit.
—and you dwindle again, hiding from their pursuing electrons. Falling away into your microstructure.
They do not know how much they have captured. They think in terms of bits and pieces and he/you/we/I are not. So they do not know this—
You knew this had to come
As worlds must turn
And primates must prance
And givers must grab
So they would try to wrap their world around yours.
They are not dumb.
And smell a beautiful beast slouching toward Bethlehem.
Benjan coils in upon himself. He has to delay Katonji. He must lie—
—and at this rogue thought, scarlet circuits fire. Agony. Benjan flinches as truth verification overrides trigger inside himself.
“I warned you.” Katonji smiles, lips thin and dry.
Let them kill me.
“You’d like that, I know. No, you will yield up your little secrets.”
Speak. Don’t just let him read your thoughts. “Why can’t you find him?”
“We do not know. Except that your sort of intelligence has gotten quite out of control, that we do know. We will take it apart gradually, to understand it—you, I suppose, included.”
“You will ...”
“Peel you, yes. There will be nothing left. To avoid that, tell us now.”
—and the howling storm breaches him, bowls him over, shrieks and tears and devours him. The fire licks flesh from his bones, chars him, flames burst behind his eyelids—
And he stands. He endures. He seals off the pain. It becomes a raging, white-hot point deep in his gut.
Find the truth. “After ... after ... escape, I imagine—yes, I am certain—he would go to the poles.”
“Ah! Perfect. Quite plausible, but—which pole?” Katonji turns and murmurs something to someone beyond Benjan’s view. He nods, turns back and says, “We will catch him there. You understand, Fleet cannot allow a manifestation of his sort to remain free after he has flouted our authority.”
“Of course,” Benjan says between clenched teeth.
(But he has no teeth, he realizes. Perceptions are but data, bits strung together in binary. But they feel like teeth, and the smoldering flames in his belly make acrid sweat trickle down his brow.)
“If we could have anticipated him, before he got on 3D. ...” Katonji mutters to himself “Here, have some more—”
Fire lances. Benjan wants to cry out and go on screaming forever. A frag of him begins his mantra. The word slides over and around itself and rises between him and the wall of pain. The flames lose their sting. He views them at a distance, their cobalt facets cool and remote, as though they have suddenly become deep blue veins of ice, fire going into glacier.
He feels the distant gnawing of them. Perhaps, in the tick of time, they will devour his substance. But the place wh
ere he sits, the thing he has become, can recede from them. And as he waits, the real Benjan is moving. And yes, he does know where. ...
Tell me true, these bastards say. All right—
“Demonax crater. At the rim of the South Polar glacier.”
Katonji checks. The verification indices bear out the truth of it. The man laughs with triumph.
All truths are partial. A portion of what Benjan is/was/will be lurks there.
Take heart, true Benjan.
For she is we and we are all together,
we mere Ones who are born to suffer.
Did you think you would come out of this long trip alive?
Remember, we are dealing with the most nasty of all species the planet
has ever produced.
Deftly, deftly—
We converge. The alabaster Earthglow guides us. Demonax crater lies around us as we see the ivory lances of their craft descend.
They come forth to inspect the ruse we have gathered ourselves into. We seem to be an entire ship and buildings, a shiny human construct of lunar grit. We hold still, though that is not our nature.
Until they enter us.
We are tiny and innumerable but we do count. Microbial tongues lick. Membranes stick.
Some of us vibrate like eardrums to their terrible swift cries.
They will discover eventually. They will find him out.
(Moisture spatters upon the walkway outside. Angry dark clouds boil up from the horizon.)
They will peel him then. Sharp and cold and hard, now it comes, but, but—
(Waves hiss on yellow sand. A green sun wobbles above the seascape. Strange birds twitter and call.)
Of course, in countering their assault upon the station, I shall bring all my hoarded assets into play.
And we all know that I cannot save everyone.
Don’t you?
They come at us through my many branches. Up the tendrils of ceramic and steel. Through my microwave dishes and phased arrays. Sounding me with gamma rays and traitor cyber-personas.
They have been planning this for decades. But I have known it was coming for centuries.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 60