Queen of Angels

by Greg Bear

  Soulavier leaned against the wall in the hallway, examining his nails. He glanced at her dolefully. “Too much time, Mademoiselle,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “We have waited too long. It is going to be dark soon. We are not going to Leoganes.”

  If the second part of her message had gotten through it only made sense for the Hispaniolans to divert her to some other location. “Where?” she asked.

  “I leave that to my instincts,” Soulavier said. “Away from here, however, and soon.”

  She wondered how he had received his instructions. It was possible he had an implant though such technology was not supposed to be common on Hispaniola.

  “I tried to make a call to my superiors,” she said. “I didn’t get through.”

  He shrugged. All brightness and life seemed to have drained out of him. He inspected her with half lidded eyes, head back, mouth expressionless. “You were told that would not be possible,” he said, each word precise.

  She returned his gaze, one corner of her lips lifted, provoking. Not a neutral flaw here. “I’d still prefer to stay in these quarters,” she said.

  “That is not your decision.”

  “But I wouldn’t mind going to Leoganes.”

  “Mademoiselle, we are not children.”

  She smiled. His attitude had changed markedly; no longer her protector. No need to reinforce the change by behaving differently herself. “I never believed you were.”

  “In some ways we are very sophisticated, perhaps more than you can know. Now we go.”

  She picked up her suitcase. He took it from her with some force and followed her down the hall. They passed Jean-Claude and Roselle standing in the dining room, stone faced, hands folded. “Thank you,” Mary told them, nodding and smiling pleasantly. They seemed shocked. Jean Claude’s nostrils flared.

  “We go now,” Soulavier reiterated.

  Mary put her hand in the coat pocket. “Are they coming with us?” she asked.

  “Roselle and Jean Claude will stay here.”

  “All right,” she said. “Anything you say.”

  50

  Sitting on the lawn in front of the IPR to eat would not be wise. Besides, a cool breeze was coming off the ocean. Carol and Martin left through the rear service entrance, passing on foot between walls of concrete and down a narrow asphalt path to the woods behind the building. Martin glanced at her back as she walked ahead of him through the eucalypti. She carried a sack of sandwiches and two cartons of beer. He carried a beach blanket. She casually, gracefully kicked at a few leaves in their path, glanced over her shoulder and said, “I order you to take your mind off work for a few minutes.”

  “Tall order,” he replied.

  “There should still be…There is,” she said triumphantly, pointing. An open spot between the trees, covered with dry unmown grass. This area was beyond the borders controlled by the IPR gardeners.

  They left the path and spread the beach blanket on the grass, working in cooperative silence. They sat in unison and Carol unwrapped the sandwiches.

  The ocean breeze had followed them. Cool puffs blew through the tall slender trees. They were lightly dressed and Martin felt goose pimples rising on his arms. He glanced with small apprehension at the nearby branches; they were prone to fall when stressed. “I can’t do it,” he said, grinning.

  “What?”

  “Take my mind off work.”

  “I didn’t really expect you to,” she said.

  “But it’s nice out here anyway. A break.”

  “So why do you think I dragged you here?” she asked.

  “You dragged me?” he said, biting the sandwich, glancing up at her speculatively. “Seduction.”

  “We’re going to be more intimate than that soon,” she reminded him.

  He nodded and replaced his expression of musing speculation with a pragmatic face. “We’re here to get things straight before we go in.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ve traveled with you three times. We’re very compatible in the Country.” He opened her carton of beer and handed it to her.

  “We are indeed,” she said. “Maybe too much so.”

  He pondered that for a moment. “Ice skaters. I know a married couple who are ice skaters. They’re tied together off the ice as much as when they work on the ice.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Carol said.

  “I always thought we could do that.”

  She smiled almost shyly. “Well. We gave it a try.”

  “You know, those ice skaters, they’re wonderful people, but they’re not exceptionally bright. Maybe we’re too smart for our own good.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” Carol said.

  “Then what?”

  “We’re simpatico deep inside,” she said. “I’ve never known that kind of thing with another person…Of course, I’ve never gone into human Country with anyone but you. The problem is, we have too many overlays between the selves we see in Country and what we see here, now. Outside.”

  Martin had considered that many times, always trying to find arguments around it. Carol’s coming to the same conclusion saddened him. That meant it was probably the truth.

  “In a dream…” she began, then paused to take another bite of sandwich. “Have you ever had a dream where you’ve experienced an emotion so strong, so true, that in the dream you start to cry? Cry as if all the pain you’ve ever felt was being released and you were being purified?”

  Martin shook his head. “Not in my dreams,” he said.

  “Well I think we had something like that in Country a couple of times. Working so closely, like brother and sister or anima and animus. I think the part of me that is male…closely matches the part of you that is female.”

  “That should be good,” he said.

  “It is…as long as they’re pushed up against each other. In Country. But you know your personality in Country differs from what I see out here, out front.”

  “That’s inevitable,” he said. “Still, you’ve seen what I’m really like.”

  She laughed then shook her head sadly. “That isn’t enough. The overlays. Remember them. You know as well as I what we’re made of—the whole ball of wax. Top to bottom, all the layers.”

  He conceded that much. “But I don’t find them a hindrance…your overlays I mean. I always keep sight of the self I meet in Country.”

  “Martin, I irritated the hell out of you.”

  He gave her a startled look. “Isn’t that…”

  “I mean I could tell I really bothered you.”

  “I presume I bothered you, as well.”

  “Yes. We just weren’t sympatico outside. We couldn’t get in the spin together. You know I tried, we tried.”

  “Transference. Cross transference,” he suggested vaguely.

  “We’re going to be together again,” she continued, gazing at him steadily and sternly, “and God knows of all times, we have to have our act together now.”

  He agreed with a slow nod.

  “I’ve been feeling this friction between us,” she said.

  “Not friction. Fading hope,” Martin corrected.

  “I’ve been very realistic,” she continued. “I hope you are, too.”

  “Oh, not so realistic,” he confessed with a sigh. He did not want to spread his thoughts out before her, give in to that hopeless urge to arouse her pity by telling her how lonely it had been in the past year and how difficult and how many times he had thought of her in terms of a home and peace and tranquility. Carol, among her many overlays, kept a barrier to be erected especially in case of pity. Still, moth to a flame, he circled in his thoughts around that past misery and realized why he had allowed himself to be Fausted.

  Anything new was better than self pity.

  “Do you think it would be wrong to go up Country together again?” she asked.

  “Too late to reconsider. You’re the best I can hope for on such short notice.” Martin looked at her
to see if that might have stung a bit. Then, shaking his head and grinning, “Or the best I could hope to find anytime.”

  “That’s a problem, though.”

  “Not such a problem,” he said with resolve, folding the sandwich wrapper meticulously. “I’m a mensch. I’ve stood up to bigger disappointments. And I didn’t really think we could make it work again.”

  “No?” she said.

  He shook his head. “But I had to try. Let’s change the subject. You went into Jill’s Country. What was that like?”

  Carol leaned forward, shifting gears quickly and gladly. Her sudden brightness and enthusiasm stung him; she loved to talk this with him, work with him professionally and use his surface self this way. She would soon mesh with him in deeper intimacy than that experienced by any married couple but there would be no in between. No calm domesticity. None of what he had half consciously been considering behind the work; the quiet hours in a cabin somewhere snow outside reading slate news watching LitVid. Smiling at each other in peace and constancy.

  “It was wonderful,” she said. “Quite extraordinary, and nothing like…not really at all like going into a human. Jill isn’t self aware. It’s brilliant, the greatest thinker in the world—probably a better mind than any individual human. But it doesn’t know who it is.”

  “So I’ve gathered.”

  “Still, in her early years, its early years, Jill managed to assemble something remarkably like Country. Her programmers discovered it a few years ago, and Samuel John Baker—he’s the third primary designer and programmer, below Roger Atkins and Caroline Pastor—he called me in after IPR was closed. I’d known him in school. He’d taken psych med and therapy for a couple of years as supplement to thinker theory. I’ve had a fair amount of thinker theory…You know that.

  “We worked together to see why Jill had a Country. In its early phase, fifteen years ago, Jill had been based on deep profiles of the five main designers, Atkins, Pastor, Baker, Joseph Wu, and George Mobus. They’d submitted to hypothalamic therapy grade surgical nano scans, back when that was a fairly experimental procedure. They distilled the patterns they’d found without really knowing what they meant, and tried incorporating them into Jill. Jill wasn’t called that back then. Atkins used that name as a whim later. An old girlfriend or something.”

  Martin listened intently.

  “What they did was like throwing dead meat into a centrifuge and hoping it would grow back into an animal again. Real Frankenstein desperation. Or maybe it was brilliance. Anyway—”

  “It worked,” Martin said.

  “After a fashion. We can guess now why it worked at all—they were using personality organization algorithms, and they’re robust and almost universal. Put those kinds of patterns into any appropriate free energy medium and they’ll start afresh.

  “Jill acquired something from all her designers. As it turns out, it wasn’t enough to spark her into self-awareness. But combined with what she already had, a tremendous thinker capacity and memory store, it added real depth and made her something unlike any thinker created before.”

  “Even AXIS?”

  “Now that’s a good question. AXIS is simpler than Jill, by necessity. But AXIS is based on personality scans of Atkins and the others, as well; earlier, less complete scans. Atkins claims that AXIS will probably become self aware before Jill does. He says that in private, anyway. He thinks they might have cluttered up poor Jill with too many conflicting algorithms, however much depth and quality they gave it.”

  “Sounds mystical.”

  “Oh, it is and sometimes he is, too. Atkins. Very moralistic. But he honestly believes that AXIS is a purer case.”

  “So how about the Country.”

  “The algorithms Jill acquired automatically search for a substrate of mental internal language. Jill didn’t have any. So the algorithms began making some up, after the fact. The whole process must have taken nine or ten years, so Jill was hardly an infant, but the algorithms began soaking up details from memory and sensorium, working backward to create a kind of Country. When Mobus and Baker found this, they thought it was a disaster. They thought they’d found a self-generated virus in the thinker.”

  Martin laughed. “I’ll bet.”

  “They tried to lock it off, but they couldn’t. Not without closing down Jill’s higher functions. Finally, after a year of worry and investigation, Baker called on me. He’d decided maybe they really had a Country as you’d described. They did.”

  “Why didn’t he call on me?”

  “Because you were up to your neck and he couldn’t justify the publicity.”

  Martin made a wry face. “So what was it like?”

  “Sweet, actually,” Carol said. “Uncomplicated and direct. A thinker’s land of faerie. Simple images of human beings, especially the programmers and designers as first perceived by Jill. I was reminded of old twentieth century computer graphics. Quaint, slick, clean and mathematical. Lots of abstractions and base thinker design language given visual shape. Lots of nonvisual spaces difficult to interpret. Visiting Jill’s basement made me feel as Roger Atkins must—I really came to like her. It.”

  Martin, his curiosity appeased, dismissed this with a restless nod. “Doesn’t sound like a complex Country, though.”

  Carol pursed her lips. “Not really, I suppose.”

  “So you haven’t gone up Country since the last time we did it together.”

  “No, I suppose you’d say I haven’t. But I spent over a dozen hours in triplex. That should count as exercise at least.”

  “Please don’t think I’m belittling the work you’ve done. You must know that if I couldn’t have you along with me, I probably wouldn’t have agreed to this.”

  “‘Probably,’” she repeated wryly.

  He lifted his eyebrow and looked down at the blanket. “Have you given any thought to the possibility that we’ll be in danger?”

  “Not really,” she said. “What makes you think so?”

  “First of all, Goldsmith. He’s rough ocean beneath thick clouds. We only see the peaceful cloudscape. But what really worries me is not having a buffer. We’ll be inside each other, you and I and Goldsmith, fully exposed to Country conditions. Realtime. No delay.”

  She reached her hand out and grasped his shoulder. “Sounds like the real thing to me. Quite an adventure.”

  Martin looked at her with concern, hoping she was not being too confident; worry might serve as a kind of defense up Country. “Have we got everything straight?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then let’s cut our break short and get back to work.”

  “All right. Thank you.”

  “For what?” he asked, puzzled.

  As they stood, she hugged him tightly and held him at arm’s length. “For being understanding and being a colleague,” she said.

  “Very important,” he muttered as they folded the blanket and picked up the empty beer cartons.

  “Damn right,” Carol said.

  51

  Tropical night, blaze of stars, rushing in a black limousine driven by ghosts through a black countryside, seated across from a brooding and unhappy man who had said not a word for the last half an hour, Mary Choy watched the procession of villages fields scrub more villages, black asphalt road. The limousine moved smoothly up steep grades onto curving mountain highways.

  She had touched her pistol often enough to find it familiar and not very reassuring; if she had to use it very likely she would die anyway. So why had Reeve given it to her?

  Because no pd enjoyed the thought of going in harm’s way absolutely powerless. She thought of Shlege’s mistress in the comb Selector jiltz firing wildly with her flechettes.

  “We are getting near,” Soulavier said. He leaned to look through the windows, rubbed his hands together, bowed his head and rubbed his eyes and cheeks, making preparations for something he would not enjoy. He lifted his head and regarded her sadly, steadily.

  “Near to what?”
Mary asked.

  He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he turned away. “Something special,” he said.

  Mary clenched her teeth to control a chill. “I’d like to know what I’m getting myself into.”

  “You get yourself into nothing,” Soulavier said. “Your bosses get you into things. You are a lackey. Do Americans still use that word?” He glanced at her in imperious query, nose raised. “You have no control over your fate. Nor do I. You have made your commitments as have I. You follow your path. As do I.”

  “That all sounds terribly fateful,” Mary said. She contemplated again pulling the pistol and forcing him to bring the limousine to a stop and let her out. Weak contemplation, no action. She could not lose herself in the countryside for long; it was no problem finding a single lost human today or even selecting an individual out of a crowd; no problem even for Hispaniola, twenty years behind the times.

  Soulavier asked the limousine something in Creole. The limousine replied in a light feminine voice. “Two more minutes,” he said to Mary. “You are going to the house of Colonel Sir in the mountains, which mountains do not matter.”

  She felt relief. That did not sound like a death sentence; it sounded more like diplomatic card games. “Why are you unhappy, then?” she asked. “He’s your chosen leader.”

  “I am loyal to Colonel Sir,” Soulavier said. “I am not unhappy to visit his house. I have sadness for those who oppose him, such as yourself.”

  Mary shook her head solemnly. “I’ve done nothing to oppose him.”

  Soulavier waved that aside contemptuously, snapping, “You are part of all his troubles. He is beset from all sides. A man such as he, noble as he, should not face the gratitude of baying wild dogs.”

  Mary softened her voice. “I am no more a cause of his troubles than you are. I came here seeking a suspect in a crime.”