by Robert Reed
Yellowknife, now and always, has a few thousand citizens.
No Ghosts. No World-Net links. And the AIs are minimal and quite simple in their nature.
Steward thinks how he used to know every Yellowknife face, if not every name, and how it felt to be in a crowded room and know some fact about everyone. A hamlet like Yellowknife is built from people. Brulé is built from strangers leavened with people, a few, and sometimes it is all he can do to be out in public and not feel the strangers pressing in on him. Even now. Even after spending half his life in this place, trying hard to purge himself of these alien feelings. This sense of not belonging. Like a Flower might feel, he thinks, and he laughs to himself.
The floater is descending now. Chiffon makes a sound and turns to him with her hands folded around the living white purse in her lap, her breath fragrant and cool and nervous-quick. Her dress is clinging. He hadn’t noticed it before. He can see dark nipples muscling their way up through the fabric, as broad and long as the tips of his little fingers, and she makes the sound again and looks up through the round canopy, confessing, “We don’t have so many in Quito.”
“So many?”
“Stars,” she says, looking at him and smiling again.
“No?” He glances at the moon, emerald green and cloaked in a deep newborn atmosphere that’s sheathed under a monomolecular cocoon, the moon’s water and soil manufactured from Belt materials and assorted comets. Below the full moon, stretching in a neat glittering arc from horizon to horizon, are an assortment of factories and fusion plants interwoven with hyperfiber tubes. The skyhooks themselves are slender and dark and rise up out of Quito and New Brasilia to link with them. Spinning wheels and cylinders are in even higher orbits, and beyond the moon, scattered through local space, are the Apollo asteroids and several thousand captured comets, all of them settled, all of them wet and warm and dressed up in their transparent coats so nothing boils or drifts away.
“You’re from Quito,” he remarks.
She nods and shoots him one of her patented smiles.
Kross—once called Mercury—has set. Morning—once called Venus—is down too. Cradle—still Mars to the astrologically inclined—may be up but it’s too dull and dark to show. Jupiter is and has always been Jupiter, King of the Gods. It’s high and bright and attended by its various bright terraformed moons. Steward wonders about Saturn. Probably hiding somewhere. He wonders what Flowers know about the System’s geography, deciding they’re probably not ignorant. Somewhere he has heard that their nervous systems are designed to be programmed with a minimum of fuss, and their AI tutors work them while they’re still inside their artificial wombs. Geography makes sense, he thinks. Sure. A Flower needs to be able to chat with customers, filling the quiet gaps, and there must be a lot of varied travelers coming through Quito. From everywhere, he thinks. Probably homesick, too.
Steward doesn’t feel like a customer.
He remembers Chiffon telling the whore that she was waiting for her owner, lying then or lying later to him. Or maybe lying both times. He recalls someone saying that Flowers, like all expert lovers, lie easily and well. There’s no better proof of intelligence, he reasons. He tells himself to be careful, don’t treat her like some simpleminded child. And always be careful, don’t take every word as the absolute truth.
He glances to the north and sees a lumpy chain of clouds moving away from Brulé, rainboys herding them. Sometimes the clouds fill with lightning. They turn pinkish and orange and a hard sharp blue at their cores, looking like strange living creatures for those moments. The rainboys themselves are shaped like enormous teardrops, perfect as that sounds, and they twist and dart around the clouds. This is the storm that hit earlier. The wind is helping it north, but the rainboys use lassos of plasma to adjust the direction and speed—dispensing rain to whichever Freestate or City-State or Farmstead pays for the privilege.
The cool seamless voice of the pilot announces, “We are landing.”
Steward’s home is inside a long shaggy building, low and rounded and flanked by identical buildings. Everywhere are the same square floater pads on the roofs and the same tiny swimming pools full of green moonlight. Bushes and trees and vines grow half-wild, tangled and mysterious, and most of the visible windows are darkened. The scene doesn’t require people, or invite them. It’s all a poor neighborhood likely never to improve again.
A woman—a human woman—would insult what she saw if she knew better, or she would say nothing at all, and either way Steward would feel an obligation to explain or apologize. But Flowers are set apart from human values. Or so the advertisements on World-Net claim. They give love and companionship without making judgments…another reason why they’re so popular wherever the laws allow them.
Not in Brulé, he thinks. So what is she doing here?
And the floater sets down, the AI thanking Steward for his patronage. He glances at the tab and pays, then he uses a special green-black card and code number to blank the AI’s memory of this trip and transaction. It’s his custom. No one can trace him home now. The glass canopy opens and the air turns summer-hot and damp. They climb out and Steward grips Chiffon’s arm, and the floater crackles and lifts. Then they walk down a staircase, and the hallway senses them, teasing awake the lights in the ceiling. The hallway is endless and curling to afford the illusion of privacy. Its walls are white and scuffed and dead in spots. The carpeting is dead down the middle, killed by feet. Chiffon is alert. Tense. He glances at her eyes, big and impossibly blue and darting, and he notices how the dress clings to her body like a white, white layer of skin. “This way,” he offers. “Here.” He finds himself squeezing the arm, feeling an unexpected firmness laid over her delicate bones.
His door recognizes him. It says, “Steward—”
“—with a friend,” and the big mag-locks, massive enough to serve a vault, cut their power and release. It’s a very secure home. Very. “Make yourself comfortable,” he says.
“I am.” Her tone implies there is no other state besides comfort. “I’m just fine, Steward. Thank you.”
He feels giddy. He came here telling himself that he would leave and do some work for himself, only here he stands, numbed, thinking about turning on a light or doing some small host-type thing. Why would she ever get herself into this mess? he wonders. Alone and surviving on a stranger’s kindness. A Flower knows no pain. It’s a sobering thought. The typical Flower is raised in a special brothel where candles burn scented wax and the foods are rich and sweet and there is no suffering. He thinks of the whores and their poor chessmen. He doesn’t agree with the whores, not in the least, but his Yellowknife sensibilities tell him that a Flower’s life is no way to acquire an education. He has half an urge to lift her and shake her hard. He wants to show her the honest shape of the world.
She says, “Steward?” and he turns.
Miss Luscious Chiffon is kneeling on the floor, on the healthy living carpet, with the hem of her dress in both hands and a knowing, wide smile beaming up at him. She has such a pretty face and big eyes, her hands lifting the dress and the fabric crinkling and sparkling. That’s why it’s clinging, he thinks. There’s a potent static charge being generated. Not for the last time, he remembers the girl in Yellowknife and the smell of the crushed green vegetation mixing with the smell of her loins, and the big eyes watching him then and waiting, trusting in him. He blinks and breathes deeply, once and again, aware of his heart beating too high in his chest. He has been uncontrollably aroused for nearly half an hour. His penis hurts and the dress is off and he stares at the swollen nipples, like plums, and the wide hips and a Flower’s magnificent clitoris, fan-shaped and glistening and huge. Chiffon is folding the dress and watching him. She seems so pretty, yet there is something hard beneath the pretty features. There’s a toughness that he can’t quite explain. And there! What is that? He sees a bandage on the inside of her leg, and the white crusted clotting foam, and he wonders what has happened and feels such an enormous ache for her.
Something is going on. He knows it now, and he wonders what is happening, everything so crazy and his heart filling his chest and her dropping the folded dress to the floor and pressing it down with one hand, a few staticy sparks showing inside the white fabric. He thinks of lightning inside distant clouds. He remembers something he once read about ordinary static charges being brighter and hotter than the surface of the sun—for a moment, in a miniscule space—and he starts to kneel and then reaches for something too cool to burn. That’s how he thinks of it. It’s silly, but that’s how he thinks.
2
Garden is a gemstone. I love it. It is peaceful and warm, blessed with skies like few others, deep and blue like its seas, and jade green where the land drifts in the gentle currents. Life and life and more life. Beautiful life. Inspired life. But what makes it truly precious to all of humanity is its people and their unique foundation…The Prophet Adam’s descendants are good and kind and full of love. The typical Gardener knows the value of leisure, of noncompetitive fun, his or her tailored genes designed to accent those qualities that lie dormant and unrecognized in so many of us, sadly…I admire these people. I spent several weeks with them, sharing their feasts and their boundless love, and when I left them I cried and they cried and I went away with my self empty of jealousy and aggression and all those terrible emotions that poison the soul. And I found myself more in touch with the worlds around me. More perceptive. More understanding of those things that seemed at odds with me and my world…
—excerpt from a traveler’s notebook, available through System-Net
Toby—the future despot—wakes up feeling crushed by the stale air of the little room. So he stands and opens the window and lies down again, drifting away to the chattering sounds of monkeys. He starts to dream. He dreams about walking on the island where he was a child. He sees himself cloaked in a strange black uniform, eerily familiar, a black sack drawn over his face, the fabric made of some slick and pliable hyperfiber. He walks down a trail that twists around a stand of whitesmear palms, and Toby’s family is waiting in the glade beyond. He sees his father and his mother, plus his assorted cousins and such. The family looks at him and wonders about his identity, pointing and growing a little scared.
But it’s me! he says. Me!
They don’t recognize his voice. They begin to cower in his presence.
I’m Toby! he swears. Toby! Don’t you know me?
Apparently not. His father comes forward—an old man, gray and a bit feeble—and says: What’s your name?
Toby! Toby! Toby!
But no, his father doesn’t believe him. With a strange sharp voice he repeats himself: What’s your name?
I’m your son, Toby! TOBY!
Come on! Wake up and tell me your name!
Toby opens his eyes and sits up in bed, sweating, his head swimming and his stomach full of nothing. A voice from the window asks, “What’s your name?” Toby looks. A large black bird is perched on the ledge just outside the window, its head tilted and one black eye giving a curious stare. “Hey!” it snaps. “What’s your name?”
Toby says, “Shoo!”
“Mr. Shoo!” says the bird. “I have a message for you, Mr. Shoo.” It pauses, the head rolling from side to side, and then it tells him, “Eat my green donkey dick.”
Toby throws his pillow at the window. The bird waits calmly and watches the pillow hit the rigid screen and fall away. It’s some kind of gene-tampered bird, he thinks. Someone has given it a mouth.
“Suck my saggy tits, Mr. Shoo!”
Toby rushes the window, shouting, and the bird wheels and flies away with a crowlike squawk and bearing. Toby pauses and tries to listen past the chattering monkeys. He wonders who did it. Vandals might have done it, he hopes, and just ignores it. He shuts the window and tells himself that it must be vandals, random and perverted, because it has been a long time since he has done anything. Weeks, or maybe months. Or does it just seem that long?
Toby begins to pace.
Wiping his sleepy face with both webbed hands, he arches his back and cracks his joints and picks at his nose while he speculates.
What if it is him?
What then?
It makes him shiver just to think it might be so.
The apartment is cramped and miserable for anyone born on watery, warm Garden. It’s two rooms and a bath, plus a short empty balcony. The bedroom has a single window, facing north, and a bed and hideaway closets. The yard below seems constricted. Underneath the balcony is a round swimming pool with a narrow soft-coral deck and a fringe of half-wild fruiting bushes. The fruits are ripe. Birds and monkeys are waging a noisy war over the prizes. Toby stands at the window and looks across the yard, feeling typically sad about his sad life. Each building is a gene-tailored tree. The walls and floors and roofs are indifferent to sunlight but still vegetable in nature. They feed on electrical currents carried through a fine mesh of buried wires. The gene-tailoring allows them to use energy from Brulé’s own power net, their wood fixing carbon dioxide into long-chain carbohydrates. Miniscule pipes are buried alongside the wire mesh, assuring a kind of vascular system. Workmen had set up the wires and pipes ages ago, laying out the pattern of curved rooms and curling hallways, leaving gaps for the doorways and sewage lines and grocery lines and the World-Net linkups.
All the essentials.
The buildings don’t grow anymore. The living wood is fed enough to maintain itself, no more. Broadest at their base and flat where the floaters perch, they are covered with a thick, durable bark, rough and dark, and layers of infesting vines and epiphytes and an assortment of odd parasites. Where sunlight is strongest, the outer walls resemble steep, jungled hillsides. Birds nest and rats nest and all sorts of peculiar invented creatures hide in the cracks and little holes. Just by living here, by sheer osmosis, Toby has gotten to know the local fauna. He recognizes species and sometimes individuals and wonders what they would say on Garden if they heard him tell how nature is corrupted on the corrupted old Earth.
He picks up a pair of shorts and steps into them.
His arms ache and his right knee complains as he walks into the bathroom to enjoy a good long piss.
Later, coming into the front room, Toby thinks of eating. He sits and leans back in one chair and looks at the empty ceiling, no need to hurry. No place to go. Most of the wall and ceiling is covered with panels of acoustically and optically active proteins. The panels are linked to AIs rooted in the Old Quarter, and those AIs are themselves part of World-Net. There is nothing resembling World-Net on Garden. There are no million channels involving drama and sports and arts and fantasy, not to mention the millions of subsidiary channels linking with libraries and data pools and scholarly AIs using their rapid computer brains to manage and manipulate every small thing. Through World-Net, Toby can call any of his fifty billion immediate neighbors or arrange delayed conversations with any of the two trillion people scattered throughout the System. Or, should he wish, he can summon any painting or photograph, tri-dee or not. The artistic accomplishments of every human and AI and Ghost are permanently recorded. He can even do his own work and put it into the common memory, his limits set only by his will and talent and patience.
World-Net confuses Toby and oftentimes bores him, and there’s very little that he does or feels comfortable with doing.
There’s one interactive fantasy, yes, and there are certain links to libraries and ancient records…but not much else. Garden and its people don’t have this kind of equipment. They don’t need it and the Prophet forbids its needless use. So Toby won’t invest the time or energy to master the potentials. He won’t let the Earth touch him any more than he can help, his presence here something forced on him. Something entirely against his will.
The panels are a neutral bottomless white. In the front room, at times, the whiteness threatens to swallow the two small chairs and the scattered dishes and clothes. Toby presses buttons on his little remote control—a native Terran would have a larger version o
f the same tool—and now the entire west-facing wall dissolves into a flat image nearly two thousand years old. An ancient nuclear rocket, massive and filthy, stands on a concrete plain. A voice is talking in a dead language, and Toby decides against an AI-supplied translation. He has watched the documentary many times, and he certainly knows the subject better than its original makers. What interests him are the old videotapes from which it was drawn, authentic scenes and the spirit of the times captured. A pioneering spirit. The documentary begins with the launch of the rocket, fire and poisoned smoke and a ripping roar that he feels in his bones, and he looks at his little prison cell and shakes his head and stands and walks into the kitchen-corner. He wishes for the rocket’s kind of freedom. He envies its power and primitiveness, muttering to himself, “If only I could get loose.” Saying, “Gabbro, did you do it? The bird? The wicked black bird?”
He works his sour-tasting mouth and punches up an inventory, the selections stored in a communal set of freezers and bug-free closets somewhere underground. He chooses and punches and waits, listening to the ridiculous rattle of old machinery struggling to serve him breakfast. Something moves above him. He sees a large steel-colored bug clinging to the wall, a white skull-and-crossbones on its carapace. It’s supposed to be a gene-tailored cockroach, predatory and certain doom to the pests that come into its realm. The management introduced them last month. Toby’s Garden training and Garden temperament make him suspicious. The Earth is home to countless species. More are born every minute, each to serve aesthetic or economic roles for their makers. No reason to the process. No vision. None of what the Prophet in His wisdom saw for Garden, surely. Standing on his toes and extending, Toby gives the bug a hard swat and leaves the wall stained.