by Robert Reed
Minus says nothing.
“Believe me. I know.” He gives his bodyguard a hard look, saying, “A few more days and he’ll be her puppet. You wait.”
“Maybe.” Minus is not convinced. “It’ll be interesting to see.”
“That it’ll be.” The Freestaters on the wall are now in two lines, facing one another without a meter of air between them. One line kneels and leans forward to kiss the toes before them. Then the other line does the same. Dirk can’t believe it. He knows faces. He knows hate when he sees it, violence trying to come bursting out of them; yet they control themselves to do this…this thing. This gesture. He supposes it has something to do with honoring your enemy. He growls and turns to Minus, asking, “Have you ever been in love? Tell me the truth.”
Minus shrugs. He says, “No,” and shakes his head. “I got myself cured when I was a kid.” One strong hand taps his temple, and he tells Dirk, “A dose of electricity burned out the responsible neurons.”
“Yeah?”
“They’re gone for good.”
“No kidding?” Dirk has to know. “How does it feel? Being rid of it…what’s it like?”
Minus thinks. Dirk cannot remember Minus being so composed, so utterly thoughtful, for half this long a stretch. Then he says, “You ever look at something too tiny to be seen? Or too distant? You know how you look and look but you can’t quite bring it into view?” He gives a mysterious smile. “That’s how it feels. That’s love to me.”
They want him at the drill station today. He wants to warn them that he shouldn’t be trusted, he’s a hundred times too tired to be trusted with that job, but he knows that half of this shift is in the same sad position. At least half. There was the drinking early in the night, his doing what Steward wanted and finding volunteers. That part was easy. Then there was the climbing and the police afterward and that certain ass with the attitude about Morningers—making all of them go through the motions of an arrest, putting a Morninger into each of the police floaters and then taking them away so the news cameras and the Brulé citizens could feel pride in the fair-handedness of justice. Each of the floaters hummed and crackled, the extra weight making them work to get airborne. Gabbro remembers how the officer flying him had come out of the crowd to take him. He was looking for him. He remembers the guy smiling, halfway friendly, and Gabbro felt the beer and fun buoying him up. He told the officer:
On Morning we’ve got a saying.
Oh yeah? What saying’s that?
People are weak. Only the world is strong.
The world, huh?
Any world, said Gabbro. Morning. The Earth. Any of them.
The officer, still smiling, played it over in his head. Then he started to laugh, shaking his head and asking, People are weak, huh?
It’s to keep us humble, Gabbro explained.
So does it work? Are you humble?
Fuck no! Gabbro told him. He was in a mood. The night had put him in a mood, and it was fun to look up at the Small Fry and say, I’m the biggest fastest toughest strongest sweetest thing in all creation!
I bet you are, said the officer.
Hell yes!
And then the officer did something odd. He put on a serious look and told Gabbro, Listen. He told me to look for you. You know who I’m talking about?
He had an idea, but he said nothing. Steward had never spoken to him, he recalled, so he just sat in the back end and waited. He tried to wipe Steward from his thoughts.
So where do you want to be dropped? asked the officer.
How about the Morninger bar? Gabbro answered.
He told me to keep you out of trouble…you big fast tough strong sweet thing you! So okay. Hold on and here we go!
So that’s where he ended up. In the bar. To come to work this morning, not having time to go home, he had to borrow clothes from a friend. I’m one sorry mess, he tells himself. What he should have done was call in sick. Sleep he could use. If only April would let him get his sleep. Then he thinks that maybe he did the smart thing after all. God, he thinks, listen to me ramble. I came here because it’s better than home. I went back to the bar for the same damned reason. The night made me so happy that I didn’t want anything spoiled. None of it. Home would have tainted everything. He sighs and thanks his good sense for having been awake, and he sighs and looks around the chamber and tries to make the best of everything.
Morningers surround him. The chamber itself is decelerating at a little short of twenty gees, each of them strapped in and taking the punishment without complaint. Small Fry would be splattered all over the floor by now. Their various pieces would be cooking. The air’s temperature is already as hot as the surface of Morning, the polished hyperfiber walls glowing with a faint dull redness. They’re at the bottom of the Earth’s crust. The chamber is stopping now. Each Morninger wears a power pack and a refrigeration unit to cool their flesh-on-blood insides and a close-fitting mask that insures each breath is as cool and sweet as possible. Or that’s the theory. Gabbro’s mouthpiece isn’t working well enough. His lungs ache and sometimes burn, and when the chamber is motionless he unstraps and stands, thinking how he should knock the equipment hard once and make it fall apart. Otherwise the shift boss would say, “Come on, Gabbro! It’ll last through your hours, so don’t bother me. All right?”
The shift boss is a big Morninger woman, not pretty and not ugly either. She watches her crew while she remains behind, monitoring the show with a range of cameras and sensors. Gabbro ignores the burning sensations, seeing no chance to do mischief. He walks along a tunnel where the walls and beams and everything are hyperfiber, everything transfused with a cherry-colored glow. The Earth’s mantle is a precious few kilometers below him. The plastic rock is like some enormous slow-boiling ocean and the crust is its icy cap, thin and fragile. Brulé City happens to be built over some of the thickest, stablest crust. This and politics make it good for the work. When the mines are finished and operating as they are intended, the crust will serve as a kind of floating platform for the duration. Every continent will be home to dozens of such mines. This is the landmark first. As much as he hates this work…and this seems funny to him…Gabbro can’t help but feel pride in building something that will outlast him and everyone by ten thousand years.
His station is beside the main shaft. His job is to keep the drill running and properly aligned. He can’t see the thing directly, of course. It’s hundreds of kilometers below—a fierce machine bristling with sonic drills and multiple arms and built of hyperfibers so exotic and strong that they make his own midge of a shell seem weak.
The shaft is vast, dark and filled with cables and pipes and the roar of the distant drill. The little station is occupied by a lone Morninger whom Gabbro taps on a shoulder, signaling his presence. The woman stands, relinquishing her seat, and Gabbro takes it and puts on padded earphones and touches the various buttons without actually pushing them. He’s saying hello to the controls. The Morninger says, “Good-goddamn-bye,” and she turns and leaves.
Gabbro announces his presence to the AIs feeding him data. He checks readouts against preferred norms, making adjustments, then tries to breathe enough to clear his fogged head. This is a pure sitdown job. No muscles, thank God. No coordination. But alertness isn’t easy. He reminds himself that key sensors can fail any time. That drill is the operation’s hub, and it’s running deeper and hotter than anything ever attempted. That’s why they can’t trust AIs to run the show. Too much need for a human hand. For cyborg reaction times. Sweet Lord, he thinks, this is the hub job. The miners cutting hyperfiber panels with hand-held torches…they’re nothing. Or the ones working with the geothermal equipment. Or the cleanup crews. Or any of them. Their mistakes are just mistakes. “Listen to me,” he mutters. “Get focused, you stupid shit. Right now.”
The roaring of the drill is enormous.
The sonics are boring away at the plastic rock, compressing it and pushing it away from the shaft long enough for the drill’s arms to lay d
own and fuse the hyperfiber panels and braces and such. The process is almost entirely automated. Half a kilometer is a good day’s drilling. It’s not true what some people think, about the core being the goal, and no Morninger will ever go past this point…excepting the two or three who have taken wrong steps and fallen down a shaft, auxiliary or not, getting past the safety systems and dying somewhere between here and the hellhole bottom.
Gabbro remembers what he told the officer.
Only the world is strong.
It’s absolutely true, he thinks, and he feels shame for having been so glib with the man.
Someday, probably long after he’s gone, this mine will operate at full capacity. A network of tunnels will be laced through the mantle, and robots yet unbuilt will suck up and process the plastic rock. The rare earth elements will make fortunes. Iridium and ytterbium and tantalum. If asked, he couldn’t describe the precise physics that need them. Superconductors and lasing equipment and star-drives all use them. That’s important to Gabbro, knowing they’re important products. Someone once told him that in the vastness of time, when places like Kross and the Belt quit selling metals on the open market, their own stocks finished or too precious to waste, these mines will be expanded again, cutting into the core for the nickel and iron and titanium. Eventually the earthly continents will slump, so much of the mantle and core sucked away beneath them. The seas will spread inland like they did in the Mesozoic. The thick crust will be drowned, mountains becoming islands, and in the end—if there is such a thing in all creation—the only land above the pea-green sea will be the ring of enormous cities still girdling the equator.
It’s all too big for one mind.
He’s thought about it plenty of times, even tinkering with the images on World-Net fantasy channels, yet it all still leaves him panting.
Sure, only the world is strong. But people have the persistence. Maybe he should have said that to the officer. It wouldn’t have been so funny, but it sure would have true. People persist. For some reason he starts to think about Steward again. He remembers standing on the top of that building, halfway expecting to see Steward somewhere. That elevator door opened twice. The second time someone came out—a nightmare with the wildest hair and eyes—and Gabbro watched him and tried to figure out where Steward fit in. He had a feeling there was a connection somewhere, and it bothers him still—
An AI comes across the line, warning of trouble.
Gabbro should have caught it himself. He presses buttons, fixing the problem. The alignment of the drill was off by a tiny margin, which means it was off much too much. He braces for the shift boss to come on the line and ask if he’s falling asleep at his station. But she doesn’t. She must be watching someone else blunder along. And he’s a little sorry. If you are part of something vast, goes his thinking, then an alcohol-soggy fool shouldn’t be allowed to let substandard crap slide past.
It doesn’t seem right, he tells himself. Not even a little bit.
He sighs and turns his mind to April. She’ll be waiting at home. He knows. She’ll be angry for his having left and furious because he never returned and livid because he can’t admit the true reasons to her. I promised her something, he recalls. Wasn’t there something we planned to do? He can’t quite bring it to mind, but expectations are lying in wait. He feels them. It’s funny, but he feels as though his own brain is working against him. Conspiring against him. It’s as though some secret hurtful part of him has set up these circumstances, knowing just what will happen and glad for it.
Giddy, almost.
“This is crazy.”
If he stood and took a leap straight out, out into the empty screaming shaft, he’d fall to his death and nothing could save him. Yet what scares him to tears is going home. Imagine. All this dangerous work and the wicked machinery, and his real nemesis is a lover made of stuff soft and weak and beyond his reach.
Somewhere, somehow, he is sure this has to be funny.
12
She called herself Wisp. That probably wasn’t her name during her flesh-on-blood existence—a lot of us acquire new identities after the transformation, either out of shame for the past or a willingness to start again with the proverbial clean slate. I don’t which it was for Wisp. Maybe neither. I don’t know how she made her money, but she had plenty in the early going. She never explained how she had died, but I knew it had happened at a tragically early time. Telling that was easy. Wisp had a young girl’s makeup, a young girl’s passions. That makes it tough when you’re Ghosted. You are so disappointed with so much. Like the sky. “It isn’t quite right, you know?” The taste of food. “Why’s it so bland? This is my favorite meal, for goodness sake.” The feel of any surface. “I mean I can tell it’s wood. And that’s metal. But I can’t…I don’t know…it all feels so simple, you know?” Of course we would explain the problems to her. AIs can do only so much. It’s one thing to see a scene on World-Net, a moving picture and sound and you the detached viewer. But it’s something else entirely for you to be a part of that picture. The numbers of calculations are enormous, not to mention instantaneous. A single AI can build a fantasy on World-Net. A thousand AIs are required to build and maintain you inside a simple home. And never, never will the illusion feel right. Certainly not to a newly Ghosted person. There’s some basic physics involved. I can’t explain it myself, but the core of the concept involves a natural randomness in a living person’s environment—the way air molecules strike the skin, the way your sensory inputs are subject to quantum effects, and so on. Not a million AIs working in tandem can effectively replicate these very tiny effects. And Ghosts are aware of their absence, believe me. Wisp was very, very sad to learn it was so. The flatness. The grayness. The bland meals and the wrong sky and all the rest. She came to us with a lot of money, yes, but she did the very worst thing possible. She tried to reproduce the life she knew from before being a Ghost. She spent much of what she had to do this, never succeeding, then when she could see the end of her resources she tried something particularly foolish. She tried to coax and cajole us, her fellow Ghosts, into granting her new money.
I must say she was good. Very good. I was tempted myself, several times. But when you’re truly alive you think only once before giving away riches to a pretty face. If that. And when you’re a Ghost you think twice, or more, and you resist. In life it’s only hard-won money, you see. In a Ghost’s existence that money represents existence. You see? And no one is going to let that go. Not for a smile, surely. Poor Wisp, charming us and charming us and not getting a thing…and all the while her money was running down. Running out. Her existence fading away…
—excerpt from an interview with a Ghost, the Magician’s private file
Her first thought is that Steward should have been killed. She wishes it had happened in the early going, thinking that would have been best. If he could have slipped and tumbled to his death in the elevator shaft, Chiffon believes, and never gotten close to Dirk…and she catches herself, not wanting to waste the effort with simpleminded hope. She looks at him and prays there’s no way for Dirk and Minus to make the connection with her and here. And she makes herself smile. “At least you’re all right, love.” Her voice is naturally relieved. “Thank goodness nothing terrible happened!”
Steward rubs his arm, saying, “Anyway, I tried.” He shrugs as if he’s embarrassed. He doesn’t like admitting failure, not accustomed to it. “I made him an offer and maybe he would have accepted. I don’t know. But his people broke in and broke up our dealing.”
“You shouldn’t have done it.” Honest words; a lying tone. “I wish you had at least told me.”
He looks at Chiffon, nothing to say.
“Steward.” She whimpers and goes to him, curling up snug in his lap and cooing in his ear. She wonders what Dirk and he said to one another. Did Dirk tell him the truth? Would Steward believe it? Is he so quiet because he suspects me now? Terror in her belly, she says, “I love you.”
“I didn’t want dashe
d hopes,” he confessed.
“Of course not.” She would have talked him out of it. Or she would have killed him herself, saving herself. “I know you were helping.”
“Not close.”
“I think the man is insane.”
“And I treated you shabbily.” He pulls her blonde hair to his mouth, cupping it and kissing it and her scalp, saying, “I keep forgetting you’re no helpless little girl.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re smart in a hundred ways.”
“I told you.” She kisses him. She’s so angry that she has half an urge to bite his lip or tongue, but the Flower’s face shows nothing beyond sweet eyes and an endearing smile and a mouth that can be concerned and sexual at the same instant, uttering banalities until it’s numb.
“Do you want to hear what happened?”
She does. She listens, imagining how those cyborgs looked as they scaled the Cosgrove. “I remember you talking with Gabbro.” She wants to know what the Morninger knows. She asks some sideways questions, Steward replying that if the cyborgs could be identified and if Dirk somehow traced his way back to Gabbro…well, if the Quito man has the will and tools then there just might be trouble. He feels to blame. “I’m sorry,” he swears. “It’s another thing we’ll have to consider from now on.”
She’s thinking to herself, weighing options.
“That albino soldier of his? Minus?” Steward says, “He broke us up,” and he skips to the end, his fleeing and Minus giving chase and his escaping by no margin at all. What she wants to know is what happened in Dirk’s bedroom. She wants every word laid down, every syllable given its authentic voice. But she can’t alarm him. If he has any suspicions, she has to play it all perfectly.