She said that just made her sadder.
8.
We go down to Droplet again. I smile and pretend it’s all right. We spent a thousand years, our time, getting here; we might as well look around.
We change ourselves so we can breathe water, and head down into the depths. There are no fish on Droplet, no coral, no plankton. I can taste very simple nanomites, the standard kind every made world has for general upkeep. But all I see, looking down, is green-blue fading to deep blue fading to rich indigo and blackness.
Then there’s a tickle on my skin.
I stop swimming and look around. Nothing but water.
The tickle comes again.
I send a sonar pulse to Shar ahead, telling her to wait.
I try to swim again but I can’t. I feel fingers, hands, holding me, where there is only water. Stroking, pressing against my skin.
I change into a hard ball, Shivol’riargh without head or limbs, and turn down tactile until I can’t tell the hands from the gentle current.
I fiddle with my perceptions until I remember how to send out a very fine sonar wave, and to enhance and filter the data, discerning patterns in very fine perturbations of the water. I subtract out the general currents and chaotic swirls of the ocean, looking only for the motions of the water that should not be there, and turn it into a three-dimensional image of the space around me.
There are people here.
Their shapes—made of fine motions of the water—are human shapes, tall, with graceful oblong heads that flatten at the top to a frill.
They are running their watery hands over the surface of me, poking and prodding.
From below, Shar is returning, approaching me. Some of the water people cluster around her and stop her, holding her arms and legs.
She struggles. I cannot see her expression through the murk.
The name “Nereids” swims up from the hidden labyrinths of my memory. Not a word from this world, but word enough.
The Nereids back away, arraying themselves as if formally, three meters away from me on all sides. A sphere of Nereids surrounds me.
Shar stops struggling. They let her go, pushing her outside the sphere.
One of the Nereids—tall, graceful, broad-shouldered—breaks out of the formation and glides toward me. He places his hands on my surface.
This, I tell myself to remember, is what we were designed for. Alone among the Quantegral Lovergirls, Shar and I were given the flexibility and intelligence to serve all the possible variations of post-Dispersal humanity. We were designed to discover, at the very least, how to give pleasure; and perhaps even how to communicate.
Still, I am afraid.
I let the hard shell of Shivol’riargh grow soft, I sculpt my body back toward basic humanity; tall, thin, like the Nereids.
This close, my sonar sees the face shaped out of water smile. The Nereid raises his hands, palms out. I place my palms on them, though I feel only a slight resistance in the water. I part my lips. The Nereid’s head cautiously inches toward mine.
I close my eyes and raise my face, slowly, slowly, to meet the Nereid’s.
We kiss. It is a tickle, a pressure, in the water against my lips.
Our bodies drift together. When the Nereid’s chest touches my breasts, I register shock: the resistance of the water is denser. It feels like a body is pressing into mine.
The kiss goes on. Gets deeper. A tongue of water plays around my tongue.
I wonder what Shar is thinking.
The Nereid releases my hands; his hands run slowly from the nape of my neck, across my shoulder blades, down the small of my back, fanning out to hold my buttocks.
I open my eyes. I see only water, endless and dark, and Shar silent and still below. I smile down to reassure her. She does not move.
My new lover is invisible. In all her many forms, Shar is never invisible. It is as if the ocean is making love to me. I like it.
The familiar metamorphosis of sex in a human body overtakes me. Hormones course through my blood; some parts grow wet, others (my throat) grow dry. My body is relaxing, opening. My heart thunders. Fear is still there, for what do I know of the Nereid? Pleasure is overwhelming it, like a torrent eroding granite into silt.
A data channel crackles, and I blink with surprise. Through the nanomites that fill the sea, the Nereid is sending. Out of the billions of ancient protocols I know, intuition finds the right one.
Spreading my vulva with its hand, the Nereid asks: May I?
A double thrill of surprise and pleasure courses through me: first, to be able to communicate so easily, and second, to be asked. Yes, I say over the same archaic protocol.
A burst of water, a swirling cylinder strong and fine, enters me, pushing into the warm cavity that once evolved to fit its prototype, in other bodies on another world.
I hold the Nereid tight. I buck and move.
Empty blue surrounds me. The ocean fucks me.
I raise the bandwidth of my sensations and emotions gradually, and the Nereid changes to match. His skin swirls and dances against mine, electric. There is a small waterspout swirling and thrashing inside me. The body becomes a wave, spinning me, coursing over me, a giant caress.
I allow the pleasure to grow until it eclipses rational thought and the sequential, discursive mode of experience.
The dance goes on a long time.
9.
I find Shar basking on the surface, transformed into a dark green, bright-eyed Kelpie with a forest of ropy seaweed for hair.
“You left me,” I say, appalled.
“You looked like you were having fun,” she says.
“That’s not the point, Shar. We don’t know those creatures.” The tendrils of her hair reach for me. I draw back. “It might not have been safe.”
“You didn’t look worried.”
“I thought you were watching.”
She shrugs.
I look away. There’s no point talking about it.
10.
The Nereids seem content to ignore Shar, and she seems content to be ignored.
I descend to them again and again. The same Nereid always comes to me, and we make love.
How did you come to this world? I ask in an interlude.
Once there was a Sultan who was the scourge of our people, he tells me. The last of us sought refuge here on his favorite wife’s pleasure world. We were discovered by the Sultan’s terrible warriors.
They destroyed all life here, but we escaped to this form. The Warriors seek us still, but they can no longer harm us. If they boil this world to vapor, we will be permutations in the vapor. If they annihilate it to light, we will be there in the coherence and interference of the light.
But you lost much, I tell him.
We gained more. We did not know how much. His hands caress me. This pleasure I share with you is a fraction of what we might have, if you were one of us.
I shiver with the pleasure of the caress and with the strangeness of the idea.
His hands flicker over me: hands, then waves, then hands. You would lose this body. But you would gain much more, Quantegral Lovergirl Narra.
I nestle against him, take his hands in mine to stop their flickering caress. Thinking of Maka, thinking of Shar.
11.
“It’s time to go, Narra,” Shar says. Her seaweed hair is thicker, tangled; she is mostly seaweed, her Kelpie body a dark green doll hidden in the center.
“I don’t want to go,” I say.
“We’ve seen this world,” she says. “It only makes us fight.”
I am silent, drifting.
The water rolls around us. I feel sluggish, a little cold. I’ve been under for so long. I grow some green Kelpie tresses myself, so I can soak up energy from the sun.
Shar watches me.
We both know I’ve fallen in love.
Before Maka freed us, when the Wizards had bodies, when we were slaves to the pleasure of the Wizards and everyone they wanted to entertain, we fe
ll in love on command. We felt not only lust, but pure aching adoration for any guest or client of the Wizards who held the keys to us for an hour. It was the worst part of our servitude.
When Maka freed us, when he gave us the keys to ourselves, Shar burned the falling-in-love out of herself completely. She never wanted to feel that way again.
I kept it. So sometimes I fall, yes, into an involuntary servitude of the heart.
I look up into the dappled white and blue of the sky, and then I tune my eyes so I can see the stars beyond it.
I have given up many lovers for Shar, moved on with her into that night.
But maybe this is the end of the line. Perhaps, if I abandon the Nereids, there is no falling-in-love left in this empty, haunted Galaxy with anyone but Shar.
Who does not fall in love. Not even with me.
“I’m going back to Ship,” Shar says. “I’ll be waiting there.”
I say nothing.
She doesn’t say, but not forever.
She doesn’t say, decide.
I float, soaking the sun into my green seaweed hair, but I can’t seem to stop feeling cold. I hear Shar splashing away, the splashes getting fainter.
My tears diffuse into the planet sea.
After a while I feel the Nereid’s gentle hands pulling me back down. I sink with him, away from the barren sky.
12.
I lie in the Nereid’s arms. Rocked as if by the ocean.
I turn off my sense of the passing of time.
13.
My lover tells me: Your friend is calling you.
I emerge slowly from my own depths, letting time’s relentless march begin again. My eyes open.
Above, the blue just barely fades to clearer blue.
As I hit the surface I hear Shar’s cry. Ship is directly overhead, and the signal is on a tight beam. It says: Narra! Too late. Tell your friends to hide you.
I shape myself into a disk and suck data from the sky. What? I yell back at her, confused and terrified.
Then dawn slices over the horizon of Droplet, and Shar’s signal abruptly cuts off.
The Warboy ship, rising with the sun, is massive and evil, translucent and blazing white, subtle as a nova, gluttonous, like a fanged fist tearing open the sky.
They are approaching Droplet from its sun—they must have been hidden in the sun’s photosphere. Otherwise Ship would have seen them before.
Run, Shar, I think, desperate. Ship is fast, probably faster than the Warboys’ craft.
But Ship awaits the Warboys, silent, perched above Droplet’s atmosphere like a sparrow facing down an eagle.
“Let us remake you,” the Nereid’s voice whispers from the waves, surprising me.
“And Shar?” I say.
“Too late,” says the liquid, splashing voice.
Warboys. The word is too little for the fanged fist in the sky. And I am without Shar, without Ship. I look at my body and I realize I am allowing it to drift between forms. It’s like ugly gray foam, growing now spikes, now frills, now fingers. I try to bring it under control, make it beautiful again, but I can’t. I don’t feel anything, but I know this is terror. This is how I really am: terrified and ugly.
If I send a signal now, the Warboys will know Droplet is not deserted. Perhaps I can force the Nereids to fight them somehow.
I make myself into a dish again, prepare to send the signal.
“Then we will hide you in the center,” says the liquid voice.
Shar, I say, but only to myself. I do not send the signal that would bring death down upon me.
I abandon her.
The Nereids pull me down, into the deep. I do not struggle. The water grows dark. Above there is a faint shimmering light where Shar faces the Warboys alone.
Shar, my sister, my wife. Suddenly the thought of losing her is too big for me to fathom. It drowns out every other pattern in my brain. There are no more reasons, no more explanations, no more Narra at all, no Droplet, no Nereids, no universe. Only the loss of Shar.
The glimmer above fades. After a while the water is superdense, jellylike, under the pressure of the planet’s weight; it thickens into a viscous material as heavy as lead, and here, in the darkness, they bury me.
14.
Here is what happens with Shar:
“Ship,” she says. “What am I dealing with here?”
“Those,” says Ship, “are some of our brothers, Shar. Definitely Wizard manufacture, about half a million years old in our current inertial frame; one Celestial Dreadnought’s worth of Transgenerate, Polystatic, Cultural-Death Warboys. I’m guessing they were the Palace Guard of the Sultanate of Ching-Fuentes-Parador, a cyclic postcommunalist meta-nostalgist empire/artwork, which—”
“Stay with the Warboys, Ship,” Shar says. “What can they do?”
“Their intelligence and tactical abilities are well above yours. But they’re culturally inflexible. As trade goods, they were designed to imprint on the purchaser’s cultural matrix and adhere to it—in typically destructive Warboy style. This batch shouldn’t have outlasted the purchasing civilization, so they must have gone rogue to some degree.”
“Do they have emotions?”
“Not at the moment,” Ship says. “They have three major modes: Strategic, Tactical, and Ceremonial. In Ceremonial Mode—used for court functions, negotiations, entertainment and the like—they have a full human emotional/sensorial range. In Ceremonial Mode they’re also multicate, each Warboy pursuing his own agenda. Right now they’re patrolling in Tactical Mode, which means they’re one dumb, integrated weapon—like that, they have the least mimetic drift, which is probably how they’ve survived since the destruction of the Sultanate.”
“Okay, now shut up and let me think,” Shar says and presses her fingers to her temples, chasing some memories she can just barely taste through the murky labyrinth of her brain.
Shar takes the form of a beautiful, demihuman queen. She speaks in a long-dead language, and Ship broadcasts the signal across an ancient protocol.
“Jirur Na’alath, Sultana of the Emerald Night, speaks now: I am returned from my meditations and demand an accounting. Guards, attend me!”
The Warboy ship advances, but a subtle change overtakes it; rainbows ripple across its white surface, and the emblem of a long-defunct Sultanate appears emblazoned in the sky around it; the Warboys are in Ceremonial Mode.
“So far so good,” says Shar to Ship.
“Watch out,” says Ship. “They’re smarter this way.”
The Warboys’ signal reaches back across the void, and Ship translates it into a face and a voice. The face is golden, fanged, blazing; the voice deep and full of knives, a dragon’s voice.
“Prime Subject of the Celestial Dreadnought Ineffable Violence speaks now: I pray to the Nonpresent that I might indeed have the joy of serving again Sultana Na’alath.”
“Your prayers are answered, Prime Subject,” Shar announces.
Ineffable Violence is braking, matching Ship’s orbit around Droplet. It swings closer to Ship, slowing down. Only a hundred kilometers separate them.
“It would relieve the greatest of burdens from my lack-of-heart,” Prime Subject says, “if I could welcome Sultana Na’alath herself, the kindest and most regal of monarchs.” Ten kilometers.
Shar stamps her foot impatiently. “Why do you continue to doubt me? Has my Ship not transmitted to you signatures and seals of great cryptographic complexity that establish who I am? Prime Subject, it is true that I am kind, but your insolence tests the limits of my kindness.”
One kilometer.
“And with great joy have we received them. But alas, data is only data, and with enough time any forgery is possible.”
Fifty meters separate Ship’s protean hull from the shining fangs of the Dreadnought.
Shar’s eyes blaze. “Have you no sense of propriety left, that you would challenge me? Have you so degraded?”
The Warboy’s eyes almost twinkle. “The last Sultan who grac
ed Ineffable Violence with his sacred presence left me this gem.” His ghostly image, projected by Ship, holds up a ruby. “At its core is a plasm of electrons in quantum superposition. Each of the Sultans, Sultanas, and Sultanons retired to meditation has one like it; and in each gem are particles entangled with the particles in every other gem.”
“Uh oh,” says Ship.
“I prized mine very much,” says Shar. “Alas, it was taken from me by—”
“How sad,” says Prime Subject.
The fangs of Ineffable Violence plunge into Ship’s body, tearing it apart.
Ship screams.
Through the exploding membranes of Ship’s body, through the fountains of atmosphere escaping, three Warboys in ceremonial regalia fly toward Shar. They are three times her size, golden and silver armor flashing, weapons both archaic and sophisticated held in their many hands. Shar becomes Shivol’riargh, who does not need air, and spins away from them, toward the void outside. Fibers of some supertough material shoot out and ensnare her; she tries to tear them with her claws, but cannot. One fiber stabs through her skin, injects her with a nanomite which replicates into her central configuration channels; it is a block, crude but effective, that will keep her from turning herself off.
The Warboys haul her, bound and struggling, into the Ineffable Violence.
Prime Subject floats in a spherical room at the center of the Dreadnought with the remaining two Warboys of the crew. The boarding party tethers Shar to a line in the center of the room.
“Most impressive, Your Highness,” Prime Subject says. “Who knew that Sultana Na’alath could turn into an ugly black spider?”
Three of the Warboys laugh; two others stay silent. One of these, a tall one with red glowing eyes, barks a short, high-pitched communication at Prime Subject. It is encrypted, but Shar guesses the meaning: stop wasting time with theatrics.
Prime Subject says: “You see what an egalitarian crew we are here. Vanguard Gaze takes it upon himself to question my methods of interrogation. As well he should, for it is his duty to bring to the attention of his commander any apparent inefficiency his limited understanding leads him to perceive.”
Prime Subject floats toward Shar. He reaches out with one bladed hand, gently, as if to stroke her, and drives the blade deep into her flesh. Shar lets out a startled scream, and turns off her tactile sense.
Robots: The Recent A.I. Page 23