Time passed. A white form came plummeting downward, belly-flopping into the water with a lethal smack. They were sacrificing the children.
Something grabbed his foot and pulled him under.
Water filled his nose. He was too busy choking to fight his way free. He was pulled down into the blackness. Water seared his lungs and he passed out.
The spook awoke in a straitjacket and looked up at a ceiling of creamy antiseptic white. He was in a hospital bed. He moved his head on the pillow and realized that his scalp had been shaved.
To his left an antique monitor registered his pulse and breathing. He felt awful. He waited for his computer to whisper something, and realized that it was gone. Rather than feeling its loss, however, he felt, somehow, repulsively whole. His brain ached like an overstuffed stomach.
From his right he heard faint, harsh breathing. He twisted his head to look. Sprawled on a waterbed was a withered, naked old man, cyborged into a medusa complex of life-support machinery. A few locks of colorless hair clung to the old man’s age-spotted scalp, and his sunken sharp-nosed face had the look of long-forgotten cruelty…An EEG registered a few flickers of comatose delta waves from the hindbrain. It was John Augustus Owens.
The sound of sandals on stone. It was the female spook. “Welcome to the Hacienda Maya, Eugene.”
He stirred feebly in his straitjacket, trying to pick up her vibrations. It was like trying to swim in air. With growing panic, he realized that his paradigmatic empathy was gone. “What in hell…”
“You’re whole again, Eugene. It feels strange, doesn’t it? After all those years of being a junkyard of other people’s feelings? Can you remember your real name yet? That’s an important first step. Try.”
“You’re a traitor.” His head weighed ten tons. He sank back into the pillow, feeling too stupid even to regret his indiscretion. Tattered remnants of his spook training said he ought to flatter her…
“My real name,” she said precisely, “was Anatolya Zhukova, and I was sentenced to corrective education by the Brezhnevograd People’s Zaibatsery…You were a dissident or so-called criminal of some kind also, before the Veil robbed you of your personality. Most of our top people here are from orbit, Eugene. We’re not the stupid Terran cultists you were led to believe. Who hired you, anyway? Yamato Corporation? Fleisher S.A.?”
“Don’t waste your time.”
She smiled. “You’ll come around. You’re human now, and the Resurgence is humanity’s brightest hope. Look.”
She held up a glass flask. Inside it, something like a threaded cloudy film floated slowly in a yellowish plasma. It seemed to squirm. “We took this out of your head, Eugene.”
He gasped. “The Veil.”
“Yes, the Veil. It’s been riding on the top of your cortex for God knows how long now, breaking you up, keeping you fluid. Robbing you of your personality. You were nothing better than a psychopath in harness.”
He closed his eyes, stunned. She said, “We understand Veil technology here, Eugene. We use it ourselves, sometimes, on sacrificial victims. They can emerge from the well, touched by the Gods. Troublemakers turned divinely into saints. It fits in well with the old Mayan traditions of trepanation; a triumph of social engineering, really. They’re very competent here. They managed to capture me without knowing anything about the spook apparat but rumors.”
“You tried to take them out?”
“Yes. They caught me alive and won me over. And even without the Veil I have enough perception left to tell a spook when I see one.” Again, she smiled. “I was faking mania when I attacked you. I only knew you had to be stopped at any cost.”
“I could have ripped you apart.”
“Then, yes. But now you’ve lost your maniac phase, and we’ve killed your implanted weapons. Cloned bacteria producing schizophrenic toxins in your sinuses. Altered sweat glands oozing emotional hormones. Nasty! But you’re safe now. You’re nothing more or less than a normal human being.”
He consulted his interior state. His brain felt like a dinosaur’s. “Do people really feel like this?”
She touched his cheek. “You haven’t begun to feel. Wait until you’ve lived with us awhile, seen the plans we’ve made, in the finest traditions of the Predator Saints…” She looked reverently at the machine-pumped corpse across the room. “Overpopulation, Eugene—that’s what ruined us. The Saints took the moral effort of genocide upon themselves. Now the Resurgents have taken up the challenge of building a stable society—without the dehumanizing technology that has always, inevitably, been turned against us. The Mayans had the right idea—a civilization of social stability, ecstatic communion with the Godhead, and a firm appreciation of the cheapness of human life. They simply didn’t go far enough. They didn’t kill enough people to keep their population in check. With a few small changes in the Mayan theology we have brought the whole system into balance. It’s a balance that will outlast the Synthesis by centuries.”
“You think primitives armed with stone knives can triumph over the industrialized world?”
She looked at him pityingly. “Don’t be naive. Industry really belongs in space, where there’s room and raw materials, not in a biosphere. Already the zaibatseries are years ahead of Earth in every major field. The Earth’s industrial cartels are so drained of energy and resources trying to clean up the mess they inherited that they can’t even handle their own industrial espionage. And the Resurgent elite is armed to the teeth with the weaponry, and the spiritual inheritance, of the Predator Saints. John Augustus Owens dug the cenote of Tikal with a low-yield neutron bomb. And we own stores of twentieth-century binary nerve gas that we could smuggle, if we wanted, into Washington, or Kyoto, or Kiev…No, as long as the elite exists, the Synthetics can’t dare to attack us head-on—and we intend to go on protecting this society until its rivals are driven into space, where they belong. And now you and I, together, can avert the threat of paradigmatic attack.”
“There’ll be others,” he said.
“We’ve co-opted every attack made upon us. People want to live real lives, Eugene—to feel and breathe and love and be of simple human worth. They want to be something more than flies in a cybernetic web. They want something realer than empty pleasures in the luxury of a zaibatsu can-world. Listen, Eugene. I’m the only person who has ever put on the spook’s Veil and then returned to humanity, to a thinking, feeling, genuine life. We can understand each other.”
The spook considered this. It was frightening and bizarre to be rationally thinking on his own, without a computer helping to manage his stream of consciousness. He hadn’t realized how stiff and painful thinking was. The weight of consciousness had crushed the intuitive powers that the Veil had once set free. He said incredulously, “You think we could understand each other? By ourselves?”
“Yes!” she said. “You don’t know how much I’ve needed it!”
The spook twitched in his straitjacket. There was a roaring in his head. Half-smothered segments of his mind were flaming, like blown coals, back into blazing life. “Wait!” he shouted. “Wait!” He had remembered his name and, with it, what he was.
Outside Replicon’s Washington headquarters, snow was sifting over the altered evergreens. The head of security leaned back in his chair, fiddling with his light pen. “You’ve changed, Eugene.”
The spook shrugged. “You mean the skin? The zaibatsery apparat can deal with that. I’m dead tired of this bodyform, anyway.”
“No, it’s something else.”
“Of course, I was robbed of the Veil.” He smiled flatly. “To continue. Once the traitress and I had become lovers, I was able to discover the location and guard codes of the nerve gas armaments. Immediately thereafter I faked an emergency, and released the chemical agents within the sealed bunker. They had all sought safety there, so their own ventilation system destroyed all but two of them. Those two I hunted down and shot later the same night. Whether the cyborg Owens ‘died’ or not is a matter of definition.”
“You won the woman’s trust?”
“No. That would have taken too long. I simply tortured her until she broke.” Again, he smiled. “Now the Synthesis can move in and dominate the Mayan population, as you would any other preindustrial culture. A few transistor radios will knock the whole flimsy structure over like a deck of cards.”
“You have our thanks,” said the chief. “And my personal congratulations.”
“Save it,” said the spook. “Once I’ve faded back into the shadows under the Veil, I’ll forget all this anyway. I’ll forget that my name is Simpson. I’ll forget that I am the mass murderer responsible for the explosion of the Leyland Zaibatsery and the death of eight thousand orbiters. By any standards I am a deadly hazard to society who fully deserves to be psychically destroyed.” He fixed the man with a cold, controlled, and feral grin. “And I face my own destruction happily. Because now I’ve seen life from both sides of the Veil. Because now I know for sure what I’ve always suspected. Being human just isn’t enough fun.”
THE BEAUTIFUL
AND THE SUBLIME
May 30, 2070
MY DEAR MACLUHAN:
You, my friend, who know so well a lover’s troubles, will understand my affair with Leona Hillis.
Since my last letter to you, I have come to know Leona’s soul. Slowly, almost despite myself, I opened those reservoirs of sympathy and feeling that turn a simple liaison into something much deeper. Something that partakes of the sublime.
It is love, my dear MacLuhan. Not the appetite of the body, easily counterfeited with pills. No, it is closer to agape, the soaring spiritual union of the Greeks.
I know the Greeks are out of favor these days, especially Plato with his computerlike urge toward abstract intellect.
Forgive me if my sentiments take this somewhat over-Westernized expression. I can only express what I feel, simply and directly.
In other words, I am free of that sense of evanescence that poisoned my earlier commitments. I feel as if I had always loved Leona; she has a place within my soul that could never be filled by another woman.
I know it was rash of me to leave Seattle. Aksyonov was eager to have me complete the set design for his new drama. But I felt taxed and restless, and dreaded the days of draining creative effort. Inspiration comes from nature, and I had been too long pent in the city.
So, when I received Leona’s invitation to her father’s birthday gala in the Grand Canyon, the lure was irresistible. It combined the best of both worlds: the companionship of a charming woman, against the background of a natural wonder unrivaled for sublimity.
I left poor Aksyonov only a hasty note over the mailnet, and fled to Arizona.
And what a landscape! Great sweeping mesas, long blasted vistas in purple and rose, great gaudy sunsets reaching ethereal fingers of pure radiance halfway to the zenith! It is the opposite pole to our green, introspective Seattle; a bright yang to the drizzling yin of the Pacific Coast. The air, sharpened by sagebrush and pinyon pine, seems to scrub the brain like a loofah. At once I felt my appetite return, and a new briskness lent itself to my step.
I spoke with several Arizonans about their Global Park. I found them to be sensitive and even noble people, touched to the core by the staggering beauty of their eerie landscape. They are quite modern in their sentiments, despite the large numbers of retirees—crotchety industrial-age relics. Since the draining of Lake Powell, the former floodplain of the reservoir has been opened to camping, sports, and limited development. This relieves the crowding in the Grand Canyon itself, which, under wise stewardship, is returning to a pristine state of nature.
For Dr. Hillis’s celebration, Hillis Industries had hired a modern hogan, perching on the northern canyon rim. It was a broad two-story dome, wrought from native cedar and sandstone, which blended into the landscape with admirable restraint and taste. A wide cedar porch overlooked the river. Behind the dome, white-barked Ponderosa pines bordered a large rock garden.
Freed of its obnoxious twentieth-century dams, the primal Colorado raged gloriously below the cliffsides, leaping and frothing in great silted billows and surges, flinging rocks and driftwood with tigerlike abandon. In the days that followed, its hissing roar would never be far from my thoughts.
The long drowning beneath the man-made lake had added an eerie charm to these upper reaches of the great canyon. Its shale and sandstone walls were stained a viridian green. In gulfs and eddies amid the canyon’s sinuous turns, old lake sediments still clung in warping slopes, clotted by the roots of cottonwoods and flowering scrub.
On the hogan porch, overlooking the cliffs, I plugged my wrist-ward into the house system and made my presence known. Also on the porch were a pair of old people. I checked their identities with my newly charged ward. But with the typical callousness of their generation, they had not plugged into the house system, and remained unknown to me.
It was with some relief, then, that I saw our old friend Mari Kuniyoshi emerge from the hogan to greet me. She and I had corresponded faithfully since her return to Osaka; mostly about her fashion business, and the latest gossip in Japanese graphic design.
I confess I never understood the magnetic attraction Mari has for so many men. My interest lies in her talent for design, and in fact I find her romances rather heartless.
My ward identified Mari’s companion: her production engineer and chief technician, Claire Berger. Mari was dressed somewhat ahead of the latest taste, in a bright high-throated peach sateen jacket and subtly clinging fluted anklewrap skirt. Claire Berger wore expedition pants, a cotton trek blouse, and hiking boots. It was typical of Mari that she would use this gawky young woman as a foil.
The three of us were soon chastely sipping fruit juice under one of the porch umbrellas and admiring the view. We traded pleasantries while I waited for Mari’s obvious aura of trouble to manifest itself.
It emerged that Mari’s current companion, a nineteen-year-old model and aspiring actor, had become a source of friction. Also present at the Hillis birthday fete was one of Mari’s older flames, the globe-trotting former cosmonaut, Friedrik Solokov. Mari had not expected Fred’s appearance, though he had been traveling with Dr. Hillis for some time. Mari’s model friend had sensed the rekindled rapport between Mari and Fred Solokov, and he was extravagantly jealous.
“I see,” I said. “Well, at some convenient time I can take your young friend aside, for a long talk. He’s an actor with ambitions, you say. Our troupe is always looking for new faces.”
“My dear Manfred,” she sighed, “how well you understand my little problems. You look very dashing today. I admire your ascot. What a charming effect. Did you tie it yourself or have a machine do it?”
“I confess,” I said. “This ascot has pre-stressed molecular folds.”
“Oh,” said Claire Berger distantly. “Really roughing it.”
I changed the subject. “How is Leona?”
“Ah. Poor Leona,” Mari said. “You know how fond she is of solitude. Well, as the preparations go on, she wanders through these great desolate canyons…climbing crags, staring down into the mists of that fierce river…Her father is not at all well.” She looked at me meaningfully.
“Yes.” It was well-known that old Dr. Hillis’s eccentricities, even cruelties, had advanced with the years. He never understood the new society his own great work had created. It was one of those ironic strokes you’re so fond of, my dear MacLuhan.
However, my Leona had paid for his reactionary stubbornness, so I failed to smile. Poor Leona, the child of the old man’s age, had been raised as his industrial princess, expected to master profits and losses and quarterly reports, the blighting discipline of his grisly drudgery. In today’s world, the old man might as well have trained her to be a Spanish conquistador. It’s a tribute to her spirit that she’s done as much for us as she has.
“Someone should be looking after her,” Mari said.
“She’s wearing her ward,” Claire said bluntly. “She�
�d have to work to get lost.”
“Excuse me,” I said, rising. “I think it’s time I met our host.”
I walked into the dome, where the pleasant resinous tang of last night’s pine fire still clung to the cold ashes of the hearth. I admired the interior: buffalo hides and vigorous Hopi blankets with the jagged look of old computer graphics. Hexagonal skylights poured light onto a floor of rough masculine sandstone.
Following the ward’s lead, I took my bags to a charming interior room on the second floor, with great braced geodesies of rough cedar, and whitewashed walls, hung with quaint agricultural tools.
In the common room downstairs, the old man had gathered with two of his elderly cronies. I was shocked to see how that famous face had aged: Dr. Hillis had become a cadaverous cheek-sucking invalid. He sat within his wheelchair, a buffalo robe over his withered legs. His friends still looked strong enough to be dangerous: crocodilian remnants from a lost age of violence and meat. The two of them had also not registered with the house system, but I tactfully ignored this bit of old-fashioned rudeness.
I joined them. “Good afternoon, Dr. Hillis. A pleasure to share this occasion with you. Thank you for having me.”
“This is one of my daughter’s friends,” Hillis croaked. “Manfred de Kooning, of Seattle. He’s an ar-tist.”
“Aren’t they all,” said Crocodile #1.
“If that’s so,” I said, “we owe our happy estate to Dr. Hillis. So it’s a double honor to celebrate with him.”
Crocodile #2 reached into his old-fashioned business suit and produced, of all things, a cigarette. He lit it and blew a lungful of cancerous reek among us. Despite myself, I had to take half a step back. “I’m sure we’ll meet again,” I said. “In the meantime I should greet our hostess.”
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