So what does that mean? And why technically?
Well. A little grin. That’s just what it says in the script, of course. There really is no such place as Arrasûn.
Long silence. Ling walking, Rahman still listening. The others walking some little distance away, Inbar talking with Jensen, Alireza just walking, staring at red ants. For a moment, Ling had imagined he could see the shadow of Ahmad Zeq.
He said, Script? What script?
Laing laughing, shaking her head. Somebody’s going to have a hard time explaining this one. Asses will be on the carpet. Boy.
What are you talking about?
Look, I don’t know what program you folks are from, but this is the software substrate for Crimson Desert. There’s been a pretty good malph, somewhere on up the line.
I don’t understand.
There’d been a troubled look in her eyes, a long deep shadow reaching away into her soul. You don’t know? It was plain she could see he didn’t, her upset deepening swiftly. So they programmed you all the way through? Boy, that’s not fair.
Life’s not fair.
This isn’t life.
Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where is this place and what’s Crimson Desert? And now, a stark fear of what he was about to find out.
Laing said, If there was somebody to complain to about this, I’d sure as shit complain. But there isn’t, as usual. She looked away, took a slow breath, looked back at him, face full of obvious sympathy. Crimson Desert is an interactive story background in the Ohanaic Pseudouniverse. We’re all AI modules assigned to act out various roles within the flexscript.
Silence. Then Rahman gabbling in Arabic, all walking stopped, the other Arabs turning, staring, astonished, Inbar’s eyes large with interest, Alireza’s large with unmistakable fear. Fear and disbelief.
Ling said, “I almost guessed that. Almost guessed it.”
o0o
Omry Inbar awoke to red-orange sunrise, and thought, A videonet drama. I’m inside a videonet drama. In just a minute, the director will shout Cut! and we’ll all break for lunch... No. Not quite. Just a dream. He sat up on one elbow, feeling cold and stiff, joints almost creaking after lying out on the hard ground all night, looking around. Sunrise. Brilliant sun a squashed, streaky pink disk, quite oblate, on the far horizon, out over the desert, Neptune pale blue, almost washed away by the morning light. No sign of smoke anywhere. People and red ants lying strewn on the ground around the dead fire, some of them stirring, some not.
Jensen huddled against the little red ant he’d squirmed with the night before. What is he doing to that thing? Ling’s voice then, in a hushed whisper. Passiphaë Laing’s throaty, sexually-charged chuckle. What do you think?
But... but... why?
Well. She’s his wife.
Oh.
I forget you all don’t know the story. Jensen’s a Sector Explorer for the Ohanaic Fleet. He crashed here about twenty years ago; went native.
Um. I see. And you?
I’m an investigative reporter for GalactoLight News.
Ah. Dr. Livingston, I presume?
Quite. I always liked Henry Stanley. Not to mention Spencer Tracy. She laughed, a merry sound, a likable sound.
Inbar sat up, sat cross-legged on the ground, rubbing his hands together, wriggling stiff fingers and wishing for a good, hearty cup of the very best Ethiopian coffee. Caffeine to jump start my soul, sugar to power the transformation.
So here we are inside the programming track for Crimson Desert, the most popular, longest running interactive hypernet saga accessible by the citizens of the Terran Empire of 3954 A.D., somewhere in something she calls the Ohanaic Pseudouniverse. Why pseudo-, I wonder? I have a feeling I’m not going to like it when I find out.
Inbar stood, stretching, listening to the gristle of his neck and spine and shoulder joints crackle, wishing now for a hot bathtub, a professional massage. Hell, why not simply wish for a warm bed with satin sheets and my own private, paid-for whore?
Everyone was stiff, stretching, murmuring complaints, Ling, oldest, perhaps the worst, Laing reaching down to help him to his feet, help him brush the red soil from his coverall. Even the ants were stiff, rolling around on their little globe-shaped hips, bending and straightening thin, angular arms and legs, hard plastic faces expressionless. But their eyes. You can see something in their eyes. Just a hint.
Everyone was stiff but Jensen, who’d slept more or less naked on the bare ground, Jensen bounding to his feet, yawning, laughing, bright-eyed and bushy... well. Not quite bushy-tailed, exactly. Jensen slapping his little red wife on her red plastic bottom with a flat, hard sound, like a man’s hand striking a block of wood. A hollow block, at that, little red woman murmuring tingytingting like a little bell, as if in protest.
And then another voice, not one of theirs, loud, harsh, with that oh-so-flat and unBritish accent: “Well. Caught you at last.” Flat voice echoing round the low crags surrounding their campsite. On the cliff above stood five... people? Four of them people at any rate. A short, rather unkempt young man. A slim, handsome Asian couple, man and woman, man in military uniform, woman looking like a video star...
Quite at home here, I suppose, mused Inbar, unsurprised, at himself, at them. A thing. Thing of some kind. Not a person. Not really. Person-shaped, but thin, spindly, black, something over three meters tall, with huge, featureless, glowing white eyes. Not glowing. Reflecting the morning light like mirrors.
And the American soldier woman, she of the flowing golden hair, she of the bizarre, alien silver eyes. Alien? The word’s taken on new meaning, deeper meaning. How familiar, how comfortable she looks just now. Something from home.
Up on the cliff, the Asian-looking man said, “Jensen and Laing? I wondered if we’d run into you two in here.” In here.
Alireza stepped forward, just one step, a half-step perhaps, and called out, “Sergeant-Major Kincaid, is it? Come on down. You and your friend can... explain things to us.”
“If she knows, herself,” Inbar heard Ling mutter.
“If there’s anything to know,” said Rahman aloud, voice quite cold.
Kincaid laughed and stepped off the cliff, landing like an acrobat in front of them. “There is,” she said.
o0o
Alireza sat then and ate his breakfast, hot, sharp flower-scented orange tea sipped between little spoonfuls of some crunchy grain cereal that had quickly soaked up a splash of tart, lime-green milk, and wondered for the thousandth time, if he really understood. Wondered, and listened to the talk, mostly between little soldier Genda, strapping newswoman Laing, and this metallic American Amazon, Kincaid.
Do I finally understand this word Multiverse? Maybe. Most likely not. Easy to understand its comic book implications, of course. You make a decision, yes or no, the universe splits and two of you go their separate ways, one yes, one no.
But it isn’t as simple as that, nothing ever is, especially with physics. It was demonstrated almost two hundred years ago, with all those crazy slit experiments, that a particle plainly follows all possible paths, until someone looks and nails down true history.
What about us? Whose looking? Who collapses our wave function?
A good Muslim knows. No need for some godless Anthropic Principle.
Always gave me a headache to think about these things, back at university. Never understood why an aerospace engineer in training should have to study these things, even in brief. Give me good, honest, faithful machines. Always the same, no matter what. Unless they’re broken. In which case you fix them.
Now listen to them talk.
How in Hell could we be inside a story? Look at Ling. Chinaman gleeful at what he’s hearing.
Listen to Kincaid’s questions now. She understands the Multiverse well. Understands how, if something is possible, then, somewhere, sometime, in some history or another, it is. But, still, Crimson Desert? A story is just a story, you see. Sure, there can be a history in which there exists a story c
alled Crimson Desert, which includes a meeting between... us. But. The characters in a book are just characters. They are not conscious entities. They don’t experience the story themselves.
A story, you see, is just a story.
Then, that other being... do I understand correctly? Is this woman Amaterasu a robot, built for men’s pleasure, no more than some complex masturbation toy?
Amaterasu interjecting, very quietly, No, Mother. A book is, I think, a Chinese Room.
Ah, now there’s a notion. A locked room. Inside, a man who speaks only Spanish. With him, an elaborate library containing all the rules for translating between English and Chinese. A slip of paper is passed under the door, bearing a message in Chinese. The Spanish man goes diligently to work. In due course, a slip of paper is passed back under the door, bearing the English translation. To the man inside, there is no message, only the following of rules, directing mechanical tasks. To the people outside? Something has understood the message.
Does the room itself then, speak Chinese and English? Certainly, the Spanish worker inside does not. His presence is irrelevant and could be taken by an insensate machine. All those Hard AI arguments of centuries past, arguing that the Chinese Room is indeed imbued with sentience and must, in some sense, be aware.
Even I know it isn’t so.
The intelligence of a Chinese Room lies with the mind that laid down the rules for parsing the message. An information processing machine is nothing more than an extension of the intelligence that programmed it. At best, the fossilized intelligence of its creator.
Kincaid staring hard-eyed, dismayed at the robot.
Then the soft sound of Ling, swallowing gently, eyes troubled.
Oh. I see. The fossilized intelligence of its Creator.
You follow a line of cause and effect, backward through time. The reader reads. The writer writes. The writer came from somewhere. Somewhen. Each step in the chain no more than one more insensate link, back to some First Cause. And there you find the intelligence that imbued all the rest.
Of course we can be inside a story now. What’s the difference between once sort of Creation and another? A matter of degree, not kind. Very funny, really. Look at how uncomfortable this notion makes the empiricists among us.
They don’t want, you see, to be mere... creations.
o0o
Later, when the sun was past noon, crossing beyond the zenith, afternoon advancing as it settled down the western sky once again, sky darkening very slowly from bright orange to dun, they walked and walked, Inbar’s feet in agony now, the cheap patent leather of the thin boots that he’d worn inside his spacesuit starting to tear here and there, creasing and tearing, exposing stuff like gray cardboard.
They were on the western slope of the mountain range now, the side away from the flat red desert, the sun always in their faces, but you could see the city in the distance, Kanthol, the City on the Mountain, Jensen called it with obvious pride. Kanthol, towering above lesser peaks in the foreground, some great Himalayan range visible beyond it, peering over the horizon, washed out pink with distance and haze.
On Earth, the distant mountains would look blue, this... pinkness enhances the alien feel of Arrasûn, the imaginary world of Crimson Desert. Imaginary. My God. And what had Ling meant, when he’d said, Gathol, it ought to be called Gathol? And the other one should be Helium, not Halian.
Soldier Kincaid laughing with delight, heavy American breasts shaking on her chest: Not quite Barsoom, is it, Professor Ling?
Ling staring at the red ants, listening to them clangclang away. No, he’d said. I suppose not.
But still wishing it was?
I’m wishing it was Moon Man’s Moon. At least it’d be Earth, hanging up there in the sky, not Neptune...
Kincaid silent then, for a long moment, odd expression on her face. She’d whispered: I wish it was too. Maybe that’s where he went, off to join Iulianos and Red Hawk and Valetta. Off to join them and fight the Kalksis together...
Obvious pleasure on Ling’s face. Has he met a kindred spirit? Maybe not, something else in the American woman’s face, in her face, not in those liquid silver eyes. Torment? Maybe.
Kanthol, the City on the Mountain, glittered atop its crag, as if its buildings were made from the purest of white marble, as if its domes were plated in gold, platinum, silver, electrum. Like some Hellenistic city of old. No. Not quite. Hellenes painted their marble cities in pastels, reds and blues. and in rich browns, greens. This city, Kanthol, was like the Greek cities as eighteenth century European tourists imagined them to be, dreaming among the weathered ruins.
Walking and walking. And listening. Listening to the American woman... can she really be 130 years old? Look at those luscious breasts, those broad, fertile hips... Listening to her tell the story. Can it really be true, this story of the Colonists and the Scavengers, the old abandoned system of Stargates, beginning with the one under the Moon?
Of course it can. We’re here.
It was some time, she’d said, before we understood they weren’t stargates, leading nowhere anyone could see. Gateways to other universes, to other times in other universes. Gateways across creation itself. We’d had the mathematics, the quantum cosmology to understand it for more than fifty years before we went to the Moon. It just didn’t seem like the highest probability explanation. Besides which, we wanted them to be stargates.
And why did you come home, after finding such a thing? Why did you create Fortress America? Why did you... hide?
She’d said, Let me tell you a little bit about something the Scavengers liked to call the Space-Time Juggernaut. We just like to call it the Jug...
So. Is their really something, an entity of some kind, loose out here in the... the Multiverse, cosmologists call it, something which doesn’t want us probing out among the gates?
Something, Kincaid told them, which destroyed the Colonists on all their worlds. Something which destroyed the Scavengers when they went looting among the worlds. Something which almost destroyed us.
Something, said Lord Genda Hiroshige, which erased the very fabric of the universe I called home.
Possible?
Why not, considering what’s turned out to be possible so far?
Rahman, long quiet as they walked and walked, said, Why has it left the gates open then? Why not close them all and keep us all home where we belong?
Home where we belong.
Genda only smiled, and said, “Good question. When my own universe was destroyed, utterly destroyed, apparently down to its very atoms, though I got away before then, all that remained were the gates, floating alone in the black void.”
“A wonder you survived.”
“A wonder indeed. I was on hyperdrive as the stars fell. I got through the gate. Call it luck.”
Call it anything you like.
By nightfall they were down on the dusty plains and rolling hills east of the mountain range, but the city of Kanthol, lit now by a hundred thousand twinkling golden lights, hardly seemed closer at all.
o0o
A long walk, a long night’s walk, and Subaïda Rahman sat in a little outdoor cafe in the heart of Kanthol, City on the Mountain, wishing mightily for fresh clothing, and thought, Butyl mercaptan. That’s it. My armpits smell like a natural gas pipeline leak. Any minute now there’ll be a little spark and I’ll explode, taking this whole silly world with me. We few, we band of heroes... I’m thinking like a madwoman again.
They sat at a nice round table, the twelve of them together, drinking from little sake glasses of what tasted like DeKuyper’s Peppermint Schnapps, white marble buildings towering all around them, towering from crag to crag, slanting rays of brilliant, late afternoon sunlight throwing long shadows down a red-brick-paved avenue, avenue thronged with hordes of bustling red ants, ants going clangety-clang as they maneuvered around one another, going clickety-clack, plastic skin on plastic skin.
City On the Mountain? Mirth. Ought to call it Kanthol, City of the Livi
ng Fire Engines. All we need now is to hear the hoo-hah of a French police car tootling in the distance and my life would be complete...
Pity the red ants aren’t people. At least I could get some fresh underwear then...
Image of herself, like Jensen here, dressed in red-ant harness. How would I look? I’m in good shape, nice breasts, not too large, not too small. Firm waist. I wonder if I have a nice-looking rear end...
Inbar leaned close, peppermint breath masking the fact that he hadn’t brushed his teeth in a week, and whispered, “What’re you smiling about?”
Soap bubble popped. By the one person here who’d be ever so glad to advise me about my rear end. “Nothing. Daydreaming.”
He said, “Not really necessary. Not here.” Looking up at that orange sky, that brilliant pink sun.
Across the table, Ling and Laing, Genda and Kincaid were sitting together, talking. The others. Jensen tinkling away with his... wife? How very odd that seemed. Not quite the way it is in children’s storybooks. The pretty Oriental girl, a robot incredibly, sitting to one side, talking with that little American who called himself Brucie, little man bright-eyed, focused on her in an obvious way. The big black thing with the white eyes and strange name sitting with them, with some strange interest of... her? Stranger and stranger. In any event, with some interest of her own. And Inbar. And Alireza. And me. Rather like outsiders here. I wonder why?
Genda, voice rather forceful, rather certain, was saying, “You’re not going to get home. None of you are. It is almost certain the Juggernaut is sniffing along your trail even now, making what rectifications it can.”
Hard pang. Hard pang inside. Not going home. And that other possibility, the possibility that home is... gone. A deep, hollow forming within her. Rahman thought, This is not what I wanted. Remembered image then, the excitement of going into space, going to the Moon. Space-Faring Civilization. Mars of the red sky, black at zenith, lit by a cold, faraway Sun. Voyages to the asteroids. Jupiter a fat orange ball, hanging over Callisto’s black-ice horizon, hanging over the spires and domes and steamy smokes of the new volatiles plant they would one day build.
The Transmigration of Souls Page 19