Kiln People

by David Brin

  So much for the simple part.

  Halfway to the copier platform now, I could see a glowing green START button within easy reach, but useless till my head reached the perceptron tendrils. Still, I took a moment to smack the button, telling the machine to start readying a blank. If I did manage to make it, there’d be few seconds to spare. Machinery rumbled and rumbled.

  Now things get tricky.

  Fortunately, the chair had arms … twice as many as I did, actually. That helped as I leveraged myself alongside the upended wastebasket, flopping and wedging my body against the metal mesh while my sole decaying limb pushed. Then I had to reach higher, onto the copier itself, searching for fingerholds — and as I strained again, a couple of digits broke off, liquefying horribly as they fell past my good eye to splat on the floor.

  This time, the fissures along my arm resembled chasms, sweating fluid the color of magma. It was a race to see whether dissolution would win, or hard baking from heat, like happened to that leg I threw at the missile launcher. Suppose I self-cooked in place! What a sculpture I’d make. Call it A Study in Obstinacy, reaching and grimacing while struggling to haul a useless body …

  That’s it, I realized, grateful for any inspiration, drop the deadweight!

  Barely thinking, I applied lessons that I learned upstairs, pulling my self inward and away from remote parts. The whole bottom half of my torso was useless to me now — so ditch it! Scavenge the remaining enzymes. Send them up for the arm’s final tug.

  I felt what was left of my abdomen crumble away. With the load suddenly lightened, my arm gave a hard yank … and snapped off at the shoulder.

  I don’t think I could ever describe what it felt like as a ragged head and upper chest, sailing high enough to look down at my goal, the white surface where a human original was supposed to lay in comfort, blithely commanding obedient machinery to make cheap doubles — a perfect serving class that can’t rebel and always knows what to do.

  How simple that used to seem!

  During my flying arc, I wondered, Assuming I land okay, will I be able to use my chin and shoulder to maneuver around? To guide my head between the tendrils?

  Would that automatically trigger imprinting, now that the START button had been pressed? If not, how was I to press it again? Problems, problems. And you know what? I would have found solutions, too. I know it. If that darn trajectory had just carried me where I wanted to go.

  But like Moses, I could only watch the promised land from afar. Coming down, my head barely missed the platform, caroming off the copier’s edge and then against the wastebasket, knocking it off the chair so it tumbled, landing upright on the floor.

  As if that weren’t enough, what happened next was the real capper.

  I rolled across the seat and teetered for a fragile moment, then fell off to land (appropriately enough, at the end of one hell of a week) inside a receptacle labeled TRASH

  70

  Soul’s My Destination

  Will it be all right, now that the glazier beam has fired?

  What a sight that was.

  The titanic Standing Wave blasted through both clay mirrors, hurling the pendulum — with ditYosil aboard — deep into a stony ceiling. Yet all the others who were standing around barely got singed. For the mighty wave distortion instantly turned on an axis that lay at right angles to every known direction, vanishing into a distance no living eye could follow.

  Except for realAlbert, that is, who turned his head as if to track its departure, wearing a smile so enigmatic, so knowing, that Ritu and her twin brother simply stopped in their tracks. One moment they were rushing toward him with hands raised to strike. The next, they simply dropped their arms and backed away, staring at him.

  Yes, the “anchor” is still attached, by a slender thread.

  Shall we follow?

  From the beginning, when brilliant, tormented Yosil Maharal still thought he could design and control everything, the beam’s first goal had been the nearest city. Where else could so many spirit-flickers be found close together, clustered like a tidy field of crops growing alongside a fallow prairie? It must have seemed a good place to harvest nourishment for the next step.

  Had he bent his egomania enough to involve peers and collaborators — even a whole civilization — Yosil might have discovered and corrected all the flaws in his splendid plan. Technical and conceptual flaws. Moral flaws. But “mad scientist” is almost defined by solipsism — a neurotic need to avoid criticism and do everything alone.

  Without Maharal, it might have taken another generation for humanity to make this attempt. Because of him, humanity could have been destroyed.

  As it turns out, there is no plague tearing through the metropolis when the glazier arrives overheard. No charnelhouse of rapid pestilence providing enough death manna to gorge upon at length. Just a few thousand souls per day, cast free of their organic moorings by accident or natural causes, rise gently to the hovering waveform, finding welcome room for their vibratory modes. After some initial surprise, they add breadth and subtlety to a superposition of states …

  But it’s no feast.

  This Standing Wave won’t become a “god” by raw power alone.

  Yosil’s simple plan has failed.

  Time to try something else.

  Turning sideways again, the macrowave pursues a scent that few ever noticed before. Out to sea it flies, two thousand kilometers, where blue pelagic currents course above deep trenches — an abode for cephalopods, some nearly as long as a supertanker, with eyes like dinner plates and brains reeking of high intelligence. Aliens, right here on Earth.

  Is this it?

  Plunging deep where sunlight never goes, we join the world of giant squid, sampling what it’s like to flow along by sphincter-driven water jet, touching and experiencing a liquid world with long suckers that dangle beyond the limits of vision. We feed. We chase, mate, and spawn. We compete and scheme by logic all our own, expressing concepts in warm flashes of intricate color along our flanks.

  And, once in a great while, we also tremble and worship when Death comes plunging down at us from Hell, the hot world above. For that narrow instant, while fleeing desperately, we clasp and cherish something that glimmers like hope -

  Then the devil is upon us, massive, black, devouring. His shrill voice strikes deep, paralyzing, turning guts to jelly! Then come jaws, small but powerful. White teeth reflect the protest pigmentations of our bioluminescent skin as they tear unto us, dragging us upward …

  So, it wasn’t the giant squid who attracted the glazier beam this way. They’re so exotic, perhaps they’ll find another soulscape of their own.

  It was their hunters who drew the macrowave here.

  Sperm whales, returning from the crushing depths, their hunger sated on fresh cephalopod, now gather at the pleasant wavetops to breathe and splash. Though occupied with natural concerns — the quest for food and reproductive success — now and then as many as a dozen creatures congregate, touching massive brows.

  Contained within, far larger than any other organ, is a mound of waxy substance, malleable as wet clay, subtle at refracting and reshaping sound, enabling these stalkers of the deep to propel cunning beams that find — and stun — their prey in utter darkness. Sculpted sound is to them as the dynamic recoloring of flesh is to squid, or syntactical word chains to a human being. All are ways to gossip, cooperate, deceive, meditate, or — when all else fails — seek urgent meaning in prayer.

  The sperm whales congregate, flared tails pointing outward like a petaled flower, or mandala, or rose window. Brows meeting, they exchange complex sonic shapes/images/ideograms with properties that long ago emerged from the background noise of mere survival. Meanings congeal in the wax, delicate as spiderwebs, unique as snowflakes, multifarious as an ecosystem.

  They were doing this long before Bevvisov learned to imprint souls in clay.

  Off again!

  Using so much energy, shouldn’t the glazier be growing hungry?
There was beauty amid the squid and whales — but no great nourishment. Then why does the macrowave seem undisappointed as it rotates through an axis invented on the spot — twisting the very context out of which raw vacuum arose — then building speed on a course that it makes up as it goes?

  We seem to have discovered outer space.

  In flickering sequence we pass great sweeps of stars. Mammoth clusters of bright pinpoints roll by in leaps that devour emptiness as if it wasn’t there. Metric itself becomes a component of the wave, its ally in travel, rather than an obstacle.

  Searching … examining … every now and then, we pause briefly to scrutinize — a red giant, tumid and swollen as it slowly expands, eating its children. Then — an aged white dwarf, born during the galaxy’s first generation. Having blown away much of its substance, it will (ironically) endure long ages more on a starvation diet, glittering faintly for no one — unlike a gluttonous blue super-giant, whose mere million years tick by with blazing speed. Far too massive for any other goal, it must choose glory over life — that is, until it’s cleaved by a surprising force, slicing the colossus in two. A singularity! Not a black hole, this one is long and stringy — an exceptional relic of creation, a faceted flaw in spacetime, deadly, gorgeous only to those who know its language of pure math — having already stirred turmoil when it passed through an immense molecular cloud, spinning vortices that self-gravitate, flattening to ionized skirts that whirl and merge into newborn systems — then on again we speed, past spiral arms that gleam like diamond dust, until — we find ourselves zooming down to a modest yellow sun … a star of pleasant middle age … a steady hearth, unpretentious, with a retinue of planet-specks — one of which seems luckier than most … warm-not-hot, massive-not-ponderous, wet-not-drowned, and kneaded by just enough falling objects to keep things interesting.

  We plunge to this world, gorgeous in its balance of ocean and sky, sea and shore, mountain and plain, lake and hill, pond and knoll, tree and shrub, prey and predator, fungus and rotifer, parasite and prion, clay and crystal, molecule and atom, electron and …

  Diving ever smaller, we cry out to wait!

  Go back!

  What was that passing glimpse we just had of gleaming, multibranched spires built by fascinating hands? A brief impression of docked ships and shops and tree-perched homes where shaded figures spoke a demure language, like song?

  Backtrack. It should be easy to find. Just return to a size and scale midway between a cosmos and a quark.

  Another civilization. Another race of thinking, feeling beings! Wasn’t that what you were looking for?

  Apparently not.

  71

  Head Basket

  … or how to become a real boy …

  Little remained of the gleaming me that stepped out of a kiln Tuesday morning, resigned to cleaning the house and running the chores of Albert Morris. A body that wound up living — let’s see — close to three extra days, thanks to Aeneas Kaolin, and a dash of mulish stubbornness. A self who wound up doing a whole lot more than scrub toilets! Who gathered so many interesting memories and thoughts — what a pity there’d be no chance to deposit them. To share them.

  The things I’ve seen.

  And hallucinated, reminding myself of all the fun echoes and trippy/bossy voices I made up along the way. Oh, realAl was going to miss out on a lot. Assuming that he escaped the burning of his home, Albert probably spent the whole week at a computer screen, or waving his arms under a chador, coordinating ebony researchers and gray investigators and dickering with insurance agents. Working hard, the poor dull fellow.

  And yet, he can’t be a complete bore. Not if Clara loves him.

  I’d smile if I could. How nice if my last mental picture could be of her … a woman I never met in person, yet still adored.

  I could see her now — a final, pleasant feat of imagination as the last of my torso dissolved, leaving only a pathetic head rolling at the bottom of a dustbin. Yes, it was she who came before me, all blurry in a Hollywood-romantic way that softens any image, even one wearing a duralloy helmet covered with spiky antennas.

  Through that gauzy light, Clara seemed to peer down at me, her sweet voice beckoning like an angel.

  “Well, I’ll be cut to bits and served as tempura,” said my illusory seraph, pushing aside a pair of holo goggles that gleamed like sunlit cobwebs. “Chen! Does this dit look like an Albert to you?”

  “Hm. Maybe,” said another figure, crowding in to have a look. While my conjured Clara seemed all soft and feminine (albeit wrapped in heavy armor), the newcomer was fanged and scaly.

  A demon!

  In its hand, a slim rod poked my brow.

  “Damn, you’re right! The pellet says … wait, this can’t be.”

  A third voice, much higher, squeaked, “Oh yes it can!”

  From around Clara’s shoulder a thin face like an eager fox appeared, bending over to leer down, grinning at me with twin V-rows of shiny teeth. “It’s got to be the one who signaled,” said the ferret-figure I had dreamed up, looking quite a bit like my old companion Palloid. “Maybe this is old Gumby, after all.”

  I would have shaken my head if I could, or closed my eyes if I had lids.

  This was all too much, even for a dream.

  Time to melt, before it got worse.

  Only, I had to rouse a bit when Clara called.

  “Albert? Is that you in there?”

  Illusion or not, I couldn’t refuse her anything. Though lacking a body — or any other means to make sound — I somehow gathered strength to mouth four words.

  “… just … a … fax … ma’am …”

  All right. I should have come up with something better. Everything was fading, though. Anyway, I felt happy enough. Before utter blackness, my final image would be of her smile, so reassuring that you just had to believe.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart.” Clara said, reaching into the wastebasket. “I’ve got you. Everything will be just fine.”

  PART IV

  But this man that you wish to create for yourself is short of days and full of passion.

  —The Book of Job

  72

  Rigmarole

  … or in memory still green …

  With a wide-open main gate, the estate seemed to lack security, an illusion the owner could afford. Cruising toward a great stone mansion, our limousine passed groundskeepers at work. They were ostentatiously real.

  “This is kind of familiar,” said Pal from his life-sustaining chair. “I remember thinking we’d be lucky to get out of this place alive.” Somehow he had managed to absorb some bits of memory from the smashed mini-golem — my companion across a frantic Tuesday and Wednesday. It felt good knowing some of clever Palloid survived.

  Sensors turned a narrow patch of the limo’s body transparent wherever a passenger’s eye happened to focus, creating an illusion of no roof or walls, though nosy outsiders would spy just a few dim circles, darting about madly. Still, in order to inhale the scent composition of Aeneas Kaolin’s gardens, I had to roll down a window.

  Smells kept surprising me, like memories of another life.

  Someone else took a deep breath when I did. Albert, to my left, gave one of his distant smiles, clearly enjoying hints of autumn in the breeze. Except for a small bandage below an ear, and one around his thumb, he didn’t look too bad. He could even dress and shave himself, if gently coaxed. But his attention lay elsewhere.

  Are you a neshamah? I wondered. A body without a soul?

  If so, what an ironic role reversal. For I, a golem, felt well equipped in that regard.

  Is there no one home in there, Albert? Or are we just getting a “busy signal”?

  I must have been staring again. A gentle squeeze from the other side drew me back as Clara’s slim, strong hand took mine.

  “Do you think we’ll get to look over Kaolin’s medieval armor collection?” she asked. “I’d love to try a few cuts with that big, two-handed Claymore.”

 
; This from a beautiful young woman wearing a sun hat and a light summer dress. Clara sometimes enjoyed downplaying her “formidable” side. It enhanced her feral attractiveness.

  “He may be in no mood to play tour guide,” I predicted, but she just smiled.

  Closer to the house, Clara glanced pointedly at a sunken parking area holding two more automatic limos, just like this one. We had timed our arrival to closely follow that pair.

  Red-striped guardits watched a forklift remove a tall shipping crate from a delivery truck by the chateau’s main entrance. They turned warily as we pulled up … till some hidden signal made them back off.

  “I always wanted a job like that,” Pal murmured as the grunting forklift hoisted its cargo on sturdy legs, ascending wide steps to the house.

  “No, you didn’t,” I replied, maneuvering his life-support chair onto the pavement. Hard work wasn’t Pal’s style.

  Clara examined the chair’s medical dials, then fussed over realAlbert, straightening his collar. “Will you two be okay out here?”

  Pal took Albert’s arm, getting another enigmatic smile. “Us? We’ll just stroll the grounds, helping each other over bumps and looking for trouble.”

  Clara still worried, but I squeezed her hand. What place could be safer? And their presence would make a point to Kaolin.

  “Go on in.” Pal nodded toward the mansion. “If Mr. Zillionaire gives you any trouble, holler. We’ll bust in, right, old buddy?”

  Instead of responding, Albert turned, as if following something barely visible against the blue sky. He pointed with his bandaged thumb, like some kind of metaphysical hitchhiker.