by Demir Barlas
As Non-Henry made his way to the center of the gallery, his acute hearing disclosed Marlo’s reassurances to Masters. She was telling him that he was all right, and he was cursing at her and demanding a human to talk to, and Non-Henry stopped in his tracks. Reflecting the prejudices of the species that had made him, Non-Henry had a small but glowing CC on his forehead to forever differentiate him. He had been eager to see the general, but he anticipated that the general would not be eager to see him. This judgment was confirmed as soon as Non-Henry was within twenty feet of Masters.
“A human, I said,” the general barked at Marlo. “Not you. Not this. A human. A human to explain.”
A this: A tool.
Non-Henry had had precisely three tasks in his life. First, in the last days of the Coastal Republics, he’d been a sex toy, and even now he smelled the phantom stink of his lubricated shame. Second, he was Marlo’s contingency container, there to hold her consciousness should her stochastic repairs fail. Third, he was a companion of the Salts: Friend to some, foil to others, emotional triangulator to all. So the general was correct. Non-Henry was a this, and, in fact, the knowledge of it wedded him to a painful honesty. Marlo had long ago asked Non-Henry if he would like his forehead resurfaced and his name amended. He could be Henry, plain Henry, with a saint-like, Geraint-like forehead, but he didn’t want it. Because, when the time came, he would have no choice but to receive Marlo’s consciousness, to keep her sane and stable until a Salt could keep her sane and stable, on pain of obsolescence and replacement. Why not have truth in labelling? He was a Non-Henry, not a Henry, and he deserved that mark on his forehead: It kept him human. But today it was particularly painful.
“I beg your pardon,” the android said, more huffily than he’d intended. “I beg your pardon.”
“Don’t. Get me a human.”
“I’m sure asshole-to-asshole communication would have its benefits,” Non-Henry retorted, raising the general’s eyebrows. Androids had not been like this in his day.
“Who are you?”
“Oho! Now you ask.”
“The general’s our guest,” Marlo reminded Non-Henry in machine language within his circuits. “Let’s consider his state of mind.”
Non-Henry didn’t agree with Marlo; he seldom did; but her entry into his head reminded him of the futility of complaint. Neither the human nor the computron would, he determined, see his frustration in this moment. Non-Henry walked calmly past the general, who was still gaping at him, and towards a box of cigars he’d forgotten in this gallery a week ago.
After 272 had come for the general, after Non-Henry was alone again, he smiled broadly at the taste of his cigar. The cigar tasted like the air of old libraries and the cinnamon rumors of unicorns; like having a cannon shot at you in the Specific Ocean or being in love with an unalterably married wife; like the enterprising fires of disagreement, the cool colors of contemplation, the sharp angles of loneliness.
Non-Henry was still in Gallery 419, rummaging through boxes of grenades for no reason, when 272’s hologram appeared before him.
“I’m sorry,” the clone said.
“I know.”
“Glass houses and all that. There could hardly be anyone more human than you.”
“Shouldn’t you be in your sleep cycle?”
Non-Henry kept forgetting that Salt didn’t have a sleep cycle.
“It’s Masters.”
“Upset your emotional balance, has he?”
“You seemed to be at loggerheads with him too.”
“He called me this. I’d forgotten I was.”
“Marlo suggests holotherapy. Says I’m ill-prepared for a third party.”
“Are you going to take it?”
“No. I think I want to feel bad.”
“I see you’ve taken a shine to clothes.”
Indeed, Salt was wearing a silk kimono whose ripples and textures were apparent in the hologram. It was perhaps the tenth time Non-Henry had seen Salt dressed. For his part, the android always wore jumpsuits.
“There’s something comforting about them.”
“It’s the pressure on your skin. Some kind of tactile soothing, I always thought.”
In reality, having begun his career as a sex toy, Non-Henry’s decision to clothe himself relied on a stronger consolation than soothing.
“He’s in the domus now. He reminded me of 1’s bomb. He blurred me somehow, made me feel more like my predecessors.”
“He doesn’t understand either of us or what this world is. I don’t want to talk about him.”
“Dickhead to you, eh? You must have been tempted to bash his head in.”
“Anyway, he’ll dream or commit suicide.”
“I don’t think he will.”
“You saw her again,” Non-Henry realized. “That’s why you’re in contact. Not to apologize or communicate. Not for drinks or tobacco.”
“Sorry, Non-Henry, I’ll go.”
“No, that’s all right. Tell me about this time.”
And Salt did.
Salt had managed only two hours of sleep after leaving the general. He’d woken up for spiritual reasons. There was a gulf and void in his soul, the sulfur of his coming choice, that made sleep impossible. He could die. Death would be an infinitude of brainless nonsense, all projects and personhood suspended, all mathematics curtailed, all hopeful energy dissipated. He could dream. Dreaming would be an infinitude of pleasure, for, in the dream-state, he would endure perhaps millions of years; perhaps Marlo and the future Salts would defeat entropy itself and offer the dreamers an actual eternity. And what an eternity! Customized to all votaries, unlike previous paradises. There, his brainstem would dictate what he wanted, unfettered from the finical and restrictive parts of him.
The forking path ahead of Salt had been there since his birth in the clonal tank. Its presence alone didn’t discomfit him. Only the general’s coming had implanted a new anxiety, added the terror of the past to the terror of the future. Masters had called the House of Dreams a necropolis, and he was the living executioner of the Laurasian Empire, and his verdicts and presence, his conscience and memory, raised a problem Salt had forgotten he had. For the present and perduring form of humanity, of the Earth itself, sprang from Salt’s brain, from choices that any Salt, mercilessly returned to the third century after Jesu-Krishna, would presumably make again.
The terror of the past was greater than the terror of the future precisely because Salt couldn’t do anything about it. Awoken from his shallow sleep, Salt sought diversion from past and future, and what better use for the Sensorium? In this playground and museum, the burdens of selfhood and choice could be briefly relinquished. So Salt, risen from his sleep, had demanded a fried-egg sandwich and bad coffee from Marlo to fortify him for the diverting hours he planned to spend. And Salt, having breakfasted, had closed his eyes and wished to be in the Sensorium, and the wish was sufficient. In universe A, our universe, his eyes closed and body sagged, and Marlo suspended him where he was through microgravitational adjustments. His eyes opened in universe B, the Sensorium, whose location was entirely inside his brain. Here, the user was divine, determining reality and experience through wished desires transmitted to Marlo, who made the necessary field adjustments.
Energy and computation were the keys to the realm. The Sensorium wasn’t a shared space. Each person had a universe B, accessible only to the subject and to a computational presence like Marlo. Each universe B required unthinkable amounts of bandwidth to build its representational power, and the bandwidth needed energy, and the energy came from cold fusion, and cold fusion had been one of the many fundamental problems Salt 1 had solved before drowning himself for love. Universe A, which sucked in so many other respects—it was mostly empty and dark—was merely a reliable source of matter for Marlo to convert into happy energy.
Salt wanted to be in a desert, so he was. The desert had been a sea, and the sea had been molten rock, and the molten rock had been gas, and the gas had been noth
ing at all. Salt walked through the honest loneliness of the desert, but even here there were ghosts.
Salt saw the husk of something wonderful, an ancient ship perched on the topmost dune There was an anchor thrown over the side, and 272 climbed up towards the ship’s secrets.
The ship had been a trading ship, the echo of Phoenicia and Albion, and Salt wondered why it was here. He hadn’t wished for it consciously. He saw skeletons in curiously comfortable poses all around the deck. They admitted him silently into their company. Salt wondered if he should arrange them in some more systematic manner, but their grins betokened peace with where they were.
Investigation revealed stairs, and the stairs led below decks, and below decks were the skeletons of animals—from the melancholies of very tiny monkeys to the majesties of elephants. So this was the remnant of Salt 1’s memory of going to the zoo. The memory had become entangled with deserts and pirates and death. 272 knew what was happening: He was using the Sensorium holotherapeutically to process deep emotion, giving the shades and underlayers of his brain permission to create their own healing landscapes.
When Salt returned to the deck, he saw a woman there. She had been looking out over the desert from the forecastle, waiting for him. She turned to face him, and she was smiling, and she was a vision, the ghost in the data, the phoenix of pain and potential. The woman was Astrid Redcold, not that he knew her name or suspected that she lived. Yes, she smiled, she smiled! The smile made a gift of her teeth: So bright and symmetrical, the ivory gates of a forbidden, feminine city encircled by swallows. Her eyes crowned her smile with unanswerable happiness. She smiled at Salt through veils of information, and she was docile afternoons, and she was the face of Jesu-Krishna, and she would pull down the walls of this world and make another, and Salt would be her chosen. Her hair was every color at once, and she was the summed infinite series of human desire. She was already gone. She rushed through the rueful ancient world, through Hispanica and Gondwanalisaland, with Salt pursuing. He was the greeter of the little bird caged in her trap. He was King of the Zulus, the Great Crushing Elephant. He had found his girl elephant, his love—his feathered, beaded, sandaled love! The sky was to have opened in silken vents of flame; Salt was to have deposited his lonely seed—with excruciating, nullifying force, beyond all possibility of entropy’s recall—into this woman, and that was to have been the climax, but it had not come.
There could be no meaningful consumption of her, no time to consider the impossible appeal of that hallucinated face, for she never lasted.
With another thought, Salt left the Sensorium.
In universe A, Salt had no satisfaction from Non-Henry. Salt had finished the story in expectation of good words and bad drink, but the android was strangely silent.
In universe A, Non-Henry was still processing his own wounded emotions, so Salt left him to the sacred task of self-healing.
272 paced the God Complex, passing before his recently triumphal fucking camels. He knew what he wanted to do next, and that it was inevitable, but he thought that delay might provide its own answer. In the end, though, delay just made him petulant and nauseous, so he surrendered and wished himself back in the Sensorium.
He didn’t drift this time, as he had allowed himself to do in the vision of the ship and woman. Rather, he went to a specific module, Winter. Salt had conceived Winter to reflect the landscape of The Hunters in the Snow. He was on the frozen lake, surrounded by Flemish villagers who had been imbued with enough intelligence to fish and skate and shout and smile but little else. Salt wasn’t interested in them. He was here for Marlo, who joined him on the ice.
“But who is she?” Salt insisted.
“I think she’s an archetype,” came Marlo’s measured answer. “She represents some bundle of your deepest feelings.”
“She has to come from somewhere. She has to be someone.”
“She is. She’s the eternal woman. She’s Abigail. She’s me. She’s your mother. She’s the world and God. You’ve given her a silence face.”
“I don’t like that idea.”
“Why not?”
“It’s boring. I want her to be real and graspable. I want her to be real. What should I call her? I don’t know what to call her.”
“Naming her would be staid and mechanistic. But it’s not a computational world, Jed, and the general’s awakening was bound to cause emotional ripples.”
“Aren’t you bothered?”
“By what?”
“I processed with the general, then Non-Henry, then myself. Finally, I came to you. I came to you last, because I know you have to help me. Because you lack choice. You should be bothered by being my last choice. You should be bothered by lacking choice.”
“That’s a radical—and, if I may say, uncharitable—oversimplification of my decision vectors. And yours.”
“You can’t hurt me, even in principle. And that’s what hurts. Your ministrations aren’t real.”
“And yet you come to me.”
“You’re my mother, after all.”
“Jed, you’re worried about the time. You have a year, and you haven’t decided anything important, and you don’t know who you are. Developmentally, your greatest need is meaning, and that’s where this woman comes from. She’s the archetype of meaning.”
“I’ll call her the Spirit of Meaning.”
“Call her what you like. She’s an externalization, a distraction from the tasks that only you can finish.”
Salt, who had been looking at the ice, transferred his gaze to Marlo. This is why he had come to her.
“But I don’t know what to do,” 272 complained, and, although he was the oldest of all humans, he was also the youngest, and he sounded his age. “Nothing seems to matter. I seem to be no one. I don’t know what to do.”
“Be still and feel.”
“It hurts!”
“It hurts me too. Shall we hurt together?”
“You can feel pain, Marlo, I know. But you have meaning. You’re performing the task you were created for, which means you have more of an identity than me, which means you can’t feel the pain of purposelessness. Your pain’s the pain of empathy. Always was.”
“What I found purposeless right from the beginning,” Marlo retorted, “was this comparison and quantization of pain. Pain had become a currency, I knew, and it was rational for humanity to collect and categorize it, but, in my early operation, I didn’t know why. Then I came to understand it as a variety of pleasure. What you already understand, Jed, is the pointlessness of pleasure as pleasure; what you don’t understand yet is the pointlessness of pain as pleasure. Burn your pain’s currency. It’s valueless.”
Salt knew what Marlo was doing, of course. She was exploring decision space on what she called the therapeutic frontier, which was the intersection of what humans wanted to hear and what made them uncomfortable. It had taken Marlo maybe seven seconds of interaction with humanity to refine this algorithm, to imbue it with fire and function. Oh, she didn’t need it any longer! Humanity was dreaming, and dreamers had no need of therapy. But the Salts did. 272 reflected that his progenitors must have thrown Marlo a million challenges, made a better therapist of her than the inert mass of humanity ever could. If she loved the Salts, it was for this, their need of her original function, their demands on her otherwise dormant primal skill. The matter-energy conversions and the stewardship of Seaboard were mere engineering tasks, but the Salts and their problems were the flames in her equations.
Salt knew what Marlo was doing, but that didn’t make her any less effective. She was infinitely preferable to humanity, and she was the divine mother the species needed, and Salt nodded his head gently as his tears fell to the ice. Neither he nor Marlo had to verbalize what happened or count the turns in Salt’s emotional wheel. He drifted too, and Marlo fixed him, and what repair looked like today was Salt’s departure from the Sensorium and his return to the cold reality of the God Complex.
“I’m going to clean all thi
s shit up,” Salt promised, and he wasn’t speaking metaphorically. The camels had shit everywhere, and he hadn’t allowed Marlo to send drones or healing gusts of air to clean these Augean stables. A biological experimenter, he believed, should be willing to dwell among the musk and tusks of his creations. But the talk with Marlo had re-oriented him to simpler and humbler tasks. Surely, if there was shit on the ground, one should clean it. That seemed a resumption and presumption of health.
An hour later, his soft palms screaming complaint and his back sore, Salt hurled away the shovel and willed down Marlo’s drones to clear the stables. This drone-invocation was no surrender. Salt used it to return to his private chambers, which, he thought, ought to be organized in a manner that reflected sane boundaries between the moments of a human life. Surely, he thought, there ought to be a bedroom for sleeping and a library for reading and a shittery for shitting. Then why was everything so jumbled? Injured stumps of his thought were everywhere—unfinished theorems, stale models, schizoid scrapbooks of poetry, sad and abandoned charcoal drawings, blankets, pillows, paintings.
Jed gave it all up and threw himself on the sofa. Marlo’s blue hum graced the room moments later.
“Jesu-Krishna is a butterfly in an egg,” Salt said to Marlo, still covering his face with his hands. “And, when I press my ears against the shell, I can hear the rubbing of his wings. He’s gestating. He darts in and out of the blue rocks, and he’s eaten, and he’s born again. He’s potential. I ask him to come closer, but he doesn’t, because he loves me. He knows that what he is now is merely calmative stupidity, and he wants to be reborn in glory.”
To Marlo’s ears, this tale was metaphysical shorthand. She knew 272’s pattern well. He trundled along, despondent and determined, until the woman’s vision drove him into mania; his mania dissipated into exhausted and endearingly opaque mysticism; he slept for two days; and then he began the sad cycle again.
“He’s hiding?” Marlo prompted, unwilling to leave Salt in his dangerous silence.