Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 102

by Naim Kabir

  Here goes. One foot over the lip, turn to the right, snatch the stunner out of its grip mount—

  —and it wasn’t there. They’d laundered the place already. “Damn!”

  “Thought it’d be waitin’, huh?”

  In the first second. When the Majiken was pretty sure of himself, act—

  Benjan took a step back and kicked. A satisfying soft thuuunk.

  In the low gravity the man rose a meter and his uungh! was strangely satisfying. The Majiken were warriors, after all, by heritage. Easier for them to take physical damage than life trauma.

  The Majiken came up fast and nailed Benjan with a hand feint and slam. Benjan fell back in the slow gravity—and at a 45-degree tilt, sprang backward, away, toward the wall—

  Which he hit, completing his turn in air, heels coming hard into the wall so that he could absorb the recoil—

  —and spring off, head-height—

  —into the Majiken’s throat as the man rushed forward, shaped hands ready for the put-away blow. Benjan caught him with both hand-edges, slamming the throat from both sides. The punch cut off blood to the head and the Majiken crumbled.

  Benjan tied him with his own belt. Killed the link on the screen. Bound him further to the furniture. Even on Gray, inertia was inertia. The Majiken would not find it easy to get out from under a couch he was firmly tied to.

  The apartment would figure out that something was wrong about its occupant in a hour or two, and call for help. Time enough to run? Benjan was unsure, but part of him liked this, felt a surge of adrenaline joy arc redly through his systems.

  Five minutes of work and he got the interlocks off. His connections sprang back to life. Colors and images sang in his aura.

  He was out the door, away—

  The cramped corridors seemed to shrink, dropping down and away from him, weaving and collapsing. Something came toward him—chalk-white hills, yawning craters.

  A hurricane breath whipped by him as it swept down from the jutting, fresh-carved mountains. His body strained.

  He was running, that much seeped thrcugh to him. He breathed brown murk that seared but his lungs sucked it in eagerly.

  Plunging hard and heavy across the swampy flesh of Gray.

  He moved easily, bouncing with each stride in the light gravity, down an infinite straight line between rows of enormous trees. Vegetable trees, these were, soft tubers and floppy leaves in the wan glow of a filtered sun. There should be no men here, only machines to tend the crops. Then he noticed that he was not a man at all. A robo-hauler, yes—and his legs were in fact wheels, his arms the working grapplers. Yet he read all this as his running body. Somehow it was pleasant.

  And she ran with him.

  He saw beside him a miner-bot, speeding down the slope. Yet he knew it was she, Martine, and he loved her.

  He whirred, clicked—and sent a hail.

  You are fair, my sweet.

  Back from the lumbering miner came, This body will not work well at games of lust.

  No reason we can’t shed them in time.

  To what end? she demanded. Always imperious, that girl.

  To slide silky skin again.

  You seem to forget that we are fleeing. That cop, someone will find him.

  In fact, he had forgotten. Uh . . . update me?

  Ah! How exasperating! You’ve been off, romping through your imputs again, right?

  Worse than that. He had only a slippery hold on the jiggling, surging lands of mud and murk that funneled past. Best not to alarm her, though. My sensations seem to have become a bit scrambled, yes. I know there is some reason to run—

  They are right behind us!

  Who?

  The Majiken Clan! They want to seize you as a primary manifestation!

  Damn! I’m fragmenting.

  You mean they’re reaching into your associative cortex?

  Must be, my love. Which is why you’re running with me.

  What do you mean?

  How to tell her the truth but shade it so that she does not guess . . . the Truth? Suppose I tell you something that is more useful than accurate?

  Why would you do that, m’love?

  Why do doctors slant a diagnosis?

  Because no good diagnostic gives a solid prediction.

  Exactly. Not what he had meant, but it got them by an awkward fact.

  Come on, she sent. Let’s scamper down this canyon. The topo maps say it’s a short cut.

  Can’t trust ‘em, the rains slice up the land so fast. He felt his legs springing like pistons in the mad buoyance of adrenaline.

  They surged together down slippery sheets that festered with life—spreading algae, some of the many-leaved slim-trees Benjan had himself helped design. Rank growths festooned the banks of dripping slime, biology run wild and woolly at a fevered pace, irked by infusions of smart bugs. A landscape on fast forward.

  What do you fear so much? she said suddenly

  The sharpness of it stalls his mind. He was afraid for her more than himself, but how to tell her? This apparition of her was so firm and heartbreakingly warm, her whole presence welling through to him on his sensorium . . . Time to tell another truth that conceals a deeper truth.

  They’ll blot out every central feature of me, all those they can find.

  If they catch you. Us.

  Yup. Keep it to monosyllables, so the tremor of his voice does not give itself away. If they got to her, she would face final, total erasure. Even of a fragment self.

  Save your breath for the run, shesent. So he did, gratefully.

  If there were no omni-sensors lurking along this approach to the launch fields, they might get through. Probably Fleet expected him to stay indoors, hiding, working his way to some help. But there would be no aid there. The Majikan were thorough and would capture all human manifestations, timing the arrests simultaneously to prevent anyone sending a warning. That was why they had sent a lone cop to grab him; they were stretched thin. Reassuring, but not much.

  It was only three days past the 3D interview, yet they had decided to act and put together a sweep. What would they be doing to the Station itself? He ached at the thought. After all, she resided there . . .

  And she was here. He was talking to a manifestation that was remarkable, because he had opened his inputs in a way that only a crisis can spur.

  Benjan grimaced. Decades working over Gray had aged him, taught him things Fleet could not imagine. The Sabal Game still hummed in his mind, still guided his thoughts, but these men of the Fleet had betrayed all that. They thought, quite probably, that they could recall him to full officer status,and he would not guess that they would then silence him, quite legally.

  Did they think him so slow? Benjan allowed himself a thin, dry chuckle as he ran.

  They entered the last short canyon before the launch fields. Tall blades like scimitar grasses poked up, making him dart among them. She growled and spun her tracks and plowed them under. She did not speak. None of them liked to destroy the life so precariously remaking Gray. Each crushed blade was a step backward.

  His quarters were many kilometers behind by now, and soon these green fields would end. If he had judged the map correctly—yes, there it was. A craggy peak ahead, crowned with the somber lights of the launch station. They would be operating a routine shift in there, not taking any special precautions.

  Abruptly he burst from the thicket of thick-leaved plants and charged down the last slope. Before him lay the vast lava plain of Oberg Plateau, towering above the Fogg Sea. Now it was a mud flat, foggy, littered with ships. A vast dark hole yawned in the bluff nearby, the slanting sunlight etching its rimmed locks. It must be the exit tube for the electromagnetic accelerator, now obsolete, unable to fling any more loads of ore through the cloak of atmosphere.

  A huge craft loomed at the base of the bluff. A cargo vessel probably; far too large and certainly too slow. Beyond lay an array of robot communications vessels, without the bubble of a life support system. He
rejected those, too, ran on.

  She surged behind him. They kept electromagnetic silence now.

  His breath came faster and he sucked at the thick, cold air, then had to stop for a moment in the shadow of the cruiser to catch his breath. Above he thought he could make out the faint green tinge of the atmospheric cap in the membrane that held Gray’s air. He would have to find his way out through the holes in it, too, in an unfamiliar ship.

  He glanced around, searching. To the side stood a small craft, obviously Jump type. No one worked at its base. In the murky fog that shrouded the mud flat he could see a few men and robo-servers beside nearby ships. They would wonder what he was up to. He decided to risk it. He broke from cover and ran swiftly to the small ship. The hatch opened easily.

  Gaining lift with the ship was not simple, and so he called on his time-sense accelerations, to the max. That would cost him mental energy later. Right now, he wanted to be sure there was a later at all.

  Roaring flame drove him into the pearly sky.

  Finding the exit hole in the membrane proved easier. He flew by pure eyeballed grace, slamming the acceleration until it was nearly a straight-line problem, like shooting a rifle. Fighting a mere sixth of a g had many advantages.

  And now, where to go?

  A bright arc flashed behind Benjan’s eyelids, showing the fans of purpling blood vessels. He heard the dark, whispering sounds of an inner void. A pit opened beneath him and the falling sensation began—he had run over the boundaries this body could attain. His mind had overpowered the shrieking demands of the muscles and nerves, and now he was shutting down, harking to the body’s calls . . .

  And she?

  I am here, m’love. The voice came warm and moist, wrapping him in it as he faded, faded, into a gray of his own making.

  She greeted him at the Station.

  She held shadowed inlets of rest. A cup brimming with water,

  a distant chime of bells, the sweet damp air of early morning.

  He remembered it so well, the ritual of meditation in his Fleet training,

  the days of quiet devotion through simple duties that strengthened the mind.

  Everything had been of a piece then.

  Before Gray grew to greatness, before conflict and aching doubt,

  before the storm that raged red through his mind, like—

  —Wind, snarling his hair, a hard winter afternoon as he walked back to his quarters . . .

  —then, instantly, —the cold prickly sensation of diving through shimmering spheres of wate rin zero gravity. The huge bubbles trembled and refracted the yellow light into his eyes. He laughed.

  —scalding black rock faces rose on Gray. Wedges thrust upward as the tortured skin of the planet writhed and buckled. He watched it by remote camera, seeing only a few hundred yards through the choking clouds of carbon dioxide. He felt the rumble of earthquakes, the ominous murmur of a mountain chain being born.

  —a man running, scuttling like an insect across the tortured face of Gray. Above him the great membrane clasped the atmosphere, pressing it down on him, pinning him, a beetle beneath glass. But it is Fleet that wishes to pin him there, to snarl him in the threads of duty. And as the ship arcs upward at the sky he feels a tide of joy, of freedom.

  —twisted shrieking trees, leaves like leather and apples that gleam blue. Moisture beading on fresh crimson grapes beneath a white-hot star.

  —sharp synapses, ferrite cores, spinning drums of cold electrical memory. Input and output. Copper terminals (male or female?), scanners, channels, electrons pouring through p-n-p junctions. Memory mired in quantum noise.

  Index. Catalog. Transform. Fourier components, the infinite wheeling dance of Laplace and Gauss and Hermite.

  And through it all she is there with him, through centuries to keep him whole and sane and yet he does not know, across such vaults of time and space . . . who is he?

  Many: us. One: I. Others: you. Did you think that the marriage of true organisms and fateful machines with machine minds would make a thing that could at last know itself? This is a new order of being but it is not a god.

  Us: one, We: you, He: I.

  And yet you suspect you are . . . different . . . somehow.

  The Majiken ships were peeling off from their orbits, skating down through the membrane holes, into my air!

  They gazed down, tense and wary, these shock troops in their huddled lonely carriages. Not up, where I lurk.

  For I am iceball and stony-frag, fruit of the icesteroids. Held in long orbit for just such a (then) far future. (Now) arrived.

  Down I fall in my myriads. Through the secret membrane passages I/we/you made decades before, knowing that a bolthole is good. And that bolts slam true in both directions.

  Down, down—through gray decks I have cooked, artful ambrosias, pewter terraces I have sculpted to hide my selves as they guide the rocks and bergs—after them!—

  The Majiken ships, ever-wary of fire from below, never thinking to glance up. I fall upon them in machine-gun violences, my ices and stones ripping their craft, puncturing. They die in round-mouthed surprise, these warriors.

  I, master of hyperbolic purpose, shred them.

  I, orbit-master to Gray.

  Conflict has always provoked anxiety within him, a habit he could never correct, and so:

  —in concert we will rise to full congruence with F(x)

  and sum over all variables and integrate over the contour

  encapsulating all singularities. It is right and meet so to do.

  He sat comfortably, rocking on his heels in meditation position.

  Water dripped in a cistern nearby and he thought his mantra,

  letting the sound curl up from within him. A thought entered,

  flickered across his mind as though a bird,

  and left.

  She she she she

  The mantra returned in its flowing green rhythmic beauty and he entered

  the crystal state of thought within thought,

  consciousness regarding itself without detail or structure.

  The air rested upon him, the earth groaned beneath with the weight of continents,

  shouting sweet stars wheeled in a chanting cadence above.

  He was in place and focused, man and boy and elder at once,

  officer of Fleet, mind encased in matter, body summed into mind—

  —and she came to him, cool balm of aid, succor, yet beneath her palms his muscles warmed, warmed—

  His universe slides into night. Circuits close. Oscillating electrons carry information, senses, fragments of memory.

  I swim in the blackness. There are long moments of no sensations, nothing to see or hear or feel. I grope—

  Her? No, she is not here either. Cannot be. For she has been dead these centuries and lives only in your Station, where she knows not what has become of herself.

  At last I seize upon some frag, will it to expand. A strange watery vision floats into view. A man is peering at him. There is no detail behind the man, only a blank white wall. He wears the blue uniform of Fleet and he cocks an amused eyebrow at:

  Benjan.

  “Recognize me?” the man says.

  “Of course. Hello, Katonji, you bastard.”

  “Ah, rancor. A nice touch. Unusual in a computer simulation, even one as sophisticated as this.”

  “What? Comp—”

  And Benjan knows who he is.

  In a swirling instant he sends out feelers. He finds boundaries, cool gray walls he cannot penetrate, dead patches, great areas of gray emptiness, of no memory. What did he look like when he was young? Where was his first home located? That girl—at age 15? Was that her? Her? He grasps for her—

  And knows. He cannot answer. He does not know. He is only a piece of Benjan.

  “You see now? Check it. Try something—to move your arm, for instance. You haven’t got arms.” Katonji makes a thin smile. “Computer simulations do not have bodies, though they have some of the percept
ions that come from bodies.”

  “P—Perceptions from where?”

  “From the fool Benjan, of course.”

  “Me.”

  “He didn’t realize, having burned up all that time on Gray, that we can penetrate all diagnostics. Even the Station’s. Technologies, even at the level of sentient molecular plasmas, have logs and files. Their data is not closed to certain lawful parties.”

  He swept an arm (not a real one, of course) at the man’s face. Nothing. No contact. All right, then . . . “And these feelings are—”

  “Mere memories. Bits from Benjan’s Station self.” Katonji smiles wryly.

  He stops, horrified. He does not exist. He is only binary bits of information scattered in ferrite memory cores. He has no substance, is without flesh. “But . . . but, where is the real me?” he says at last.

  “That’s what you’re going to tell us.”

  “I don’t know. I was . . . falling. Yes, over Gray—”

  “And running, yes—I know. That was a quick escape, an unexpectedly neat solution.”

  “It worked,” Benjan said, still in a daze. “But it wasn’t me?”

  “In a way it was. I’m sure the real Benjan has devised some clever destination, and some tactics. You—his ferrite inner self—will tell us, now, what he will do next.”

  “He’s got something, yes . . . ”

  “Speak now,” Katonji said impatiently.

  Stall for time. “I need to know more.”

  “This is a calculated opportunity,” Katonji said off-handedly. “We had hoped Benjan would put together a solution from things he had been thinking about recently, and apparently it worked.”

  “So you have breached the Station?” Horror flooded him, black bile.

  “Oh, you aren’t a complete simulation of Benjan, just recently stored conscious data and a good bit of subconscious motivation. A truncated personality, it is called.”

  As Katonji speaks Benjan sends out tracers and feels them flash through his being. He summons up input and output. There are slabs of useless data, a latticed library of the mind. He can expand in polynomials, integrate along an orbit, factorize, compare coefficients—so they used my computational self to make up part of this shambling construct.