The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  Tory…She smiled mentally. He was exasperating at times, but still she was coming to rely on having him around. She was beginning to think she was in love with him.

  A lesser love, perhaps. Certainly not the love that is the Christ.

  Well, maybe so. Still, on a human level, Tory filled needs in her she hadn’t known existed. It was too much effort to argue with herself, though. Her thoughts drifted away into a wordless, luxurious reveling in the bodiless state, free from distractions, carefree and disconnected.

  Nothing is disconnected. All the universe is a vast net of intermeshingprograms. Elin was amused at herself. That had sounded like something Tory would say. She’d have to watch it; she might love the man, but she certainly didn’t want to end up talking like him.

  You worry needlessly. The voice of God is subtle, but it is not your own.

  Elin started. She searched through her mind for an open intercom channel, didn’t find one. Hello, she thought. Who said that?

  The answer came to her not in words, but in a sourceless assertion of identity. It was cool, emotionless, something she could not describe even to herself, but by the same token absolute and undeniable.

  It was God.

  Then Tory was back and the voice, the presence, was gone. Tory? she thought, I think I just had a religious experience.

  “That’s very common under sensory deprivation—the mind clears out a few old programs. Nothing to worry about. Now relax for a jiff while I plug you back in—how does that feel?”

  The Presence was back again, but not nearly so strongly as before; she could resist the urge to chase after it. That’s fine, Tory, but listen, I really think—

  “Let’s leave analysis to those who have been programmed for it,shall we?”

  ***

  The lovers strolled aimlessly through a meadow, the grass brushing up higher than their waists. Biological night was coming; the agtechs flicked the daylight off and on twice in warning.

  “It was real, Tory. She talked with me; I’m not making it up.”

  Tory ran a hand through his dark curly hair, looking abstracted. “Well. Assuming that my professional opinion was wrong—and I’ll be the first to admit that the program is a bit egocentric—I still don’t think we have to stoop to mysticism for an explanation.”

  To the far side of Magritte, a waterfall was abruptly shut off. The stream of water scattered, seeming to dissolve in the air. “I thought you said she was God.”

  “I only said that to bait Landis. I don’t mean that she’s literally God, just godlike. Mentally, she’s a million years more highly developed than we. God is just a convenient metaphor.”

  “Um. So what’s your explanation?”

  “There’s at least one terminal on the island—the things are everywhere. She probably programmed it to cut into the intercom without the channels seeming to be open.”

  “Could she do that?”

  “Why not? She has that million-year edge on us—and she used to be a wetware tech; all wetware techs are closet computer hacks.” He did not look at her, had not looked at her for some time.

  “Hey.” She reached out to take his hand. “What’s wrong with you tonight?”

  “Me?” He did not meet her eyes. “Don’t mind me, I’m just sulking because you took the job. I’ll get over it.”

  “What’s wrong with the job?”

  “Nothing. It’s just dangerous as sin, is all. Look, I know I can’t talk you out of it, and I know I have no business trying. I’m just being moody.”

  She guided his arm around her waist, pressed up against him. “Well, don’t be. It’s nothing you can control—I have to have work to do. My boredom threshold is very low.”

  “I know that.” He finally turned to face her, smiled sadly. “I do love you, you know.”

  “Well…maybe I love you, too.”

  His smile banished all sadness from his face, like a sudden wind that breaks apart the clouds. “Say it again.” His hands reached out to touch her shoulders, her neck, her face. “One more time, with feeling.”

  “Will not!” Laughing, she tried to break away from him, but he would not let go, and they fell in a tangle to the ground. “Beast!” They rolled over and over in the grass. “Brute!” She hammered at his chest, tore open his jumpsuit, tried to bite his neck.

  Tory looked embarrassed, tried to pull away. “Hey, not out here! Somebody could be watching.”

  The agtechs switched off the arc lamps, plunging Magritte into darkness.

  Tory reached up to touch Elin’s face. They made love.

  ***

  Physically it was no different from things she had done countless times before with lovers and friends and the occasional stranger. But she had committed herself in a way the old Elin had never dared to, let Tory in past her defenses, laid herself open to pain and hurt, trusting him. He was a part of her now. And everything was transformed, made new and wonderful.

  Until they were right at the brink of orgasm, the both of them, and half delirious she could let herself go, murmuring, “I love you, love you, God, I love you, love…” And just as she climaxed, Tory stiffened and arced his head back, and in a voice that was wrenched from the depths of passion, whispered, “Coral…”

  ***

  Elin strode furiously among the huts a terrace down from where she had left Tory asleep in the grass. They had lain together silently after making love, and he had no way of knowing that she was holding him so tightly, burying her head behind his, not out of love or passion, but from outraged anger and fear of what she might do if she had to look at his face.

  Some few huts, sheltered from each other by scatterings of maple saplings, were dark. The rest glowed softly from the holotapes within—diffuse, scattered rainbow patterns unreadable outside their fields of focus. Elin halted before one hut, stood indecisively. Finally, because she needed somebody to talk to, she rapped on the lintel.

  Father Landis stuck her head out the doorway, blinked sleepily. “Oh, it’s you, Donnelly. What do you want?”

  To her absolute horror, Elin broke into tears.

  Landis ducked back inside, reemerged zipping up her jumpsuit. She cuddled Elin in her arms, made soothing noises, listened to her story.

  “Coral,” Landis said. “Ahhh. Suddenly everything falls into place.”

  “Well, I wish you’d tell me, then!” She tried to blink away the angry tears. Her face felt red and raw and ugly; the wetware paint was all smeared.

  “Patience, child.” Landis sat down cross-legged beside the hut, patted the ground beside her. “Sit here and pretend that I’m your mommy, and I’ll tell you a story.”

  “Hey, I didn’t come here—”

  “Who are you to criticize the latest techniques in spiritual nurturing, hey?” Landis chided gently. “Sit.”

  Elin did so. Landis put an arm about her shoulder.

  “Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Coral—I forget her last name. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, she was bright and emotional and ambitious and frivolous and just like you in every way.” She rocked Elin gently as she spoke.

  “Coral was a happy little girl, and she laughed and played and one day she fell in love. Just like that!” She snapped her fingers. “I imagine you know how she felt.”

  “This is kind of embarrassing.”

  “Hush. Well, she was very lucky, for as much as she loved him, he loved her a hundred times back, and for as much as he loved her, she loved him a thousand times back. And so it went. I think they overdid it a bit, but that’s just my personal opinion.

  “Now Coral lived in Magritte and worked as a wetware tech. She was an ambitious one, too—they’re the worst kind. She came up with a scheme to reprogram people so they could live outside the programs that run them in their everyday lives. Mind you, people are more than sum of their programming, but what did she know about free will? She hadn’t any religious training, after all. So she and her boyfriend wrote up a proposal, and applied for funding, and t
ogether they ran the new program through her skull. Arid when it was all done, she thought she was God. Only she wasn’t Coral anymore—not so’s you’d recognize her.”

  She paused to give Elin a hug. “Be strong, kid, here comes the rough part. Well, her boyfriend was brokenhearted. He didn’t want to eat, and he didn’t want to play with his friends. He was a real shit to work with. But then he got an idea.

  “You see, anyone who works with experimental wetware has her personality permanently recorded in case there’s an accident and it needs to be restored. And if that person dies or becomes God, the personality rights revert to IGF. They’re sneaky like that.

  “Well. Tory—did I mention his name was Tory?—thought to himself: What if somebody were to come here for a new personality? Happens about twice a year. Bound to get worse in the future. And Magritte is the only place this kind of work can be done. The personality bank is random-accessed by computer, so there’d be a chance of his getting Coral back, just as good as new. Only not a very good chance, because there’s lots of garbage stuffed into the personality bank.

  “And then he had a bad thought. But you mustn’t blame him for it. He was working from a faulty set of moral precepts. Suppose, he thought, he rigged the computer so that instead of choosing randomly, it would give Coral’s personality to the very first little girl who came along? And that was what he did.” Landis lapsed into silence.

  Elin wiped back a sniffle. “How does the story end?”

  “I’m still waiting on that one.”

  “Well, did Tory really rig the selection—you’re not just making that up?”

  “Christ, I don’t know. Maybe it was just a lucky throw of the dice. But the evidence sure is suspicious. You could try snooping around in his personal storage; he might still have the program squirreled away there.”

  “Oh.” She sat silently for a moment, then pulled herself together and stood. Landis followed.

  “Feeling any better, kid?”

  “I don’t know. More in control maybe.”

  “Listen. Remember what I said about you being a puppy tripping over its paws? Well, you’ve just stubbed your toes and they hurt. But you’ll get over it. People do.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  ***

  “Today we make a Buddha,” Tory said. Elin fixed him with a cold stare, said nothing, even though he was in green and red, immune. Later, she knew, when he came off his programming, he would remember. “This is a higher-level program, integrating all your mental functions and putting them under your conscious control. So it’s especially important that you keep your hands to yourself, okay?”

  “Rot in hell, you cancer,” she muttered beneath her breath.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Elin did not respond, and after a puzzled silence Tory continued: “I’m leaving your sensorium operative, so when I switch you over, I want you to pay attention to your surround. Okay?”

  The second Trojan Horse program came on. Everything changed.

  It wasn’t a physical change, not one that could be seen with the eyes. It was more as if the names for everything had gone away. A knee-tall oak grew nearby, very much like the one she had crushed accidentally in New Detroit when she had lost her virginity many years ago. And it meant nothing to her. It was only wood growing out of ground. A mole poked its head out of its burrow, nose crinkling, pink eyes weak. It was just a small biological machine. “Whooh,” she said involuntarily. “This is cold.”

  “Bother you?”

  Elin studied him, and there was nothing there. Only human being, as much an object as the oak, and no more. She felt nothing toward or against him. “No,” she said.

  “We’re getting a good recording.” The words meant nothing: they were clumsy, devoid of content.

  In the grass around her, Elin saw a grey flickering, as if it were all subtly on fire. Logically she knew the flickering was the firing of nerves in the rods and comes of her eyes, but emotionally it was something else: it was Time. A grey fire that destroyed the world constantly, eating it away and remaking it again and again.

  And it didn’t matter.

  A great calmness wrapped itself around Elin, an intelligent detachment, cold and impersonal. She found herself identifying with it, realizing that existence was simply not important. It was all things, objects.

  Tory was fussing over his machines, and it seemed to her that he had made himself into one of his own devices. Push a button and get a predictable response. And was this any way for a human being to live?

  Then again, how important was a human being? She could not see Tory’s back, and was no longer willing to assume it even existed. She could look up and see the near side of the Earth. The far side might well not exist, and if it didn’t, well that didn’t matter either.

  She stripped away the world, ignored the externalities. I never realized how dependent I am on sensory input, she thought. And if you ignored it—

  —there was the Void. It had no shape or color or position, but it was what underlay the bright interplay of colors that was constantly being destroyed by the grey fires of time. She contemplated the raw stuff of existence.

  “Please don’t monkey around with your programming,” Tory said.

  The body was unimportant too; it was only the focal point for her senses. Ignore them, and you could ignore it. Elin could feel herself fading in the presence of the Void. It had no material existence, but how much less had what she’d always taken for granted: the world and all its glitters.

  It was like being a program in a machine and realizing it for the first time.

  Landis’s voice flooded her existence. “Donnelly, for God’s sake, keep your fingers off the experiment!” The thing was, the underlying nothingness was real—if “real” had any meaning. If meaning had meaning. But beyond real and beyond meaning, there is something that is. And she had found it.

  “Donnelly, you’re treading on dangerous ground. You’ve—” Landis’s voice was a distraction, and she shut it off. Elin felt the desire to achieve unity with what was; one simply had to stop the desire for it, she realized, and it was done.

  But before she could realize the union, horror collapsed upon her. Orange flames shot up; they seared and burned and crisped, and there were snakes among them, great slimy things that reached out with disgusting mouth and needle-sharp fangs.

  She recoiled in panic, and they were upon her. The flames were drawn up into her lungs, and hot maggots wallowed through her brain tissues. She fled through a mind that writhed under the onslaught, turning things on and off.

  Until abruptly she was back in her body, and there was nothingpursuing her. She shivered, and her body responded. It felt wonderful.

  “Well, that worked at least,” Tory said.

  “What—” her voice croaked. She cleared her throat and tried again. “What happened?”

  “Just what we hoped would. Your primary identity was threatened with dissolution, and it moved to protect itself.”

  Elin realized that her eyes were still closed; she opened them now and convulsively closed her hand around the edge of the cot. It was solid and real to the touch. So good.

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” Tory said. “Just now, though, I think you need to rest.” He touched a bone inductor, and Elin fell into blackness.

  ***

  Floating again, every metaphorical nerve on edge, Elin found her-self hypersensitive to outside influences, preternaturally aware, even suggestible. Still, she suspected more than sensed Coral’s presence. Go away, she thought. This is my mind now. She was not surprised when she was answered.

  I am here and I am always. You have set foot in my country, and are dimly aware of my presence. Later, when you have climbed into the mountains, you will truly know me; and then you will be as I.

  Everyone tells me what I’m going to do, Elin though angrily. Don’t I get any say in this?

  The thought was almost amused: You are only a program caught in a universal web of
programming. You will do as your program dictates. To be free of the programs is to be God.

  Despite her anger, despite her hurt, despite the cold trickle of fear she tried to keep to the background, Elin was curious. What’s it like? She couldn’t help asking.

  It is golden freedom. The universe is a bubble infinitely large, and we who are God are the film on its outside. We interact and we program. We make the stars shine and the willows grow. We program what you want for lunch. The programming flows through us, and we alter it and maintain the universe.

  Elin pounced on this last statement. Haven’t done a very good job of it, have you?

  We do not tamper. When you are one with us, you will understand.

  This was, Elin realized, the kind of question-and-answer session Coral must have gone through repeatedly as part of the Star Maker project. She searched for a question that no one else would have asked, one that would be hers alone. And after some thought she found it.

  Do you still—personally—love Tory Shostokovich?

  There was a slight pause, then—The kind of love you mean is characteristic of lower-order programming. Not of program-free intelligence.

  A moment later Tory canceled all programming, and she floated to the surface, leaving God behind. But even before then she was acutely aware that she had not received a straight answer.

  ***

  When Tory finally found her, Elin was patched into the outside monitors, staring across Mare Imbrium. It was a straight visual program: she could feel the wetwire leads dangling down her neck, the warm humid air of Magritte against her skin.

  “Elin, we’ve got to talk.”

  The thing about Outside was its airless clarity. Rocks and shadows were so preternaturally sharp. From a sensor on the crater’s seaward slope, she stared off into Mare Imbrium; it was monotonously dull, but in a comforting sort of way. A little like when she had made a Buddha. There was no meaning out there, nothing to impose itself between her and the surface. “Nothing to talk about,” she said.