The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  “Dammit, yes there is! I’m not about to lose you again because of a misunderstanding, a—a matter of semantics.”

  Elin hopscotched down the slope to the surface, where the abandoned surface mine abutted on the mass driver. “How very melodramatic.”

  The mass driver was a thin monorail stretching kilometers into Mare Imbrium, its gentle slope all but imperceptible. Repair robots prowled its length, stopping occasionally for a spot weld: blue sparks sputtered soundlessly over the surface.

  “I don’t know how you found out about Coral, and I guess it doesn’t matter. I always figured you’d find out sooner or later. That’s not important.What matters is that I love you—”

  “Oh, hush up!” Below the hulking repair robots scurried dozens of smaller devices, quick and tiny, almost cute. They were privately owned, directed by hobbyists within the crater. Elin redirected a camera to follow one little fellow zipping about in the old strip mine, dragging a cloth sack in one claw, holding a pick in another, waving the third free. A rockhound.

  “—and that you love me. You can’t pretend you don’t.”

  Elin felt her nails dig into her palms. “Sure I can,” she said. The robot was chipping away at a rock outcrop. Dust powdered up, fell quickly. It scanned the sample it had chipped, turning it over and over before the camera lens, then let it drop. It scooted on.

  “You’re identifying with the woman who used to be Elin Donnelly. There’s nothing wrong with that; speaking as a wetware tech, it’s a healthy sign. But it’s something you’ve got to grow out of.”

  At the edge of the slope, another robot had set up a holograph generator. It fussed over the machine, set a final switch, then lapsed into quiescence. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then a field of blue pillars appeared on the floor of Imbrium.

  “Listen, Shostokovich, tinkering around with my emotions doesn’t change who I am. I’m not your dead lady-friend, and I’m not about to take her place. So why don’t you just go away and stop jerking me around, huh?”

  The pillars grew to perhaps a third the height of Magritte before resolution began to fail, and they drifted toward insubstantiality. The unseen operator adjusted their height downward.

  “You’re not the old Elin Donnelly either, and I think you know it. Bodies are transient, memories are nothing. Your spontaneity and grace, your quiet strength, your impatience—the thousand little quirks of you I’ve known and loved for years—are what make you yourself. The name doesn’t matter, nor the past. You are who you are, and I love you for it.”

  A host of butterflies appeared, fluttering out of the rock. They danced erratically, yellow and red and orange, each moving randomly, but as a whole drifting through vacuum toward the field of pillars.

  “Yeah, well, what I am does not love you, buster.”

  Several hobbyist robots had abandoned their tasks to follow the flight. Two rockhounds crawled up to the edge of the mine so their owners could see better.

  Tory was silent for a bit, his voice almost sad when he finally spoke. “You do, though. You can’t hide that from me. I know you as your lover and as your wetware surgeon. You’ve let me become a part of you, and no matter how angry you might temporarily be, you’ll come back to me.”

  Elin’s body trembled with rage; she could feel it. “Yeah, well if that’s true then why tell me? Hah? Why not just go back to your hut and wait for me to come crawling?”

  Emerald green snakes boiled out of the surface, writhed just outside the pillars. Now and again one would snap futilely at the butterflies hesitating, just out of reach, before the pillars.

  “Because I want a favor from you. I want you to quit your job.”

  “Say what?”

  There was an odd hesitancy to Tory’s voice, as if he were already defeated and knew it. “I don’t want you to become God. It was a mistake the last time, and I’m afraid it won’t be any better with the new programs. If you go up and become God and can’t get down this time, you’ll do it the next. I’ll spend my life here waiting for you, re-creating you, losing you. Can’t you see it—year after year, replaying the same tired old tape?”

  Now Tory’s voice fell to a whisper. “And I don’t think I could take it even once more.”

  With a surge the butterflies were among the pillars, and the snakes leapt and slithered after them. The instant they were all encompassed, the cold blue pillars flashed violent red, bursting into great gouts of flame, incinerating them all.

  “If you know me as well as you say, then I guess you know my answer,” Elin said coldly.

  The rockhounds waved their claws in applause. The fiery pillars faded away. Switching sensors, Elin could see the robot packing up the hologram generator for the day.

  Tory’s footsteps sounded, moving away, fading, defeat echoing after.

  Only when she was sure he was gone did Elin realize that her sensor had been scanning the same empty bit of Magritte’s slope for at least five minutes.

  ***

  It was time for the final Trojan Horse. “Today we make a God,” Tory said. “This is a total conscious integration of the mind in an optimal efficiency pattern. Close your eyes and count to three.”

  One. The hell of it, Elin realized, was that Tory was right. She still loved him. He was the one man for her, and she wanted him, was empty without him.

  Two. Worse, she didn’t know how long she could go on without coming back to him—and, good God, would that be humiliating!

  She was either cursed or blessed; cursed perhaps for the agonies and humiliations she would willingly undergo for the sake of this one obsessive and manipulative human being. Or maybe blessed in that at least there was someone who could move her so, deserving or not. Many went through their lives without.

  Three. She opened her eyes.

  Nothing was different. Magritte was as ordinary, as mundane, as ever, and she felt no special reaction to it one way or another. Certainly she did not feel the presence of God.

  “I don’t think this is working,” she tried to say. The words did not come. From the corner of her eye, she saw Tory wiping clean his facepaint, shucking off his jumpsuit. But when she tried to sit up to see, she found she was paralyzed.

  What is this maniac doing?

  Tory’s face loomed over her, his eyes glassy, almost fearful. He smiled reassuringly. His hair was a tangled mess; her fingers itched with the impulse to run a comb through it. “Forgive me, love.” He kissed her forehead lightly, her lips ever so gently. Then he was out of her field of vision, stretching out on the grass beside the cot.

  Elin stared up at the dome roof, thinking: No. She heard him strap the bone inductors to his body, one by one, and then a sharp click as he switched on a recorder. The programming began to flow into him.

  A long wait—perhaps twenty seconds viewed objectively—as the wetware was loaded. Another click as the recorder shut off. A moment of silence, and then—

  Tory gasped. One arm flew up into her field of vision, swooped down out of it, and he began choking. Elin struggled against her paralysis, could not move. Something broke noisily, a piece of equipment by the sound of it, and the choking and gasping continued as he began to thrash about wildly.

  Tory, Tory, what’s happening to you? He was having a seizure, that much was clear. But inside—within the confines of his skull—what horrors ran rampant? An arm smashed against her cot, rocking it, jolting her mildly.

  Whatever was happening, it was bad. And Elin could do nothing about it.

  ***

  “It’s just a grand mal seizure,” Landis said. “Nothing we can’t cope with, nothing we weren’t prepared for.” She touched Elin’s shoulder reassuringly, called back at the crowd huddled about Tory, “Hey! One of you loopheads—somebody there know any programming? Get the lady out of this.”

  A tech scurried up, made a few simple adjustments with her machinery. The others—still gathering, Landis had been only the third on the scene—were trying to hold Tory still, to fit a bone ind
uctor against his neck. There was a sudden gabble of comment, and Tory flopped wildly. Then a collective sigh as his muscles eased, and his convulsions ceased.

  “There,” the tech said, and Elin scrabbled off the couch.

  She pushed through the people (and a small voice in the back of her head marveled: A crowd! How strange) and knelt before Tory, cradling his head in her arms.

  He shivered, eyes wide and unblinking. “Tory, what’s the matter?”

  He turned those terrible eyes on her. “Nichevo.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Landis said. “Or maybe ‘it doesn’t matter,’ is a better translation.”

  A wetware tech had taken control, shoving the crowd back. He reported to Landis, his mouth moving calmly under the interplay of green and red. “Looks like a flaw in the programming philosophy. We were guessing that bringing the ego along would make God such an unpleasant experience that the subject would let us deprogram without interfering—now we know better.”

  Elin stroked Tory’s forehead. His muscles clenched, then loosened, as a medtech reprogrammed the body response. “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?” she demanded.

  “Take a look,” Landis said, and patched her into the intercom. In her mind’s eye, Elin could see dozens of wetware techs submitting program after program. A branching wetware diagram filled one channel, and as she watched, minor changes would occur as programs took hold, then be unmade as Tory’s mind rejected them. “We’ve got an imagery tap of his Weltanschauung coming up,” some nameless tech reported, and then something horrible appeared on a blank channel.

  Elin could only take an instant’s exposure before her mind reflexively shut the channel down, but that instant was more than enough. She stood in a room infinitely large and cluttered in all dimensions with great noisome machines. They were tended by malevolent demons who shrieked and cackled and were machines themselves, and they generated pain and madness.

  The disgust and revulsion she felt was absolute. It could not be put into words—no more than could the actual experience of what she had seen. And yet—she knew this much about wetware techniques—it was only a rough approximation, a cartoon of what was going through Tory’s head.

  Elin’s body trembled with shock, and by slow degrees she realized that she had retreated to the surface world. Tory’s head was still cradled in her arms. A wetware tech standing nearby looked stunned, her face grey.

  Elin gathered herself together, said as gently as she could, “Tory, what is that you’re seeing?”

  Tory turned his stark, haunted eyes on her, and it took an effort of will not to flinch. Then he spoke, his words shockingly calm.

  “It is—what is. It’s reality. The universe is a damned cold machine, and all of us only programs within it. We perform the actions we have no choice but to perform, and then we fade into nothingness. It’s a cruel and noisy place.”

  “I don’t understand—didn’t you always say that we were just programs?Wasn’t that what you always believed?”

  “Yes, but now I experience it.”

  Elin noticed that her hand was slowly stroking his hair; she did not try to stop it. “Then come down, Tory. Let them deprogram you.”

  He did not look away. “Nichevo,” he said.

  The tech, recovered from her shock, reached toward a piece of equipment. Landis batted her hand away. “Hold it right there, techie! Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  The woman looked impatient. “He left instructions that if the experiment turned out badly, I was to pull the terminator switch.”

  “That’s what I thought. They’ll be no mercy killings while I’m on the job, Mac.”

  “I don’t understand.” The tech backed away, puzzled. “Surely you don’t want him to suffer.”

  Landis was gathering herself for a withering reply when the intercom cut them all off. A flash of red shot through the sensorium, along with the smell of bitter almond, a prickle of static electricity, the taste of kimchi. An urgent voice cried, “Emergency! We’ve got an emergency!” A black-and-white face materialized in Elin’s mind. “Emergency!”

  Landis flipped into the circuit. “What’s the problem? Show us.”

  “You’re not going to believe this.” The face disappeared, was replaced by a wide-angle shot of the lake.

  The greenish-black water was calm and stagnant. The thrust-coneisland, with its scattered grass and weeds, slumbered.

  And God walked upon the water.

  They gawked, all of them, unable to accept what they saw. Coral walked across the lake, her pace determined but not hurried, her faceserene. The pink soles of her bare feet only just touched the surface.

  I didn’t believe her, Elin thought wildly. She saw Father Landis begin to cross herself, her mouth hanging open, eyes wide in disbelief. Half-way through her gesture, the Jesuitical wetware took hold. Her mouth snapped shut, and her face became cold and controlled. She pulled herself up straight.

  “Hans,” the priest said. “push the button.”

  “No!” Elin shrieked, but it was too late. Still hooked into the intercom, she saw the funny little man briskly, efficiently obey.

  For an instant, nothing happened. Then bright glints of light appeared at all of the condenser units, harsh and actinic. Steam and smoke gushed from the machinery, and a fraction of a second later, there was an ear-slapping gout of sound.

  Bits of the sky were blown away.

  Elin turned twisted, fell. She scrambled across the ground, and threw her arms around Tory. He did not respond. “I can’t lose you now,” she cried.

  Tory smiled sadly, said, “It doesn’t matter. You live, you die, you are aware or ignorant—the universe doesn’t change. None of it makes any difference.” He said something more, but she could not catch it, though she strained to hear.

  The air was thinner. The holes in the dome roof—small at first—expanded as more of the dome flaked away, subjected to stresses it wasdesigned not to take. An uncanny whistling filled the air, grew to a screech, then a scream, and then there was an all-encompassing whoomph and the dome shattered.

  Elin was thrown up into the air, torn away from Tory, painfully flung high and away. All the crater was in motion, the rock tearing out of the floor, the trees splintering upward, the lake exploding into steam.

  The screaming died, and for an instant the air was gone. Elin’s ears rang, and her skin stung everywhere. A universal pressure built within her, the desire of her blood to mate with the vacuum, and Elin realized that she was about to die.

  A quiet voice said: This must not be.

  Time stopped.

  ***

  Suspended between Moon and death, Elin experienced a strange interplay of sensations. The shards and fragments of an instant past crystallized and shifted. The world became, not misty, actually, but appositional. Both grew tentative, probabilities rather than actual things.

  Come be God with me now, Coral said, but not to Elin.

  Tory’s presence flooded the soupy uncertainty, a vast and powerful thing, but wrong somehow, twisted. But even as Elin felt this, there wasa change within him, a sloughing off of identity, and he seemed tostraighten, to heal.

  All around, the world began to grow more numinous, more real. Elin felt tugged in five directions at once. Tory’s presence swelled briefly, then dwindled, became a spark, less than a spark, nothing.

  Yes.

  With a roaring of waters and a shattering of rocks, with an audible thump, the world returned.

  ***

  Elin unsteadily climbed down the last flight of stone stairs from the terraces to the lakefront. She passed by two guards at the foot of the stairs, their facepaint as hastily applied as their programming, several more on the way to the nearest trellis farm. They were everywhere since the incident.

  She found the ladder up into the farm and began climbing. It was biological night, and the agtechs were long gone.

  Hand over hand she climbed, as far and high as she could, un
til she was afraid she would miss a rung and tumble off. Then she swung herself onto a ledge, wedging herself between strawberry and yam planters. She looked down on the island, and though she was dizzyingly high, she was only a third of the way up.

  “Now what the hell am I doing here?” she mumbled to herself. She swung her legs back and forth, answered her own question: “Being piss-ass drunk.” She cackled. There was something she didn’t have to share with Coral. She was capable of getting absolutely blitzed, and walking away from the bar before it hit her. It was something metabolic.

  Below, Tory and Coral sat quietly on their monkey island. They did not touch, did not make love or hold hands or even glance one at the other—they just sat. Being Gods.

  Elin squinted down at the two. “Like to upchuck all over you.” she mumbled. Then she squeezed her eyes and fists tight, drawing tears and pain. Dammit, Tory!

  Blinking hard, she looked away from the island, down into the jet-black waters of the lake. The brighter stars were reflected there. A slight breeze rippled the water, making them twinkle and blink, as if lodged in a Terran sky. They floated lightly on the surface, swarmed and coalesced, and formed Tory’s face in the lake. He smiled warmly, invitingly. Elin stared hungrily at his lips as he whispered, “Come. Join me.”

  A hand closed around her arm, and she looked up into the stern face of a security guard. “You’re drunk, Ms.,” he said, “and you’re endangering property.”

  She looked where he pointed, at a young yam plant she had squashed in the process of sitting, and began to laugh. Smoothly, professionally, the guard rolled up her sleeve, clamped a plastic bracelet around her wrist. “Time to go,” he said.

  ***

  By the time the guard had walked Elin up four terraces, she was nearly sober. A steady trickle of her blood wound through the bracelet, was returned to her body cleansed of alcohol. A sacrilegious waste of wine, in her opinion.

  In another twenty steps, the bracelet fell off her wrist. The guard snapped it neatly from the air, disappeared. Despair closed in on her again. Tory, my love! And since there was no hope of sleep, she kept on trudging up the terraces, back toward Han’s rathskeller, for another bellyful of wine.