The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  “If. You wish. As many as. You wish.”

  “How many of me are there?”

  “One.” A pause. “Now.”

  “I was here before, right? People like me. Mobile intelligent life forms. And I left. How long have I been gone?”

  Silence. “How long—” she began again.

  “Long time. Lonely. So very. Long time.”

  ***

  Trudge, drag. Trudge, drag. Trudge, drag. How many centuries had she been walking? Felt like a lot. It was night again. Her arms felt like they were going to fall out of their sockets.

  Really, she ought to leave Burton behind. She’d never said anythingto make Martha think she cared one way or the other where her body wound up. Probably would’ve thought a burial on Io was pretty damn nifty. But Martha wasn’t doing this for her. She was doing it for herself. To prove that she wasn’t entirely selfish. That she did too have feelings for others. That she was motivated by more than just the desire for fame and glory.

  Which, of course, was a sign of selfishness in itself. The desire to be known as selfless. It was hopeless. You could nail yourself to a fucking cross and it would still be proof of your innate selfishness.

  “You still there, Io?”

  Click.

  “Am. Listening.”

  “Tell me about this fine control of yours. How much do you have? Can you bring me to the lander faster than I’m going now? Can you bring the lander to me? Can you return me to the orbiter? Can you provide me with more oxygen?”

  “Dead egg, I lie. Whole. On a whole world I cannot touch. Plath.”

  “You’re not much use, then, are you?”

  There was no answer. Not that she had expected one. Or needed it, either. She checked the topos and found herself another eighth-mile closer to the lander. She could even see it now under her helmet photo-multipliers, a dim glint upon the horizon. Wonderful things, photomultipliers. The sun here provided about as much light as a full moon did back on Earth. Jupiter by itself provided even less. Yet crank up the magnification, and she could see the airlock awaiting the grateful touch of her gloved hand.

  Trudge, drag, trudge. Martha ran and reran and rereran the math in her head. She had only three miles to go, and enough oxygen for as many hours. The lander had its own air supply. She was going to make it.

  Maybe she wasn’t the total loser she’d always thought she was. Maybe there was hope for her, after all.

  Click.

  “Brace. Yourself.”

  “What for?”

  The ground rose up beneath her and knocked her off her feet.

  ***

  When the shaking stopped, Martha clambered unsteadily to her feet again. The land before her was all a jumble, as if a careless deity had lifted the entire plain up a foot and then dropped it. The silvery glint of the lander on the horizon was gone. When she pushed her helmet’s magnification to the max, she could see a metal leg rising crookedly from the rubbled ground.

  Martha knew the shear strength of every bolt and failure point of every welding seam in the lander. She knew exactly how fragile it was. That was one device that was never going to fly again.

  She stood motionless. Unblinking. Unseeing. Feeling nothing. Nothing at all.

  Eventually she pulled herself together enough to think. Maybe it was time to admit it: She never had believed she was going to make it. Not really. Not Martha Kivelsen. All her life she’d been a loser. Sometimes—like when she qualified for the expedition—she lost at a higher level than usual. But she never got whatever it was she really wanted.

  Why was that, she wondered? When had she ever desired anything bad? When you get right down to it, all she’d ever wanted was to kick God in the butt and get his attention. To be a big noise. To be the biggest fucking noise in the universe. Was that so unreasonable?

  Now she was going to wind up as a footnote in the annals of humanity’s expansion into space. A sad little cautionary tale for mommy astronauts to tell their baby astronauts on cold winter nights. Maybe Burton could’ve gotten back to the lander. Or Hols. But not her. It just wasn’t in the cards.

  Click.

  “Io is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System.”

  “You fucking bastard! Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “Did. Not. Know.”

  Now her emotions returned to her in full force. She wanted to run and scream and break things. Only there wasn’t anything in sight that hadn’t already been broken. “You shithead!” she cried. “You idiot machine! What use are you? What goddamn use at all?”

  “Can give you. Eternal life. Communion of the soul. Unlimited processing power. Can give Burton. Same.”

  “Hah?”

  “After the first death. There is no other. Dylan Thomas.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Silence.

  “Damn you, you fucking machine! What are you trying to say?”

  ***

  Then the devil took Jesus up into the holy city and set him on the highest point of the temple, and said to him, “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written he shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up.”

  Burton wasn’t the only one who could quote scripture. You didn’t have to be Catholic, like her. Presbyterians could do it too.

  Martha wasn’t sure what you’d call this feature. A volcanic phenomenon of some sort. It wasn’t very big. Maybe twenty meters across, not much higher. Call it a crater, and let be. She stood shivering at its lip. There was a black pool of molten sulfur at its bottom, just as she’d been told. Supposedly its roots reached all the way down to Tartarus.

  Her head ached so badly.

  Io claimed—had said—that if she threw herself in, it would be able to absorb her, duplicate her neural patterning, and so restore her to life. A transformed sort of life, but life nonetheless. “Throw Burton in,” it had said. “Throw yourself in. Physical configuration will be. Destroyed. Neural configuration will be. Preserved. Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Burton had limited. Biological training. Understanding of neural functions may be. Imperfect.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Or. Maybe not.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Heat radiated up from the bottom of the crater. Even protected and shielded as she was by her suit’s HVAC systems, she felt the difference between front and back. It was like standing in front of a fire on a very cold night.

  They had talked, or maybe negotiated was a better word for it, for a long time. Finally Martha had said, “You savvy Morse code? You savvy orthodox spelling?”

  “Whatever Burton. Understood. Is. Understood.”

  “Yes or no, damnit!”

  “Savvy.”

  “Good. Then maybe we can make a deal.”

  ***

  She stared up into the night. The orbiter was out there somewhere, and she was sorry she couldn’t talk directly to Hols, say good-bye and thanks for everything. But Io had said no. What she planned would raise volcanoes and level mountains. The devastation would dwarf that of the earthquake caused by the bridge across Lake Styx.

  It couldn’t guarantee two separate communications.

  The ion flux tube arched from somewhere over the horizon in a great looping jump to the north pole of Jupiter. Augmented by her visor it was as bright as the sword of God.

  As she watched, it began to sputter and jump, millions of watts of power dancing staccato in a message they’d be picking up on the surface of Earth. It would swamp every radio and drown out every broadcast in the Solar System.

  THIS IS MARTHA KIVELSEN, SPEAKING FROM THE SURFACE OF IO ON BEHALF OF MYSELF, JULIET BURTON, DECEASED, AND JACOB HOLS, OF THE FIRST GALILEAN SATELLITES EXPLORATORY MISSION. WE HAVE MADE AN IMPORTANT DISCOVERY…

  Every electrical device in the System would dance to its song.

  ***

  Burton went first. Martha gave the sledge a shove and out it flew, int
o empty space. It dwindled, hit, kicked up a bit of a splash. Then, with a disappointing lack of pyrotechnics, the corpse slowly sank into the black glop.

  It didn’t look very encouraging at all.

  Still…

  “Okay,” she said. “A deal’s a deal.” She dug in her toes and spread her arms. Took a deep breath. Maybe I am going to survive after all, she thought. It could be Burton was already halfway-merged into the oceanic mind of Io, and awaiting her to join in an alchemical marriage of personalities. Maybe I’m going to live forever. Who knows? Anything is possible.

  Maybe.

  There was a second and more likely possibility. All this could well be nothing more than a hallucination. Nothing but the sound of her brain short-circuiting and squirting bad chemicals in all directions. Madness. One last grandiose dream before dying. Martha had no way of judging.

  Whatever the truth might be, though, there were no alternatives, and only one way to find out.

  She jumped.

  Briefly, she flew.

  Wild Minds

  I met her at a businesspersons’ orgy in London. The room was in the back of a pub that was all brass and beveled glass, nostalgia and dark oak. The doorkeeper hesitated when it saw how many times I’d attended in the last month. But then I suggested it scroll up my travel schedule, and it saw that I wasn’t acting out a sex-addiction script, but properly maintaining my forebrain and hindbrain balances. So it let me in.

  Inside, the light was dimly textured and occasionally mirrored. Friendly hands helped me off with my clothing. “I’m Thom,” I murmured, and “Annalouise…Enoch…Abdul…Magdalena…Claire,” those nearest quietly replied. Time passed.

  I noticed Hellene not because she was beautiful—who pays attention to beauty after the first hour?—but because it took her so long to find release. By the time she was done, there was a whole new crowd; only she and I remained of all who had been in the room when I entered.

  In the halfway room, we talked.

  “My assemblers and sorters got into a hierarchic conflict,” I told her. “Too many new faces, too many interchangeable cities.”

  She nodded. “I’ve been under a lot of stress myself. My neural mediator has become unreliable. And since I’m scheduled for an upgrade, it’s not worth it running a purge. I had to offline the mediator, and take the week off from work.”

  “What do you do?” I asked. I’d already spotted her as being optimized.

  She worked in human resources, she said. When I heard that, I asked, “Is there any hope for people like me? Those who won’t accept optimization, I mean.”

  “Wild minds?” Hellene looked thoughtful. “Five years ago I’d’ve said no, open-and-shut, end of story. Period. Zero rez. Today, though…”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know,” she said in an anguished voice. “I simply don’t know.”

  I could sense something significant occurring within myself, intuit some emotional sea-change organizing itself deep on the unseen levels—the planners building new concept-language, the shunts and blocks being rearranged. Of course I had no way of knowing what it was. I hadn’t been optimized. Still—

  “Can I walk you home?” I asked.

  She looked at me for a long and silent second. “I live in Prague.”

  “Oh.”

  “We could go to your place, if it’s not too far.”

  ***

  We took the hypermetro to Glasgow. Got off at the Queen Street Station and walked up to my flat in Renfrew Street. We talked a little on the train, but Hellene fell silent when we hit the street.

  They don’t like the old places, the new people, cluttered with seedy pubs and street corner hangouts, the niches where shabby men sit slumped over their whisky in paper bags, the balconies from which old women watch over the street. It unnerves them, this stench of accommodation and human dirt. It frightens them that it works so well, when it so obviously shouldn’t.

  “You’re a Catholic,” she said.

  She was looking at my icon, a molecular reproduction of Ad Reinhardt’s “For T.M.” It’s one of his black paintings, his first, and modestly small. At first it seems unvaryingly colorless; you have to stare at it for some time to see the subtle differences in the black, the thick cross that quarters and dominates that small lightless universe. He painted it for Thomas Merton, who was a monk.

  My copy is a duplicate as exact as human technology can make it; more exact than human perception can distinguish. I use it as a focus for meditation. Opposite it is a Charles Rennie MacIntosh chair, high-backed. An original because it was made to his directions. Sometimes I’ll sit in the one and stare at the other, thinking about distinctions, authenticity, and duplicity.

  “You wouldn’t need meditation if you were optimized.”

  “No. But the Church considers it a mortal sin, you see.”

  “The Church can’t possibly approve of your attending orgies.”

  “Oh. Well. It’s winked at.” I shrugged. “As long as you go to confession before you take Communion…”

  “What do you see when you meditate?”

  “Sometimes I see comfort there; other times I see suffering.”

  “I don’t like ambiguity. It’s an artifact of the old world.” She turned away from the picture. She had those chill Scandinavian features that don’t show emotions well. She was beautiful, I realized with a mental start. And, almost at the same instant but twice as startling, I realized that she reminded me of Sophia.

  Out of nowhere, without transition, Hellene said, “I must return to Prague. I haven’t seen my children in two weeks.”

  “They’ll be glad to see you.”

  “Glad? I doubt it. No more than I will be to see them,” she said in the manner of one totally unable to lie to herself. “I’ve spun off three partials that they like considerably more than they do me. And I signed them up with Sterling International for full optimization when they were eight.”

  I said nothing.

  “Do you think that makes me a bad mother?”

  “I wanted children, too,” I said. “But it didn’t work out.”

  “You’re evading the question.”

  I thought for a second. Then, because there was no way around it short of a lie, I said, “Yes. Yes, I do.” And, “I’m going to put a kettle on. Would you like a cup?”

  ***

  My grandfather used to talk about the value of a good education. His generation was obsessed with the idea. But when the workings of the human brain were finally and completely understood—largely as a result of the NAFTA “virtual genome” project—mere learning became so easy that most corporations simply educated their workforce themselves to whatever standards were currently needed. Anybody could become a doctor, a lawyer, a physicist, provided they could spare the month it took to absorb the technical skills.

  With knowledge so cheap, the only thing workers had to sell was their character: their integrity, prudence, willingness to work, and hard-headed lack of sentiment. Which is when it was discovered that a dozen spiderweb-thin wires and a neural mediator the size of a pinhead would make anybody as disciplined and thrifty as they desired. Fifty cents worth of materials and an hour on the operating table would render anybody eminently employable.

  The ambitious latched onto optimization as if it were a kite string that could snatch them right up into the sky. Which, in practical terms, it was. Acquiring a neural mediator was as good as a Harvard degree used to be. And—because it was new, and most people were afraid of it—optimization created a new elite.

  Sophia and I used to argue about this all the time. She wanted to climb that kite string right into the future. I pointed out that it was the road to excommunication. Which shows just what a hypocrite I was. Back then I was not at all a religious man. I didn’t need the comfort of religion the way I do now.

  But you take your arguments where you can get them. Wild minds don’t know from rational discourse. They only care about winning. Sophia was the s
ame. We yelled at each other for hour upon hour, evening after evening. Sometimes we broke things.

  Hellene drank her tea unsweetened, with milk.

  ***

  We talked through the night. Hellene, of course, didn’t need sleep. Normally I did, but not tonight. Something was happening within me; I could feel my components buzzing and spinning. The secondary chemical effects were enough to keep me alert. Those, and the tea.

  “You seem an intelligent enough man,” she said at one point, and, gesturing at the wooden floors and glass windows, “How can you live in such primitive squalor? Why reject what science has revealed about the workings of the brain?”

  “I have no complaints about the knowledge per se.” I used to have a terrible temper. I was a violent, intemperate man. Or so it seems to me now. “Learning the structural basis of emotions, and how to master them before they flush the body with adrenaline, has been a great benefit to me.”

  “So why haven’t you been optimized?”

  “I was afraid of losing myself.”

  “Self is an illusion. The single unified ego you mistake for your ‘self’ is just a fairy tale that your assemblers, sorters, and functional transients tell one another.”

  “I know that. But still…”

  She put her cup down. “Let me show you something.”

  From her purse she took out a box of old-fashioned wooden matches. She removed five, aligned them all together in a bundle, and then clenched them in her hand, sulfur side down, with just the tips of the wood ends sticking out.

  “Control over involuntary functions, including localized body heat,” she said.

  There was a gout of flame between her fingers. She opened her hand. The matches were ablaze.

  “The ability to block pain.”

  This wasn’t a trick. I could smell her flesh burning.

  When the matches had burned out, she dumped them in her saucer, and showed me the blackened skin where they had been. The flesh by its edges was red and puffy, already starting to blister.

  “Accelerated regenerative ability.”

  For five minutes she held her hand out, flat and steady. For five minutes I watched. And at the end of that five minutes, it was pink and healed. Unblackened. Unblistered.