Double Vision

by Tricia Sullivan

  Tricia Sullivan was born in New Jersey in 1968 and studied in the pioneering Music Program Zero program at Bard College. She later received a Master's in Education from Columbia University and taught in Manhattan and New Jersey before moving to the UK in 1995. Her novel Dreaming in Smoke won the Arthur C. Clarke award.

  Find out more about Tricia Sullivan and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.co.uk

  ByTricia Sullivan

  MAUL

  DOUBLE VISION

  www.orbitbooks.co.uk

  ORBIT

  First published in Great Britain in July 2005 by Orbit

  This paperback edition published in April 2006 by Orbit

  Copyright ©Tricia Sullivan 2005

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than

  those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious

  and any resemblance to real persons,

  living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form

  or by any means, without the prior permission in writing

  of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form

  of binding or cover other than that in which it is published

  and without a similar condition, including this condition,

  being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from

  the British Library.

  ISBN-13:978-1-84149-173-8

  ISBN-10:1-84149-173-X

  Typeset in Palatino & Myriad by M Rules

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Orbit

  An imprint of

  Time Warner Book Group UK Brettenham House Lancaster Place

  London WC2E7EN

  www.orbitbooks.co.uk

  For the Heim sisters

  Gertrude

  Catherine

  Marion

  And for my daughter

  Rhiannon

  With love

  something like lunch

  Maybe it's the bonelessness messing you up. Like, if you aren't feeling too confident about things, maybe it's because you're all folded over on yourself, limp as a piece of wet Charmin that clings to anything it touches.

  You can hear guys discussing your situation. You can even feel them handling you, but you can't see them from here. All you can see is a bunch of sheds and a ship surrounded by scaffolding - and, looming beyond this, a distant chunk of the Grid. It's flashing in and out of reality in its own special, hostile-fungus-with-horrible-geometric-properties way. This doesn't contribute to your overall grip.

  Plus, Serge isn't exactly cheerleader material.

  ‘I hope that hankie's gonna fly, Lewis.’

  Captain Bonny Serge's voice percolates in her throat, phlegm effecting the same break-up of tone by white noise as the interference on a walkie-talkie so that she can be standing two feet away from you and sound like she's in Paraguay. Now she hovers on Gossamer's dorsal side while Lewis fine-tunes Goss's receiving systems to take into account the electrical disturbances that have been plaguing the flyways since the stand-off at N-Ridge began. The scaffolded ship kaleidoscopes and then vanishes as the tech untangles Gossamer from herself. Now you can see clearly. The Grid fills your field of view, pulsing, until it's obscured by Serge's body as she moves around to ventral. Her stocky trunk always appears mismatched with her stork legs, just like her Texas accent doesn't jive with her geisha-girl features. Maybe the physical comedy of her appearance is what makes her aspire to such hardassedness: fear of being laughed at just for existing.

  Lewis, kneeling, leans over you to snap her kit box shut. She says, 'Gossy's good to go. If she makes it to N-ridge, the nex will take her recordings straight to Machine Front. I think we're on top of the interference problem, too.’

  A grunt from Serge: the most courteous response she ever gives at this hour of the morning. It's enough to satisfy the tech, who smiles and stands up, relaxing.

  ‘I still can't believe the golems could of sabotaged the friggin’ MaxFact,’ Serge adds, blotting her forehead with her sleeve.’It's Machine Front passing the buck again. THEY f%#ked up and now we're gonna pay for it. You lose control of your rocket-guidance system, you might as well give the Rompers a 695 because you're going to Wisconsin in a bucket’

  You don't know what a 695 is but Serge doesn't expect you to answer-the nature of the nex means you can't. She just wants to hear herself saying it. She's like a guy talking to his dog.

  Lewis doesn't realize that Serge's commentary isn't directed at her, so she tries to contribute to the conversation by saying, in a manner lamely imitative of Serge's backwoods drawl,’Captain, we got to hope that rocket don't come back to visit us in quadruplicate. We got to hope it ain't landed in the well.’

  The conversation has taken on a rehearsed quality. You don't know whether it's being repeated for your benefit, since everything you hear is transmittable to Machine Front, or if it's just shop talk and in fact Serge and Lewis have been trading remarks like this for two weeks, ever since a golem raid on N-Ridge culminated in a misfired rocket, downed communications to the mines, and the disappearance of N-Ridge's command officer, Dr. Arla Gonzalez.

  Serge should really hawk and spit, but she just lets the phlegm go on clogging up her pipes as she says, ’Yeah, well, I need this like I need a leopardskin pillbox hat.’ She glances at her watch and gives a little jerk. ’Come on already, when are Machine Front giving their report?’

  Serge sticks her finger in her ear and wiggles it spasmodically, as though scratching a furious itch. An instant later, Dante Perelli, the Machine Front bimbo of choice in Serge's army, appears as a projection above Serge's yellow-and-green Swatch.

  ‘Hi, Serge,’ he purrs, 'Ready for the numbers?’

  The numbers come swarming out of the Swatch like little green Space Invaders. Dante's brow furrows sympathetically: no self-respecting ArtlQ could fail to anticipate the human reaction to news like this. But Serge isn't just any human. You can tell more about the nature of the data from looking at little digital Dante than from the reaction of Serge herself.

  All she says is, 'There has to be a better way of stopping them.’

  ‘You know the algorithms,’ says Dante. ’The more we kill, the faster they come.The faster they come, the more we have to kill or they'll take apart the equipment.’

  Grunt. Pause.

  ‘I won't be forced into a torch operation. Not while we still got a guy out there might be alive.’

  Whatever you may say about Serge, you can't say she doesn't look out for her guys. Everybody else has given up on Gonzalez.

  Dante answers her angry stare with, 'I'm only here to offer information and assistance.’

  ‘What's on the card for N-Ridge, then?’

  ‘If they keep multiplying by current rates? Eleven thousand for your neck of the woods. Maybe nine-five, maybe twelve.’

  Serge is quiet for a second. ’Dante, Dante,’ she says at last. ’This is not what I like to hear. What do S&T say?’

  ‘Strategy says they predicted this in March. Tactics say that Logistics didn't allocate enough hardware to deal with the swollen figures on N-Ridge. Research say the well's hottest in N-Valley and Logistics say, quote, you try schlepping fourteen hundred tons of plastic up the side of N-Ridge when there's Iowa boys and girls throwing themselves under the treads and screaming to Jesus as they die, unquote.’

  ‘A golem is a golem,’ says Serge flatly,’ and they don't co
me from Iowa. I thought we was past all that emotional hoodwinking.’

  ‘We won't be past it until you girls have gone home. Machine Front is here to do what you wetheads can't.’

  ‘So what now? What's the actual position at the mines?’

  ‘Standoff. Us on the road, heavily armored.Them blockading the mine perimeter, waiting for us to kill them so they can reproduce.’

  It's an inadequate description; you know because you've seen it for yourself, from the air. Nevertheless, Serge seems to have the imagination to visualize it for herself, because she says:

  ‘Yuck.’

  ‘We have to penetrate, Captain. I know you babes don't like killing—’

  ‘That's why we're here, dopehead. To not kill. Because the boys got carried away and now look at all the friggin’ golems.’

  ‘As I was saying, I know you don't like killing golems but in this case it's essential that we get through to N-Ridge. The third wave of unmanned relief vessels is already launched and en route to us. Once they get here, you can all go home and leave the battle to us machines. But the new ships won't be able to make their targets without Grid-specific logic bullets, and N-Ridge is the only place to get those. Ergo—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I intend to retrieve Gonzalez, I ain't gonna deviate from that plan without a direct order to the contrary from X.’

  'The clock is ticking. Captain. If Gonzalez is alive and knows what went down up there, great. If not, Machine Front has to move in.’

  Before Serge can respond, you feel Goss shudder and stiffen. She's reacting to a chemical signal in the Grid that the humans can't sense. Gossamer's action catches Serge's attention and gives her an excuse to snap the image of Dante into her Swatch.

  ‘It's about time we was movin'on up.’

  Gossamer is already standing on end. She - and you - have been lying loose like a shimmering cloak on the repair rack, but now that she is aroused for flight she stiffens like a sail in the wind. You're picking up input in her olfactories. The Grid communicates with her by scent as often as not and, at the moment, it's calling. She squirts a reply from her ventral slits, and then, without further warning, launches into the sky. There's a momentary jockeying for power between you and the Grid with its beckoning scent: both seek to use Gossamer. Then you assert control. It feels good. Once you're in the air, all your uncertainties vanish.

  ‘Don't get shot down,’ Serge shouts, like you're in a WW2 movie with Zeros over the Pacific and shark's-teeth snouts, with those symbol thingies numbering your kills.

  But you're not a pilot. In the air you are Gossamer. You're a living rainbow: people have to be in the right place at the right time to even see you. Along the length of Gossamer's belly you feel every slight variation in texture and temperature and pace. Your ventral side is so sensitive you feel like the pea-wakeful princess in the old story; sometimes you swear you could sense the undulations in the Grid below through the very air, if you shut your visuals down. Gossamer's wings have been mapped onto your human fingertips and her tail, more oddly, has been mapped onto your lips. You think this is something to do with the density of nerves required to process the sensory information. Gossamer's tail is particularly subtle and since the Gossamer-equivalents of olfactory nerves are located there you guess that crossing it with your human lips and tongue makes some kind of sense. But it means that sometimes, after flying, you can't speak properly for awhile. It also makes food taste funny for a couple of hours.

  None of that matters, though. Because when you fly, you're real. What a feeling. You're so thin and light that you're just a membrane relaying information. You almost lose your self, your sense of subject: you almost become a verb.

  You scan incessantly for relevant data. This isn't as easy as it sounds. While you're flying over the dun baldness of X, the Landing Zone, everything's straightforward enough. In the very center of X are the intensive gardens - seven levels of them. Encircling these are the command buildings and residence units, then the factories and signal towers. Each arm of the X has a landing pad. You cross over the last of the signal towers and pass above the security net, which consists of an energy barrier to keep out golems. It's patrolled by indigenous Fliers; but unlike Gossamer, these are wired directly to Machine Front soas to sound the alert if golems try to enter X. You choose a roadway from among the many that radiate from X like beams of light from the heads of saints in medieval paintings. To aid with orientation, you'll follow the N road as far as it takes you into the Grid.

  You take a last look back at the lights and the straight lines, the blandness of human architecture basking in a dull, diffuse light that doesn't necessarily seem to come from the sky. You can see Serge's team as they load into the Machine Front convoy that will crawl after you while you fly overhead. You can see a couple of jeeps puttering over the tarmac toward the scaffold-covered ship. You can see dark rain clouds scumbled over the flat surface of featureless white cloud and, below them, the emerald green of the gardens like a little piece of Oz.

  Then you stop looking back and start looking forward, and there it is. The Grid.

  Sometimes you'd swear you could see it breathing; but the limits of the Grid are hard to perceive, and if it does respire then it exhales confusion. Even its name is misleading. The first explorers inaccurately called it the Speed Jungle because its structures reminded them of trees that could move, snaking and changing positions like beans sprouting on time-lapse film. Later, the First Wave soldiers who escaped immersion in its well called it The Headf@*k, and when the generals saw what end the Grid's captives came to, that name was reified by the fact that no more soldiers were sent in. But those who control the names of things now call it the Grid - a euphemistic, deceptively neutral label that suits the purposes of the war-makers. Ostensibly they chose ‘Grid’ because the phenomenon in question functions as an armature for the soft stuff of the planet's life codes. Also you figure it's because from the air the Grid looks more like a spider web than the forest it resembles at ground level. Especially at night, in the absence of the blond light that can etch the details of each terminus, each leaf, each flower spiralling into cloud, the faintly luminous Grid seems two-dimensional, reducible. It seems a statement, not a question. It seems localized and therefore finite. Yet, by daylight when you have flown in close like Gossamer has, then the hairs and tendrils of the Grid become apparent. Its essential seediness asserts itself as you realize you are flying through a delicate life-pod like those blown from dandelions on Earth, only far more complex. You perceive that the identity codes of the Grid are sticking to you and Gossamer like motes of pollen, looking for a fertile place to replicate themselves and ultimately, by their persuasive powers, to make you into something for the well.

  Something like lunch.

  Gossamer is a human-modified indigene. Thanks to the efforts of the Machine Front engineers, she is carrying a spy kit consisting of electronics so low in mass that they don't even register on a standard Dataplex scale. Without these silicon prosthetics, Gossamer would be just another native entity - unusual, yes, because so few of the planet's organisms are independently motile, but not extraordinary.

  The extraordinary part comes about because Gossamer carries you, Cookie Orbach, all one hundred ninety-seven pounds of you, within those slender, body-electric-powered filaments. You: Cookie: World's Chubbiest Spy: You fly above it all.

  What the Grid's well would make of Gossamer's Earth-made parts if it ever got hold of them is a matter you have refused to consider on the basis that you might flip out. The well makes golems of human bodies; it swallows armored vehicles whole, and strange tree-cities spring up in their place. Missiles, too, are transformed, and red lights like malevolent swamp-eyes hover in the froth of the Grid's upper layers when the well has been cooking the weapons of the terrestrial colonists. But what would become of Gossamer's Earth-made eyes if Gossamer fell in the well is an unknown belonging to that broad category of things you would rather eat cake than think about.

>   Of course, you are aware that Gossamer is a prisoner of war. lt has no cortex as such, and therefore possesses neither intelligence nor consciousness nor selfhood, so there is really nothing to feel guilty about because Gossamer doesn't know that it's being exploited. It was picked up by Machine Front in an opportunistic nest-strike. It was taken away from the Grid and loaded with spy tech; then it was returned, with you on board thanks to the beauty of the nex.

  Your job, apart from hanging on to the nex and translating what Gossamer sees, is to make sure that Gossamer stays clear of the Grid and its integrity-remixing properties. This act of will exerted upon the relatively simple nervous system of Gossamer does require a degree of communion with the indigene, however vague. It is the nature of the nex to fold you into Gossamer a little, as egg whites into angel food cake. Finding the end of yourself and the beginning of Gossamer is sometimes like finding a contact lens in a white shag rug. But that's a subtle point, not one you often consider.

  So:

  You don't understand your job, but you do it anyway. The more you learn about people, the more you believe that's not so unusual.

  Besides, no one understands this war.

  LOOK FOR BURN SIGNS, Serge reminds you unnecessarily. She's nervous today. That makes two of you.

  Burn signs are important because if Dr. Gonzalez has been forced to commit suicide, she will have self-immolated to prevent the Grid making golems of her.

  Serge is relaying a message from Machine Front.

  SAT SAYS YOU GOT A STORM BREWING AT 60 DEGREES, AND THERE'S A GAP IN THE GRID AT 22 APPROX THREE KILOMETERS FROM PRESENT POSITION. CAN YOU CHECK THE GAP BEFORE WEATHER HITS?

  The storm is no surprise: nobody's been able to fly over the mines since the incident thirteen days ago. The Grid brews impossible weather and magnetic conditions. But this alleged gap doesn't sound right to you. You know this area well. You've never seen any break in the continuity of the Grid around here.