Solip:System

by Walter Jon Williams

  That, Reno thinks, and the logic of Black Mind.

  “Sabah isn’t precisely a logical man,” Herschel objects.

  “Perhaps he only has to be approached the right way,” Reno says, and smiles with his decaying teeth. Herschel looks away.

  “Let us prepare an offer,” Reno says. “If it is a good one, if it has the right logic, the answer will be inevitable.”

  *

  “Your offer is kind,” says Abdallah Sabah. “I regret we must refuse.” Reno can see Sabah through his video connection. The old patriarch is in his eighties and is dressed in an old-fashioned Savile Row suit, striped tie and all. He speaks English with an Italian accent, and is drinking tea from a silver cup. The wall behind him is covered in silk wallpaper with a pink flower design. Patterned sockets stand out on his bald skull.

  “I am sorry to hear this, sir.” Reno has called Sabah on a private conference line; he’s made his offer, showed how it would benefit Osmanian Source. The old man has remained polite, but has steadily refused.

  “There is one other thing, sir,” Reno says. He lifts an interface stud. “One last offer. Would you humor me and face in? I would prefer not to speak this aloud.”

  Sabah frowns, then agrees. “If you like, Mr. Roon,” he says. “Though it won’t change my mind.”

  “Give me this one chance.” He studs into the face, then smiles as he pulses a mental signal to Havana.

  The ghost rises, a whine of data transmitted by crystal, by optic wire and radio link, a rising wave of darkness invading Sabah’s mind. Reno sees the old man slump in his chair, try to raise a hand to his forehead to yank the stud away, sees the hand fall. Tremors move over Sabah’s face. Saliva glistens on his lower lip. Reno turns away, unable to watch. Black Mind shrieks over the radio link.

  The transmission ends. The cold hiss of space fills the radio link. Reno looks at his video again, sees that nothing has changed. The old man continues to stare blankly at the camera.

  Reno terminates the transmission. Black Mind worked or it didn’t. If it worked, the ghost will call him back. He waits, watching Earth tumble against the black velvet night.

  There is no call.

  Black Mind has failed.

  *

  Word comes, through private sources, that Abdallah Sabah has had a breakdown. Reno calls to express his concern, speaks to other members of the family. The old man had driven the strongest members away, and used the weak ruthlessly: there’s no one left with the founder’s inner power, or his vision, inevitability of Reno’s logic becomes clear. The merger is voted on, and passed. The board offers their congratulations.

  Three expressionless Somali faces look at him from behind the round meteor table. My praetorians, Reno thinks. Reno wonders about the old man in his weightless padded cell, two personalities warring in his head, raging at one another, struggling for control. The strong old Somali, and the ghost that has tried to possess him.

  Reno looks at the board and smiles. His power is secure: they don’t know how he brought it off, but he’s lucky and they won’t betray him as long as his luck holds.

  “The next step,” he says. “Always the next step.”

  *

  Mercedes Calderón is back from her first trip, sitting across from his desk, wearing a navy jacket over a blue pinstripe shirt. With her briefcase clasped in her two hands, she looks like a starving schoolgirl. The holo image of Habitat One rotates ponderously behind her. She’s got her information, and she projects raw figures into the vid set on his desk. She talks rapidly about methods of analyzing the data and raises a hand to brush her hair back over her ear. The wrist is knobbed, the arm sticklike. She looks more emaciated than the last time he’d seen her. She won’t return his glance.

  She’s not Reno’s type. He doesn’t know why he can’t stop looking at her. She falls silent. He glances at the vid set and sees she’s come to the end her presentation.

  “Thank you, Mercedes,” Reno says. He stands up. “I’ll review the data later. You’ve done very well.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she says, almost voicelessly. He stands up to show her the door.

  “Are you well?” he asks. “You don’t look as if you’ve been eating.”

  “It’s just the strain of travel. I only need some rest.” It’s the same toneless voice.

  He puts his hand on her shoulder, feels the skin drawn taut over sharp bone. She doesn’t react to his touch, just stops and stares at the door he hasn’t yet opened. Her cheeks are dead pale. Behind her the holo habitat rolls on, oblivious.

  Reno realizes that she won’t react no matter what, that she’s as inert as the cotton fabric beneath his fingers. He touches her chin, turns her head, kisses her. Her lips are cool. Her eyes avoid his. He can see the pulse beating in her throat.

  Flame licks Reno’s nerves. She isn’t his type, he thinks.

  He leads her to his adjoining apartments, takes off her clothes, pushes her down on the bed. The roof tents over her in a series of smooth interlocking non-Euclidean curves. She doesn’t speak. He can count the hollows between each rib. He touches her, strokes her skin lightly. No matter what he does, she doesn’t react. He takes her chin in his hand, turns her toward him.

  “Look at me,” he says. She obeys. In the half-light her shadowed eyes seem as large as staring craters of the moon.

  Suddenly there is fire. Somehow he knows how to touch her, make her react, give her pleasure. She clings to him, her hipbones sharp against his skin. Little cries arise from her throat, are absorbed by the room’s perfect architecture.

  She isn’t his type, Reno thinks.

  Afterwards Reno has a meeting, and it’s too important to cancel. She lies like a broken stick-figure in the bed while he dresses in silence. He feels her eyes on him. He doesn’t know what to say.

  She says it for him. She sits on the edge of the bed as he is about to leave and takes his hand. He is surprised by the cool touch of her lips on his knuckle.

  His blood freezes in the knowledge of what Mercedes is about to say.

  “Gracias, tío.”

  Thank you, uncle.

  *

  Reno is sweating as he scans through her file. Where can it have happened?

  There. Roon’s path might have crossed with Mercedes’ eight years before, just after he’d received his demotion and dropped to South America. She was at some kind of refugee school in Panama City. Roon would have had a lot of business at the Panama spaceport.

  The name of Albrecht Roon is not to be found on her records, but a surprising number of high-ranking Tempel officials seem to have written recommendations for her. That’s the evidence, then, the smoking gun. Perhaps Roon was being more careful about his passions then, but he’d still pulled strings for his protegée, got her into college and then into orbit. Being kind, by his lights. Maybe, before he’d gone insane in his little Cordillera paradise, he’d had a conscience, and tried to pay it off.

  Reno can’t stop thinking about her, the sharp angles of her body, the mad deep craters of her eyes. He spends most of the night in a fever, working, clearing his computer of all open files. Then he heads for the executive brothel. Ill’s late and the floor show is over, the band gone home. He finds a woman, someone his type, yawning over a cordial at the mirrored bar. With her he tries to fuck Mercedes out of his mind. He is desperate to need this woman, find in her something he actually wants. He spends the night there, the tired whore wrapped in his arms. In the morning he takes her again, bulling her in a thunderous display of vigorous lust, hoping to find in her somnolent, sterile flesh an antidote to the acid that is searing a path through his veins. The passion remains his alone.

  The next day he wanders through his schedule in a frantic display of failed concentration. Mercedes is continually floating through his thoughts. He decides he has to speak to her, explain things somehow.

  She appears in his office carrying her briefcase in her knobby hands. Her eyes are rimmed with red, her cheeks are hollow. She doe
sn’t look as if she’s slept, either.

  Reno has planned to say all manner of things, make all manner of apologies. “Miss Calderón,” he begins, and then she takes his hand and kisses it, and at the brush of her lips on his knuckle Albrecht Roon’s madness rises, all the animal lunacy that Reno had thought was buried beneath the coded onslaught of Black Mind. Reno lifts her in his arms and the briefcase tumbles to the office floor. He carries her to his apartments. She is weightless as a wand.

  This time she isn’t passive; she clutches his body with her hands, her legs, demands the pleasure he gives her. There is surprising strength in her spidery frame.

  After their spasm the strength fades, and suddenly Mercedes seems a desolate fawn, all knees and elbows and sharpened bone, an angular contrast to the smooth polymer curves of the room. Reno gathers her in his arms. Her eyes avoid his.

  “Thank you, uncle,” she says.

  “Don’t call me that.” Reno’s answer is instant and sharp. Mercedes doesn’t seem surprised. Perhaps it’s what she expects from him. “Yes, Mr. Roon,” she says.

  Vague bits of his planned speech resurface in his consciousness. “You’re not the girl you were,” he says. “I’m not the man I was.” True as this last statement is, his words sound heavy, leaden. He isn’t convinced himself.

  “We should start something new,” he says. “Don’t kiss my hand any more, you’re my lover, not my pet.”

  “Yes. If you like.” He can’t tell if she’s absorbed any of this. She’s become passive again, a reflection of him.

  “Call me Reno.” he says. And for the first time, she seems surprised.

  *

  The ghost brother’s voice sounds as if it’s drowning in a tank of liquid glass, transformed but ringing with clarity. Little inflection is left, little to indicate personality. Little that is human.

  “The transfer railed. The clone wouldn’t take the program and went into seizure instead.”

  “I’m sorry. I will order another clone prepared.”

  “That’s already been done. I suspect it won’t work.”

  Reno is surprised. “Why not?”

  “I believe our original program was damaged in transfer to the tank. It was done under emergency circumstances, when we were trapped by the fire, and it may not have all come across.”

  Reno gazes into the black velvet coldness beyond his window. “Why did Black Mind work for me, then?” he asked.

  “Because Black Mind wrote over a mind already inhabited by a personality. Roon’s personality was already there to fill the gaps in the program.”

  A tremor runs along Reno’s nerves. “I’ve wondered about some things,” he says. “How easily I’ve got along here. How I’ve always seemed to know what to do.” He casts a glance toward the door that leads to his private apartments, where Mercedes had been only a few hours before. “Some feelings I’ve had,” he says, “that I didn’t have before.”

  “That’s not unusual with mind transfer. Personality change is a hazard.”

  “I’ll get you into a body,” Reno says. “I have a plan.”

  “Don’t rush things. I can wait.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  There is a short pause. “What did you mean by that?”

  “We’ve talked too long on this channel. I’ll send a coded package with the next messenger.” Reno switches off.

  He looks toward the door to his apartments and thinks of Mercedes. Now he knows why he wants a woman who isn’t his type.

  Roon is living inside him, in the gaps between his own program.

  And Roon is mad.

  *

  “My father is still ... not well,” says Mohammad.

  “I’m sorry. He is a great man.”

  “He talks strangely. Of things he has never seen, people he has not met.” He sips his little gold-rimmed cup of tea. Behind him, the holo habitat gleams in sunlight. “There are those in the family who believe he is possessed by a devil. There have been ...” He gives a wry smile. “attempts at exorcism.”

  “I can understand the family’s concern, particularly when conventional modes of treatment fail. More tea?”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  There are other ways of knowing people besides bringing them to brothels. Mohammad is a strict Muslim, and in his case the executive brothel would not be a good idea. But even in a Puritan there is always a key. Mohammad hates his father.

  Mohammad is one of Abdallah’s sons, one of the most capable and one of those the old man drove into semi-exile. When Reno called him to the Tempel board, Mohammad was running an insignificant transport operation in the Ogaden. He’s tall, hawk-nosed, probably brilliant. Reno needs someone to negotiate the labyrinth of Osmanian, the strange network of kinship systems and obligation that serves the transport company in place of a formal structure. He needs someone smart enough to manipulate that complex system, and for that wants someone more loyal to him than to the company, to the cousins who were promoted ahead of him.

  And Mohammad hates his father. Maybe he’s looking for another father-figure, a man who lives in the sky and has his best interests at heart. Someone like Albrecht Roon.

  “Your reports have been outstanding,” Reno says.

  “Thank you, Mr. Roon.”

  “I’m prepared to go to the board with the proposal for the new Century I Series of fast frigates. We need to move quickly on that matter if the public is to believe that Osmanian’s efficiency won’t be hampered by the acquisition.”

  “Sir. I’m very pleased.”

  “I suspect your abilities are a little constricted in your present circumstance. Perhaps your talents can be better utilized in another direction.”

  Mohammad sips his tea. “Yes?”

  “Acquisitions.”

  Earthlight glimmers in Mohammad’s deep eyes. “I’m interested, sir.”

  *

  Mercedes lies with her eyes closed, her head partly turned away. She is passive again, a straw doll in Reno’s bed. Her passivity drives him into frenzy: he uses her fiercely, desperate to force some reaction from her. Her breath quickens; she bites her lip to stifle a sound. That suppressed cry is enough to trigger his climax.

  Afterward Mercedes lies motionless on the dull maroon sheets, still the straw doll. He thinks of the clone dying, its brain an erupting electrical storm, and of what fills the gaps in his own pattern. Albrecht Roon, the architect of the Rock War, with the blood of millions on his hands. Despoiler of children, of the straw doll lying in Reno’s bed.

  A wave of disgust washes over Reno’s mind. He is compounding Roon’s crime, victimizing a woman who has already been victimized more than anyone could possibly deserve.

  With a shock he realizes that she hates him. Hates him so much that she can’t even move when he touches her.

  “You don’t have to do this,” he says.

  Her eyes open slowly, as if she is arising from a dream. She takes a breath. “Do what?” she asks.

  “Have sex with me. Not if it’s just because I’m your boss. That’s not... what I want from you.”

  “What do you want from me, then?”

  “What do you want? That’s my question.”

  Mercedes gazes at the ceiling. Reno watches the pulse beat in the shadowed hollow above the sharp relief of her clavicle.

  “I know you like me to be still and not move,“ she says. She seems to be talking to the ceiling. “I try to do that for you. But sometimes I want you so much that I have to bite my cheeks and tongue to keep from crying out. Sometimes I want to scream with what I feel for you.”

  Reno feels blood rush to his skin. He reaches a hand to her, turns her face to his. “You don’t have to lie still,” he says. “You can do what you want. This is something we can share.”

  Her expression is faintly puzzled. He doesn’t know whether he’s been understood. He doesn’t want her on Roon’s terms. He doesn’t know how else to explain it to her.

  Mercedes leans forward, brushes her lips
against his. He strokes the back of her neck. Her fingertips slide over his body. He can feel the touch of her breath on his neck. His skin seems aflame.

  There is a peculiar intent look on her face. She is exploring the relationship between them, her movements still tentative, her mind investigating possibilities.

  He closes his eyes and lies back while she caresses him. By now he is perfectly engorged. She throws a leg over him, rides him astride.

  Reno looks up at her angular body, the flesh stretched over her ribs into ridges and valleys, the skin drawn so tight over her sharp shoulders that he wonders how it isn’t worn through. She looks as though she’s been living in a refugee camp for years.

  Roon has done this, he thinks. Twisted her, driven her, probably come close to breaking her. But he also taught her to love. Even if that love is for a monster, it’s still something Reno wants to cherish.

  But its not for him. As she rides him to climax, she cries out not for Reno, but for tío.

  Uncle. A monster. And, in the U.S., a term of surrender.

  *

  Mercedes has left Habitat One on another data-collection job to the power satellites. Reno is free to purge her from his blood, extend the work he has begun.

  He takes van Allen to the executive whorehouse. A new stage show features a man with a grafted artificial penis, black and preposterously large, studded with metal and cruel barbed hooks. With this apparatus he gives apparent satisfaction to several willing partners. Jarring feedback wails from the amps. Reno wonders what manner of genitalia have been implanted in these women for them to be able to affect enjoyment of this. No doubt he’s intended to wonder.