Nanotech

by Gardner Dozois

  "We are far from Earth," Hassan said sharply. "Has Marsden found his quantum nonlinearity?"

  "I can't tell." Bayliss gazed at the data desks, longing shining through her artificial eyes. "I must complete my data mining."

  "What's the point?" Hassan asked. "If the nonlinearity is such a tiny effect, even if it exists—"

  "We could construct chaotic quantum systems," Bayliss said dryly. "And if you're familiar with the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox—"

  "Get to the point," Hassan said wearily.

  "Nonlinear quantum systems could violate special relativity. Instantaneous communication, Hassan."

  Chen stared at the floor uneasily. The thrashing of the trees in the logic pool was becoming more intense.

  The Sky was close, a tangible presence above him. He devoured statements, barely registering their logical content, budding ferociously. Diminished brothers fell away from him, failed copies of himself, urging him on.

  He remembered how—last time, before the Cull—he had struck at that vast, forbidding interface—lashed through it in the instant before he had fallen back. How he had pushed into something soft, receptive, yielding. How good it had felt.

  The Sky neared. He reached up—

  "I think the trees killed Marsden."

  Hassan laughed. "That's absurd."

  She thought it through again. "No," she said, her voice measured. "Remember they are sentient. Motivated by whatever they see as their goals. Growth, I suppose, and survival. The culling, if they are aware of it, must create murderous fury—"

  "But they can't have been aware of Marsden, as if he were some huge god outside their logic pool."

  "Perhaps not. But they might be aware of something beyond the boundary of their world. Something they could strike at . . .

  Bayliss was no longer with them.

  Chen stepped away from Hassan and scanned the dome rapidly. The glowing logic pool was becoming more irregular in outline, spreading under the floor like some liquid. And Bayliss was working at the data desks, setting up transmit functions, plugging in datacubes.

  Chen took two strides across to her and grabbed her arm. For a moment Bayliss tried to keep working, feverishly; only slowly did she become aware of Chen's hand, restraining her.

  She looked up at Chen, her face working, abstracted. "What do you want?"

  "I don't believe it. You're continuing with your data mining, aren't you?"

  Bayliss looked as if she couldn't understand Chen's language. "Of course I am."

  "But this data has been gained illegally. Immorally. Can't you see that? It's—"

  Bayliss tipped back her head; her augmented corneas shone. "Tainted? Is that what you're trying to say? Stained with the blood of these artificial creatures, Chen?"

  "Artificial or not, they are sentient. We have to recognize the rights of all—"

  "Data is data, Susan Chen. Whatever its source. I am a scientist; I do not accept your—" for a moment the small, precise mouth worked "—your medieval morality."

  "I'm not going to let you take this data out of here," Chen said calmly.

  "Susan." Hassan was standing close to her; with a surprisingly strong grasp his lifted her hands from Bayliss' arm.

  "Keep out of this."

  "You must let her finish her work."

  "Why? For science?"

  "No. For commerce. And perhaps," he said dryly, "for the future of the race. If she is right about non-local communication—"

  "I'm going to stop her."

  "No." His hand moved minutely; it was resting against the butt of a laser pistol.

  With automatic reflex, she let her muscles relax, began the ancient calculation of relative times and distances, of skills and physical conditions.

  She could take him. And—

  Bayliss cried out; it was a high-pitched, oddly girlish yelp. There was a clatter as she dropped some piece of equipment.

  Chen's confrontation with Hassan broke up instantly. They turned, ran to Bayliss; Chen's steps were springy, unnatural in the tiny gravity.

  "What is it?"

  "Look at the floor."

  The Sky resisted for an instant. Then it crumbled, melting away like ancient doubts.

  He surged through the break, strong, exultant, still growing.

  He was outside the Sky. He saw arrays of new postulate-fruits, virgin, waiting for him. And there was no further Sky; the Pool went on forever, infinite, endlessly rich.

  He roared outward, devouring, budding; behind him a tree of brothers sprouted explosively.

  The pool surged, in an instant, across the floor and out beyond the dome. The light, squirming with logic trees, rippled beneath Chen's dark, booted feet; she wanted, absurdly, to get away, to jump onto a data desk.

  "The quantum switch." Bayliss' voice was tight, angry; she was squatting beside the switch, in the middle of the swamped light pool.

  "Get away from there."

  "It's not functioning. The nanobees are unrestrained."

  "No more culling, then." Hassan stared into Chen's face. "Well, Susan? Is this some sentimental spasm, on your part? Have you liberated the poor logic trees from their Schrödinger hell?"

  "Of course not. For Lethe's sake, Hassan, isn't it obvious? The logic trees themselves did this. They got through the interface to Marsden's corpus callosum. Now they've got through into the switch box, wrecked Marsden's clever little toy."

  Hassan looked down at his feet, as if aware of the light pool for the first time. "There's nothing to restrain them."

  "Hassan, we've got to get out of here."

  "Yes." He turned to Bayliss, who was still working frantically at her data mines.

  "Leave her."

  Hassan gave Chen one long, hard look, then stalked across to Bayliss. Ignoring the little mathematician's protests he grabbed her arm and dragged her from the data desks; Bayliss' booted feet slithered across the glowing floor comically.

  "Visors up." Hassan lifted his pistol and lased through the plastic wall of the dome. Air puffed out, striving to fill the vacuum beyond.

  Chen ran out, almost stumbling, feeling huge in the feeble gravity. Neptune's ghost-blue visage floated over them, serene, untroubled.

  Waves of light already surged through the substance of the moon, sparkling from its small mountaintops. It was eerie, beautiful. The flitter was a solid, shadowed mass in the middle of the light show under the surface.

  Hassan breathed hard as he dragged a still reluctant Bayliss across the flickering surface. "You think the trees, the nanobees could get into the substance of the flitter?"

  "Why not? Any interface would do; they are like viruses. . . ."

  "And ourselves? Could they get across the boundary into flesh?"

  "I don't want to find out. Come on, damn it."

  Logic light swarmed across a low ridge, explosive, defiant.

  "They must be growing exponentially," Hassan growled. "How long before the moon is consumed? Days?"

  "More like hours. And I don't know if a moon-sized mass of buckytube carbon can sustain itself against gravity. Nereid might collapse."

  Now Hassan, with his one free hand, was struggling to get the flitter's hatch open. "It will forever be uninhabitable, at the least. A prime chunk of real estate lost."

  "The System's big."

  "Not infinite. And all because of the arrogance of one man—"

  "But," Bayliss said, her augmented eyes shining as she stroked the datacubes at her belt, "what a prize we may have gained."

  "Get in the damn flitter."

  Chen glanced back into the ruined dome. The splayed body of Marsden, exposed to vacuum, crawled with light.

  The Pool beyond the Sky was limitless. He and his brothers could grow forever, unbounded, free of Culling! He roared out his exultation, surging on, spreading—

  But there was something ahead of him.

  He slowed, confused. It looked like a brother. But so different from himself, so changed.

  P
erhaps this had once been a brother—but from a remote branch which had already grown, somehow, around this greater Pool.

  The brother had slowed in his own growth and was watching. Curious. Wary.

  Was this possible? Was the Pool finite after all, even though unbounded? And had he so soon found its limits?

  Fury, resentment, surged through his mighty body. He gathered his strength and leapt forward, roaring out his intent to devour this stranger, this distant brother.

  ANY MAJOR DUDE

  Paul Di Filippo

  Paul Di Filippo shows every sign of becoming one of those rare writers, like Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury, who establish their reputations largely through short work rather than through novels. He has yet to produce a novel, but his short fiction has popped up with regularity almost everywhere in the last ten years or so, a large body of work that has appeared in such markets as Interzone, New Worlds, Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, and Asimov's Science Fiction, as well as in many small press magazines and anthologies, and he has gathered wide critical acclaim with collections of his short work such as The Steampunk Trilogy, Ribofunk, Calling All Brains!, and, most recently, Fractal Paisleys—which also enables him to join an elite club of writers who published their first collection before publishing their first novel. Di Filippo also works as a columnist for two of the leading science fiction magazines simultaneously, with his often wry and quirky critical work appearing regularly in both Asimov's Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—a perhaps unique distinction.

  With the possible exception of Rudy Rucker, Di Filippo has probably written more extensively about nanotechnology, and examined it from a greater and more varied set of angles, with more imagination and élan, than any other contemporary SF writer; most of his collection Ribofunk deals with nanotechnology, as do such classic takes on it as "Up the Lazy River," "Big Eater," and "Distributed Mind." In the eloquent story that follows, perhaps his most intriguing and intricate take on nanotechnology, he takes us to a Europe where nanotech is creating a New World literally out of the ashes of the Old—and not everybody is happy about it, by any means!

  Taylor's room was costing him twenty thousand pesetas a day. A few years ago, the civil authorities had closed down the building as unfit for human habitation. Only minimal repairs had been made since.

  The room boasted a single window that opened onto a sooty brick airshaft, a tall dark box full of smells and sounds, capped with a square of blue Spanish sky. Into Taylor's room from this central well, dotted with other windows, drifted odors of oily foreign cooking.

  Hotplates were prohibited in theory by the management, and, yes, the fat hotel-owner had agreed, there was a possibility of starting a fire, but really, Señor, what can we do? We agree it is dangerous, but most of these people are too poor to eat in restaurants, having spent all of their money on a promised passage across the Strait. Ah, Señor, everyone wishes to cross to Africa, and we are just helping. Were we younger ourselves . . .

  Helping yourself get rich, you old hypocrite, thought Taylor, but said nothing at the time.

  Filtering in through Taylor's window along the Mediterranean scents were snatches of music and conversation, and tepid, torpid breezes that idly ruffled the dirty white gauze curtains, like an old woman sorting remnants of fabric at a sale.

  Taylor lay half in shadow on the narrow bed with bad springs. He rested on his side, facing the peeling, papered wall, wearing the rumpled linen suit he had been too abstracted to shed. At some point in the past the plaster had cracked, splitting the mottled wallpaper and erupting in a line of chalky lava. It reminded Taylor of the white calcareous strata beneath the Channel, so perfect for tunneling. How was the work going now? he wondered. Did anyone miss him? Did anyone puzzle over why he had left so precipitously, with the job so near completion? Did anyone care . . . ?

  It was very hot in Algeciras that July. So hot, so enervating, that it affected Taylor's thinking. He found that unless he continually reminded himself of his goals, his mind would wander, he would forget what he had to do next. Not that there was much he could do, of course, except to wait.

  He hadn't been like that a week ago, when he had arrived fresh in the swarming port town, on the trail of his runaway wife. Then, he had been all fire and determination. Everything had been clear and uncomplicated as vacuum, his course laid out simply before him.

  He would cross the border, cross the sea, to Maxwell's Land. He would find Aubrey. He would ask her if she intended to come home. If she agreed, well and good. (Although how they would travel home, return through the global interdict, he had no idea.) If she said no, he would kill her. Then he would kill Holt. It was as simple as that.

  Now, however, after seven days of delay, seven days of brain-broiling heat which even the advent of night could not annul, things no longer seemed so simple. There seemed to be a lag between every action he took and its consequences. Hysteresis was the technical term, he dimly remembered. (Always the engineer, Taylor, even when you were numb or hurt or raving mad. How fucking pitiful.) Or else the proper order of his actions seemed muzzy and doubtful. (For this latter effect, there was unfortunately no convenient scientific term.)

  Perhaps he would kill Holt first. The entire affair was, after all, his fault. He was responsible for the whole mess, both in Taylor's personal life, and on an international scale. Surely his death would be a good thing, and might perhaps send Aubrey back into Taylor's arms without even the necessity of asking.

  On the other hand, was he even sure any longer that he wanted Aubrey back? Perhaps she and Holt deserved each other, the damn traitors. Perhaps he would kill Aubrey and Holt together, without a word . . .

  No, that wasn't right. He was not a man who sought idle revenge. He would not have abandoned a job he deemed important, traveled all this hot and dusty way, along with hundreds of thousands of other pilgrims and emigrants, just to achieve that entropic end. It was Aubrey he wanted, alive and sweetly tangible and his once more, not the nebulous and twisted satisfaction of seeing her dead. And Holt. Even he could live. Yes, Taylor would let him live. True, he had done wrong. But Taylor could understand what had driven him: a love of elegant solutions, a lifelong affair with the muse of physical precision and grace. After all, he and Taylor were simpatico, both engineers, albeit at different ends of the spectrum.

  Up from the airshaft, preternaturally clear in an unusual moment when competitive noises were missing, floated a string of Spanish vocal and musical non sequiturs, as someone tuned across the radio band. Unctuous ads, flamenco guitars, the unmistakable transcultural inanities of a soap opera . . . Finally the unknown dial-twiddler settled on a station playing some ubiquitous old American rock. In niter disbelief, Taylor listened as half-forgotten lyrics tumbled over his windowsill.

  Taylor laughed without pleasure. " 'Demon at your door . . .' " he repeated into the blankets. Oh, yeah, the demons were at the door now, sure enough.

  That song was over twenty-five years old. Steely Dan's "Any Major Dude." It had been old when that campus DJ had used it as his closing theme, when Taylor and Holt had both been in grad school together a decade ago.

  MIT, on the banks of the Charles. Studying and sailing, fireworks on frosty First Night, a fire in their guts, to be someone, to do something important. Taylor in macroengineering, Holt in the barely nascent field of nanotechnology. Two divergent personalities, yet somehow fast friends. Given to endless bullshitting sessions, each man half-seriously defending his specialty as more vital than the other's.

  "All the really important work left is in the big projects, Des," Taylor would tell his friend. "Orbital stations, a bridge across the Bering Strait, harvesting icebergs, mid-Atlantic islands—"

  "Show-off stuff," Desmond Holt would contend. "Megalomania, pure and simple. Old ideas writ large. The same impulse that leads flower-breeders to produce bigger and bigger blossoms with less and less scent. Distinct lack of imaginat
ion there, boy. No, Nick, the age of materials is over. You've got to face it some day. The real action in the future will be on the atomic and molecular levels, and in information theory."

  "You've been listening to Drexler and Fredkin again. Those guys're crazy. Can you heat your house with information, or drive your car on it? You're building castles in the clouds, buddy."

  "We'll see. Time will tell. But I know one thing. Your kind of engineering promotes heavy social control."

  "And yours promotes chaos."

  "Fascist."

  "Anarchist."

  And, thought Taylor, recalling that archetypical conversation, a composite memory distilled out of so many, the cliché Holt had employed had, as clichés disconcertingly will, embodied truth.

  Time had indeed told. With the passage of the last few years, there could be no doubt now as to who had been right about the relative importance of their work.

  Taylor's own projects had not been without results. But not on the scale of Holt's.

  Aubrey had been someone utterly foreign to their scene, a communications major from Emerson. Doing the unusual, drawn solely by the subject matter, they had seen her in a play—a stage-adaptation of Capek's Absolute at Large; Aubrey had the role of Ellen—and been instantly smitten. Both had dated her, one had wed her.

  Since then, Taylor had, off and on, harbored doubts about whether Aubrey hadn't chosen arbitrarily between them, seeing little differences between their cognate manias, entranced merely by their common hard-edged vision. Now he feared he knew the bitter truth: that she had cast her lot with the one she thought stood the greatest chance of worldly success, and, upon a shift in fortunes, abandoned the downward-bound man for the one on the rise.

  He didn't really want to believe it about her, but it was the only explanation he could accept. Surely that other drivel contained in her goodbye letter was just a façade for her real motives . . .