by Ian McDonald
The tank smelled of mold and plastic and, somehow, a long lack of its own gravity.
“Thunderheart and Devadip and Winston and Josh, are they out on a show already?”
The heat bulb was plugged into a ceiling socket by an extension coil and gave the only light, dim and red and intimate.
“Kelse, where are they? I really want to see them …” Her brother, her twin, lifted her hands from his shoulders, took them in his own hands. “Eh, Kelse … M’kuba, where are the others?” Suddenly suspicious, suddenly fearful.
“The Love Police got them.” V. S. Pyar’s voice.
“M’kuba, come on, tell me, eh?”
“He’s telling you the truth.”
“Kelse, brother, you wouldn’t fool me, tell me what’s happened.”
“The Love Police have them.”
The universe staggered, knocked loose from its moorings; it punched her hard, in the heart.
“Oh, Yah. Oh, dear sweet Yah. Oh, dear dear God.” First the nail in the heart, then the numbness it creates. Then the denial. She laughed, nervously. “No, no, it couldn’t be right. You’re joking, aren’t you? Couldn’t be, couldn’t be, come on, tell me, this is Josh’s idea of a practical joke, isn’t it? Hah hah, very funny, come on, Kelse, the real truth, come on, I can see you smiling.”
“You want the truth? So: the truth. They found us. I don’t know how they did it, but they found us. They were waiting for us, they knew exactly where we were going to be. We weren’t five minutes into the place when they hit us. All sides. All at once. Used ringcharges of the walls, had the doors covered, men on the catwalks, smoke, gas, sonics, I don’t really remember what, there was so much happening, all I remember is Pyar here picking up Love Policemen and throwing them out of his way, and somehow M’kuba and I got sucked along in the wake. The rest … they tranqed them and stuffed them into pantycars and took them away.” He paused, blinked, swallowed several times. “M’kuba found us this place with the help of his persona-runner friends, they all knew each other when they went out on blue six together, they gave us this place and kept a watch out for you. I didn’t know what had happened to you, I just couldn’t think about anything but what had happened to the others, you might have been captured as well, back at the Glory Bowl, we just didn’t know. But the runners kept a watch out for you anyway, in the hope you’d made it. The rest, Winston, Devadip, Thunderheart, Josh … I can’t believe it.”
Kansas Byrne slapped her brother hard across the face. She lifted her hand to strike him again, felt Kilimanjaro West’s hand around her wrist.
“There is no need for that. It’s not his fault.” Kansas Byrne glared at her brother, anger and pain and incredulity in one glance.
“Leave the man be,” said M’kuba. “There is no more Raging Apostles.”
The curving wall of the tank channeled the truth into one hard, long reverberation. Kansas Byrne spread her hands.
“What can we do?” The edge of the world was within reach. At last. It had always been inevitable; outside society the currents all flowed in one direction. It had seemed so distant, hardly even a dark smudge on the horizon as they danced and sang and played and performed and made the world a bright and dangerous place once again. All those weeks and months the currents had been running, how could she not have sensed it, unless she had deliberately willed not to do so? And now they could see it, rising up beyond the edge of the world: the final monolith, West One.
Psychological reengineering and rehabilitation center.
“What can we do?”
“M’kuba has an idea.”
The Scorpio shrugged. “Possible we might go back into Compassionate Society.”
“Oh, yes? When we threw away our famuluses, we made our choices. No way back. We going to walk up to the nearest MiniPain Bureau of Care and ask for new ones?”
“Mah sib, true we can’t go back as ourselves, as Kansas Byrne and Kelso Byrne and Dr. M’kuba and Kilimanjaro West and V. S. Pyar. But if we give ourselves up, there is a way back.”
“You mean, go to the Love Police and say, here we are, your most wanted PainCriminals, take us?”
“No. You misinterpret, sib. What I mean is, give up ourselves. Become someone else.”
“Are you talking personality erasure? Because, shug, that is no better than what the Ministry offers.”
“Hear him out.” Both of Kilimanjaro West’s hands were on her shoulders, heavy and still as marble.
“My bror persona runners think they may be able to superimpose memories, identities, histories, personalities over our own. Become these people, real people who have died, step into their places, take their names, numbers, everything, be absorbed back into society.”
“So we would cease to be. So Kansas Byrne would die.”
“In one sense.”
“Yes or no?”
“Kansas Byrne, she exist only as ghost; like a dream, like a fantasy.”
“That is suicide.”
“Brors think, I agree, that in time older, longer-established persona engrams might gradually surface, take over superimposed persona. Might become Kansas Byrne again.”
“And that is the best you have to offer me?”
“It’s a hope, isn’t it?” said the brother, her twin.
“When will we have to decide?”
“My brors running physical typing matches now. Tomorrow. Morning. Hey, sib, they don’t owe us this. This is favor, Kaybee.”
“And you’ve decided, have you, Dr. M?”
“We all have.”
“Shug. Yah blast it. Shug, shug, shug.” She sat down and swore and swore and swore and then cried a little, and no one thought to stop her because it was all the helplessness and hopelessness and fury and anguish they felt themselves.
Night. Outside, the sudden roar of gas flares, the rumble of the automated tram taking the ghosts home to their roosts, and the rain, drum-drumming on the metal separator tank. The heat bulb was stopped down to a bare glow, the tank was filled with swirling dots of darkness. And people, taking a last time alone with themselves. A last sleeping. A last dreaming. A last being oneself.
And a word.
“Kaydoubleyou?”
“Yes?”
“Shug, I don’t know what to call you now.”
“Kaydoubleyou is fine.”
“Ahm, I was wondering … oh, shug, do you mind if we talk a little? It’s just, well, the dark, and what’s happening tomorrow, and everything … Have you decided?”
“Yes. Have you?”
“Yes. And I’m doing it. That’s why I was wondering … oh, shug.”
“What?”
“Damn you, damn you, damn you, damn you, you still have to be so shuggin’ innocent.”
“Please, not so loud, the others are trying to sleep, and I don’t want them to know.”
“Kaydoubleyou, ahm, when you said you loved me, did you mean it?”
“Of course. As far as I understand the word, yes, I do love you.”
“Well, would you, could you, could we, ahm … it’s like this. Shug, I’ve never been nervous about this before. Tomorrow, Yah, tomorrow, tomorrow, Kansas Byrne Raging Apostle, this Kansas Byrne you love, she is going to die, and I will be someone else who won’t even know who you are, and I want to know you, I don’t want to forget you, I want to remember you more than anything, I want to keep on being amazed and amused and just plain bewildered by you: you say you love me, and I know I feel something for you like I’ve never felt before, so, ah, why don’t we?”
And they did.
Afterward:
“You know, this is going to sound stupid and really obvious, but I’ve never done it with a god before.” Laughing into his chest.
“I have never done it before with anyone.”
“Thank you.”
“What are you going to do? You asked me, and I told you, but you didn’t tell me.”
“I’m not going to do it.”
“Why the fug not?”
“I can’t. Not and remain what I am, what I’m meant to be. Anyway, I don’t think it would work on me.”
“The Love Police will catch you.”
“Maybe. Maybe not, if they don’t know who or what I am, they won’t know what to look for, or even that they should be looking. But even if they do, I think I can still be as much Advocate from a tank in West One as here, with you, or clinging to the roof of the Babazulu Aztec Cathedrium.”
“That’s not fair. It’s not fair that you will remember all about me and I will forget about you; you will be just a ghost within the ghost that was me.”
“I’m sorry. I did not decide this lightly.”
“That doesn’t help. Strange and wonderful creature. A god.” She arched her back like a sleek, sensuous cat, warmed and comfortable between the heat bulb and Kilimanjaro West’s body. “I don’t think I will ever be happy again.”
Then something blew a hole in the wall with a blast and a roar and a scream and a shatter and a rush of noise and light and Kansas Byrne shrieked and shrieked and shrieked as black-and-silver creatures all red nightsight goggles and thin, weapon arms came pouring out of the night, out of the void, out of the terrifying nothing outside the separator tank: light and voices and shouts and clouds of gas? smoke?—choking, coughing, eyes streaming with tears and madly vertiginous, she jumped up, nakedly vulnerable and terribly terribly lovely and a Love Police shock beam threw her across the little nest against the curving wall and she writhed and spasmed and foamed as the charge chewed away at her nervous system; and the man who called himself Kilimanjaro West rose up with a roar and a cry and threw himself through the smoke? gas? and the din and the darkness at the black-and-silver things that had hurt his friend, his comrade, his woman, his Kansas Byrne; with the roar of a god outraged he threw himself at the Love Police and a shock charge caught him full in the chest and everything everywhere, every nerve ending, crawled with red acid ants while he hallucinated flying birthday cakes and tumbling kaleidoscopic pieces of red-brick masonry and the smell of vinegar, then everything blew up in his head like a white monobloc exploding into a universe of confusion, and then he knew nothing at all.
A Love Policeman’s Lot …
“SPECIAL TACTICAL SQUAD SEVEN to West One Central, come in West One Central; will be docking in approximately five minutes, report successful arrest of remaining PainCriminal elements of the Raging Apostles group. Request high-security team to meet us at pad to effect transfer of prisoners to sensdep tanks. Special Tactical Squad, out.”
Number two seven eight in tank two twelve.
Number sixty-six in tank three one six.
Number eleven hundred and sixty-two in tank seven twenty.
Number seventy-seven in tank … no, sorry, hold seventy-seven, number seventy-seven, seventy-seven to … ah, got it, level sixty-six.
Number four hundred and thirty in tank one six.
“Special Tactical Squad nine to West One Central, Tactical Squad nine to West One, Sergeant Grenfall reporting successful arrest of PainCriminal Courtney Hall in company of two hostile noncitizen accomplices within confines of Final Arsenal Maximum Security Complex. Also, report, resecuring of Final Arsenal and entropic weapons system, known as The Unit. You can stand down from condition triple-red. Plus, report capture of one cat. Repeat, cat. Yes, you’ve got that right, West One. Noncitizens plus cat exhibit special talents; request you have Extraordinary Abilities team rendezvous with us at touchdown and maximum security units prepared for prisoners. Estimated transit time to West One, fifty-five minutes. Sergeant Grenfall out.”
Number ten in tank five fifty-seven.
Number four in tank niner two.
Number nine ninety-six in tank … hang on, have we got a number nine ninety-six? Have you got a number nine ninety-six? Well, then who has got number nine ninety-six? No, I don’t have number nine ninety-six. Yes, there most certainly is a number nine ninety-six. Right here in front of me, that’s where … No, no docket. Yes, of course I’ve looked. Underneath? Yes, you were right all along. It was underneath the pod. Number nine ninety-six to level sixty-six. Well, it’s not my fault if the number gets hidden underneath, is it?
“Ah, we’re getting anomalous readings from number four in unit forty-two.”
“What do you mean, anomalous readings?”
“Anomalous persona engram readings. Like superimposed memory traces.”
“Persona runner?”
“Similar, but much more intricate. Never seen anything quite like this. Scans more like record-only personality information, loosely stored.”
“Let’s have a look.”
“There, see?”
“That’s unusual … isn’t unit forty-two one of the specials?”
“No, they’re up on sixty-six. This one has just an ordinary high-security categorization. As much as you could call any high-security categorization ordinary.”
“You know what this means, of course. We’ll have to follow up each and every one of those engram traces and erase them before we can even begin any personality reengineering.”
“Aw, no.”
“’Fraid so.”
“And who have we here?”
“Tlakh fem, about twenty-seven, not bad looking, if you like that sort of thing.”
“Shame on you, a partnered man, and a closet transcaster. Here, let’s have a looksee. Eh, not bad at all. What’s she down for?”
“Let’s see … well, she’s just finished subliminal preliminary voice-print indoctrination. She’s due another shot of that in about three hours or so. For the moment she’s just stewing in her own juice.”
“Why not give her a little tickle.”
“It’s not down here on the spec sheet.”
“Oh, go on … I’ll do it. Here we go daughter … twelve milliamps clean through the limbic gate … oh, she likes that, she likes that a lot! You doing anything tonight?”
“Going out: Lares and Penates have the partner and me booked in for dinner at the Social; reckon we need a little romance back in our partnership. Yourself?”
“Nothing much. I’m up on level fifty-five, you know, all the weirds, until twenty o’clock. Then I’ll probably off-shift with a few comrades and a crate of brews, catch something on the entertainment channels, nothing much.”
“Hey ho. It’s a life, isn’t it?”
“That’s the whole thing, I suppose.”
Number twelve forty-two in tank nineteen.
Number sixteen oh nine in tank sixteen oh nine.
Number twenty-seven in tank four.
Number one in high security level forty-two, tank one.
… IS NOT A HAPPY ONE.
TIDDY-PUM.
Chapter 10
IMAGINE. THERE IS A dimension without sight, without sound, of eternal and impenetrable darkness and a silence so complete you cannot even hear the drone and pulse of your own body. A dimensionalless dimension, without up or down or forward or backward or left or right, without inside or outside, without the pressure of bowels and bones and blood and bladder, without any tactile awareness whatsoever, without even the gravitational cues to orientation in space: the interior world as void as the exterior, without shape or form or any understanding, without taste or smell or feel, without even a name for a name is something and this is nothing, no-thing, this is sensory shutdown, this is the nightmare zone: welcome!
Welcome to yourself.
There is nothing and no one else here to be welcome to, but yourself. Hope you get on well with you. If you don’t, well, never mind, you’ll have lots of time to get to like yourself as you float, encased in soft rubber smeared with anesthetic gel, in your tank of freegee biobase pseudopolymer with the Ministry of Pain hardwired into your brain and cathetered, tubed, piped into your lungs, veins, bowels, bladder: time makes its own rules in sensory deprivation.
Number eight in tank forty-two seven …
This does not worry him. He has been through sensory deprivation, and worse, within t
he Cosmic Madonna’s silver sphere. Boredom, however …
When no action is possible, practice presence.
When you cannot become, simply be.
When there is no outwardness, practice inwardness. Descend into the flesh, fill up the whistling vacuum of the interstices of your own body: most of you is empty space. Most of everything is empty space; you are in good company. The universe is incarnate within you. Into the flesh, through the flesh, to the heart of things, to the cells, and through them to the stately gavotte of things molecular: here, at the edge of life, he takes into his hands the twin strands of his humanity and his divinity and separates them. The phospho-amino linkages between the protein and the pseudo-organic monomolecules snap with crackles of light and laughter as he untwines the machine from the human. All knowledge is in the molecules: It is written, for the organic and the inorganic. The billion years of life on earth from the finger of God’s stirring the primordial waters to the painfree angel-children of the Cosmic Madonna. The half millennium in which the machines have evolved faster, further than the living creatures, perhaps, into a Mobius loop of cause and effect into that primate fiat lux, the lightning moving upon the waters beneath the darkness? He stands at the junction of two heritages, a racial memory in each hand. He has learned what it is to be human. He has not yet learned what it is to be a machine. He sends his spirit out along the shining black coils of the machine-life.
The city is his body, his soul. What he had hallucinated before the Salmagundy Street shrine he comprehends with certainty. The Cosmic Madonna herself, for all her diggings and her delvings, is but one small organ of his self. The Celestials, the digits through which he constantly replenishes and reconstructs himself. Having flown inward, he now follows himself backward, through those rushing, swooping memories of voices he recognizes now as the computers that supervised his incarnation, back to those other times he had deliberately put off his greater body to take the lesser form of a human and walk and talk and move and love within the confines of that greater organism: nine times in almost half a millennium he has taken the fleshwalk, always without caste or name or number. Five times that walk has taken him here. He reads those terminal black marks along his coil of life where the Love Police have pulled a lifeless collop of meat from their sensdep tanks (scratch official heads in puzzlement, how would, could, did prisoner X die in adaptive custody, impossible, incredible, and altogether improper) never guessing that in the darkness he had returned to the Infinite Exalted Plane and his true body and true place before the Polytheon to report duly, sadly, sorrowfully, that mankind was still not ready to master its own destiny.