Out on Blue Six

by Ian McDonald

  Don’t lick your lips. Do not lick your lips …

  “I’m afraid that doesn’t mean an awful lot to me whatever way you describe it. You tend not to believe in God either, down here. If anyone’s God DeepUnder, it’s Dad. And that makes us angels.”

  “Or apostles.”

  “Welcome to my world. All the room in the world for genius down here. If you seek Dad’s monument, look around you. Took him ten years to grow this place from one genesplicer kit, one case of cell cultivator, and one vial of deepfrozen stock, and in those ten years he reckons he’s taken the science of biological engineering fifty years ahead of anything the Seven Servants are practicing.”

  “He couldn’t very well make his breakthroughs public, now, could he?”

  “Sweetness, the Compassionate Society doesn’t want breakthroughs. All it wants is to keep things improving slowly enough for everyone to say, ‘Oh, look, aren’t our lifestyles getting better and better every day?’”

  This time the funny voice did not work.

  “Perhaps that was why they made him a fish waiter in the first place.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps indeed.” (Thinking “fish,” thinking “swimming” in the warm waters of the filtration tank; thinking “skinny-dip,” thinking “wet love.”) “But his work did not go totally unnoticed. Not the Compassionate Society, not the Seven Servants, not the Ministry of Pain, but someone out there was taking notice of him.” Finger raised, eyebrows arched melodramatically. Not impressed. Forgot she was a performance artist.

  “Say you just tell me it’s the Polytheon and we get on with the story, neh?”

  Shug.

  “About fifteen years back they began to initiate contact. Constructs, biological avatars, agents, were sent to find Dad and put a small proposition. Which was, in return for not informing on him to the Ministry of Pain, the Celestials would require his assistance in certain neurobiological projects they were engaged upon.”

  “Such as?”

  Shifting nearer to her.

  “Such as experiments into fusing biological and nonbiological life. Such as research into ways of making it impossible for the brain to recognize pain. Pretty cosmic stuff, most of it. I’m not even totally sure what he’s got going on in those labs of his.”

  “Angel-children!” Kansas Byrne exclaimed. The inching, crabbing hand scuttled into retreat. “It all begins to make sense. What Kaydoubleyou said about the Cosmic Madonna’s references to the Celestials, and their agents.”

  His hands held up, clean and spotless in the air.

  “Hey, sib, please, I only live here …” But she was so elated and enlightened that he had to, just had to, couldn’t do anything but share in her joy by slipping his arm around her waist. “But if there’s any way I can help you—”

  And, after the numb explosion, sitting in the ferns, going, unh? unh?

  “Look, boy. I have had more than a bellyful of being jumped on like I’m one of your … Dad’s … animated sextoys, as if it’s people’s right to try and pick me up: I am sick and tired of being treated as a nicely shaped chunk of meat. First of all, the Love Police play with my head, then you want to ram me, and I have had quite enough of it, you understand?”

  Nursing a walloped jaw. “My dear, I understand completely.”

  “Well, just in case you have any further trouble, understand this. I have someone. I have someone and it just so happens that he is … he is … and you are … you have … Good gods. Good God.”

  And she was up and sprinting through the cycads and the polymosses, out of the conservatories toward the chancel, and he was still flat on his ass in the ferns, saying, “Sib, it was only one arm, it’s not like I actually did anything, neh?”

  She hung in the white sleep pod, white and innocent as sleep, a naked madonna gazing blindly, blithely into her own dreams, whatever dreams and destinations Dad’s life-support computers programmed for her.

  Kilimanjaro West looked up at the body in the pod: rue and reminiscence. A small grotesque troglodyte thing came gurgling and goose-stepping across the green-lab floor, another of Dad’s little biological innovations that had wandered loose from the menagerie. The small dumpling-man in the germ-white isolation suit turned the mannequin and pointed it toward the door.

  “I’ve considered terminating the lot of them, but I’m too softhearted. They were, after all, my very first efforts at creating artificial life. Rather too inspired by my days doing pets, I’m afraid. Too much like murder to get rid of them; anyway, they tend not to be terribly long-lived, poor things, a little kink in their thanatic hormone systems.” Dad had a very deep voice for so small a man, a rich purr of a voice, as if coming out of something much deeper and greater than himself. “But my daughter, my poor Callisto, what to do, eh, my love? So unfair to leave you dreaming away in white sleep. But all may not be lost. Angelo may have disappointed me, and betrayed you, but at least he has provided us with the key and guide to The Unit’s eventual retrieval. Enjoy your dream, daughter, while you may.”

  “Does she know that you created her?” said Kilimanjaro West.

  A soft, wicked grin. “Why, Mr. West, I really must apologize. I am guilty of having underestimated you. Yes, you are quite correct; I created little Callisto here, grew her like a bean in a jelly jar.”

  “And the others. Angelo Brasil and the other girl.”

  Dad’s eyes twinkled, rare crystals hidden in deep caves. “Little Xian. Yes, I really am their Dad. And their Mom, too. Little joke, you see? Yes, I grew them all in this lab, in these very white sleep pods, and fed them with false memories and phantom childhoods; I do confess, I am guilty. They all think that they are abandoned children of other DeepUnders whom I took in and somehow bestowed with miraculous powers; it’s not so farfetched a scenario, certainly the lower levels are quite densely populated. Unfortunately, and what, I trust, they will never know, is that it is quite impossible to create their kind of talent after birth. The biomechanisms must be implanted soon after conception and develop with the fetus, fuse themselves with the host nervous system. I grew them all the way up to age sixteen in accelerated growth medium and then decanted the poor troubled sulky adolescents into the world.”

  Another soft, wide grin.

  “Some people would say that is a monstrous thing to do.”

  “And what would the Advocate say?”

  “So, you know.”

  “We seem to know a lot about each other, Mr. West.”

  “And I know how you know.”

  “Please continue, Mr. West.”

  The synthetic child moved languidly in her sack, like a corpse bubbling up to the sky.

  “In good time, Mr. …”

  “‘Dad’ will do. It is appropriate enough.”

  “First, I want to ask, why?”

  “Why? Angelo and Callisto and little Xian? Company. Protection. The Polytheon makes no promises against the Love Police, my existence down here is precarious enough. As I have said, there are others just below me who would sack St. Damien’s just to hear the nice sound of the flames. Demons below me, gods above me, scarce wonder that I have need of a rather more, shall we say—robust?—form of enforcement. Callisto was to have been the lynchpin of the team. She was my first, but from the very start there were problems with Pernicious Energetic Bioplasty, as I’ve already explained to you at some length. Poor kid.”

  “There were other reasons.”

  “Of course there were.”

  “Practice.”

  “Precisely.”

  “For me.”

  “Mr. West, you really are to be commended on your perspicacity. You are exactly right. Xian and Callisto were my initial dabblings at in vitro fusing of the organic with the inorganic, different modes, different styles. Little Xian I really am quite proud of, purely as a piece of engineering. The unspace randomizer is built in just under her heart—you can see it clear as day on any full scanning tomoscope. Amazing to think, Mr. West, that the Compassionate Society has left th
e principles of matter transmission sitting in a dump file in West One for three hundred years purely because it would be too socially unsettling to introduce it into society. Frustrating times, Mr. West.”

  “And Angelo?”

  “The Boy with the Computer Brain? And the Goat’s Gonads, might I add. I do rather think he has his eye on your Mizz Byrne. He was the most recent. The last. The prototype.”

  “The prototype of the Advocate.”

  “Precisely, sir. Precisely.”

  “Of me.”

  “You could say that he is a failed Advocate, yes. The degree of fusion of the two technologies was not satisfactory.”

  “And I am the successful model.”

  “And very proud I am of you, too, Mr. West. In all modesty, I must say that I did a first-rate job on you. I set up that white sleep tank over in Toltethren, under the supervision of the Celestials’ agents. I produced the genotypes and cloning material, the Polytheon did the rest.”

  “But I am not the first Advocate.”

  “Yes and no. First for me. But not first for Yu. And I know that I am not the first Dad. History does not record those other pioneering individuals, but I can only conclude that there have been many chosen by the Polytheon to their service and driven out of the Compassionate Society to practice their skills in seclusion.”

  “And what happened to them?”

  “That I would not like to say. I surmise that when the Advocates they had helped design failed in their Advocacy, they were quite simply exterminated. Annihilated. Erased from every file and record so that not only did they no longer exist, they had never existed in the first place. This is a ruthless game, Mr. West. Your patrons are compassionless creatures. Which is why, if you will excuse me, I am a little apprehensive in your presence.”

  “Because I may be your death?”

  “And Angelo’s, and little Xian’s, and poor Callisto’s here, and the death of all your Raging Apostles, and that dear dizzy woman Courtney Hall, and your friend Kansas Byrne. Which is why I am hoping, if you will again excuse the presumption, that you will not be too hasty in taking us all before the Court of the Celestials. I may be old, my children may be artificial, but they are no less my children and I am no less their Dad.”

  An uproar from the toy library. The little goose-stepper mannequin was trying to goose-step over a recumbent giant ambulatory breast, kicking its legs and struggling to rise to its feet.

  Without doubt it was the best bed since Victorialand (better even than the barbaric luxury of the Electoral airbarge), and Courtney Hall relished, lavished, ravished in all its feather softness, warmness. She was beginning to feel at home with a roof over her head. Multimillions of tons of masonry and concrete and steel was cozy and safe. A comfortable nest for meditation and contemplation, a dawdle along that long-promised road that had brought her here and now, and for the first time since huddling under New Paris Community Mall, it seemed to be leading somewhere.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the Raging Apostles are dead, long live the Raging Apostles!” Joshua Drumm had declared at the extraordinary meeting of the exiled artists, and she, Courtney Hall, yulp, exiled artist, ex-cartoonist, had joined with them in raising voice and heart and a glass of Dad’s home-brew vintage. “We have died and been born again, and now the Raging Apostles can never die, we are free, my friends, we are the Church of the Catacombs, we see before us a wide-open future, there are no limits anymore!”

  Real friends at last. Accepted, welcomed (some had even been fans of Wee Wendy Waif and recalled her final venture onto the streets with fondness and admiration), her artistic judgments valued and weighed and listened to. No one had ever listened to her before. And they would teach her to dance and juggle and sing and play a musical instrument, and she would teach them satire and burlesque, and together they would spill up out of their hatches to splash Day-Glo graffiti across serene marble walls and chase through the highways and the byways and the ways-less-gone-by with impunity and immunity and impudence …

  She could hardly wait for the first rehearsal to begin.

  As she was wondering what she would look like in a leotard, she succumbed to the common meditator’s complaint. She fell asleep.

  And woke.

  Something very like her childhood imaginings of a vampire was fluttering at her left wrist.

  She squawked, shouted on the wall lights, and sat up, ready to slap out. The small round man in the saggy plastic isolation suit sprang back from the bed.

  “So sorry, madam, my most humble apologies.”

  “What are you doing, just tell me that. What do you think you are doing?”

  Her pyramid of trust sloped hyperbolically from Joshua Drumm and his Raging Apostles at the apex through Xian Man Ray and Angelo Brasil to this man, this Dad at the base. He had the manners and affectations of a King of Nebraska, but whereas Jonathon Ammonier’s had been the expression of the luminous naïveté and faith, Dad’s concealed a warren of ferrety ulteriors. She trusted his cat more than she trusted him.

  “I was preparing to render you a little service, madam, which would make both your stay and my residency here a little more, ah, secure? But it seems, to my amazement, I must confess, that my services are unnecessary.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I had intended to remove your tag, as I have done for all your tatterdemalion allies, but I find that some other has beaten me to it.”

  “Jonathon Ammonier.”

  Pudgy fingers smote brow.

  “Of course! He would have had to have known of their existence and have acted on that knowledge. Certainly, the Ministry of Pain would never have let him abscond from the Salamander Throne in possession of so vital a commodity as the stored personas of his predecessors. He was not one half the fool I took him for.”

  “Indeed he was not,” said Courtney Hall evenly. Dad continued his musing aloud.

  “And even more certainly, he could not have permitted himself to associate with a tagged citizen whose every move could be, and probably was, tracked by the Love Police. Tell me, how did he do it?”

  “White sleep tank, if it’s any help.”

  “Effective, I suppose, but I think you would have found my method less uncomfortable. Subdermal polarity invertor …” He flicked a small needle-nosed conical device out of his fat, creased palm. “One two three and out it comes in one nice piece. No blood, no pain, no fuss. You must be a light sleeper; you were the only one I awoke on my nocturnal errands. Guilty conscience?”

  “Should I?”

  “You tell me. What has your experience of the DeepUnder taught you?”

  “Beware of dogs.”

  He clapped his hands in sour delight.

  “Very good. Oh, most droll. But please, you do me a disservice. I may be a rat, but I am a moral rat, by a rat’s lights. What else?”

  “Oh, this and that. Ships, shoes, sealing wax, cabbages, and kings. This world that we live within. This Compassionate Society we are taught to believe is so strong that it will outlive the sun, but which rats and artists know is really a rather fragile and delicate ornament; one tap in the right place will shatter it into a hundred million tiny brilliant pieces. A society which will outlive the sun has no need of things like tags. Or West One.”

  “Travel does indeed broaden the mind, Mizz Hall. But tell me, in the view of your enlightenment, who do you think will be this neo-barbarian who would storm the gates of the City Imperishable? Your Raging Apostles? They certainly look dangerous enough, and they certainly like to believe that they are dangerous, but really, there is nothing new about them, my dear. Since time immemorial there have been artists who deliberately placed themselves outside society; self-proclaimed flambeaux bearers lighting the path to the Beautiful Land of free expression and Free Love and free beer and wonderful art; but we both know, don’t we, that that is a load of … well, what I pump through my conservatories. The push cannot come from them. If it comes from anywhere, Mizz Hall, it could come from you.”


  “Oh, come on. I’m just another flambeau bearer lighting the purple path, not even a very good one. My one attempt to turn the world upside down was stepped on quickly enough by the Love Police. I’m just a yulp who isn’t bad at art.”

  “Almost true. A yulp who isn’t bad at art with the stored personas of the forty-three Electors of Yu in her head. Which rightly belong to Elector the Forty-fifth, Roberto Calzino, the living equipoise between God, State, and Industry, who is sitting on the Salamander Throne playing with himself without the slightest idea of how to do what he’s meant to be doing. That’s quite a hefty push, madam.”

  “Let me tell you this. I take no pleasure in giving that rabble the hospitality of my head after what they tried to do to me in sensdep. I can’t allow myself to forget they’re there, not even for a second, or they’ll stage a coup de tête and throw me out of my own body.”

  Now she knew where Angelo Brasil had learned that certain smile.

  “But how would it be if I were to tell you that Dad can send them all home again?”

  Temptation grew into desire, hovered on the lip of action; her tongue was shaping a yes, then she looked at this white gnome stroking his beard, with plans and ambitions no one could name sewn to the back of his button-moon eyes, and she could see how the pyramid of distrust went all the way down to infinity.

  “No thank you. If I can find a way to return them to their rightful owner, I will. Until then, they’ll stay here for safekeeping.”

  “You don’t trust me to give them to the proper recipient?”

  “I trust you about as far as I could spit a rat.”

  “That far. You’re probably quite right, my dear.” He laughed, and the laugh was very much nastier than any of Angelo Brasil’s repertoire of nasty laughs because all his nasty laughs had only been imitations of his father’s. “Oh, well. If you won’t give them to me, I’ll have to make a deal with you. There is no conceivable way that you can return the soulchip to Roberto Calzino without my help. You’re going to walk up to the Presidium and say, ‘Here you are, I believe this is yours, please accept with the compliments of Courtney Hall, PainCriminal, escapee from West One?’ Come now, madam, you do need me. You need my son Angelo. Without his lynkbrain, how are you even going to begin? So, in return for our assistance, you will furnish me with the exact location of The Unit.”