Dreaming in Smoke

by Tricia Sullivan

  Rasheeda said, “Let’s not rush into anything. Jianni, we’ll get it fixed. Don’t be upset.”

  Her tone was soothing, and she reinforced it by going to Jianni and laying a hand on his forearm. She possessed an absolute confidence in what she was saying: Kalypso could see the witch doctor’s face cloud as he tried to hold on to his resolve. She knew what he was feeling. Irrational as they were, the Mothers had a way of casting a spell over you.

  “This is much more dangerous than you realize. . .”

  “Leaving First would be insane,” Lassare said bluntly.

  Kalypso, stirring as vigorously as her tingling wrist would allow, glanced sideways at the still-unconscious youth in the mask and wondered what Lassare’s definition of sanity was.

  Jianni stuck to his guns. “The luma could break down. I shouldn’t have to tell you what that means.”

  Naomi said, “Don’t try to lay the blame on us. Without the luma, there would be no future generation. Without us—”

  Jianni waved this aside with the air of someone who’d heard Naomi’s glorification of her own uterus a time or three too many.

  “I can’t talk to you when you’re stoned.”

  “This was bound to happen sooner or later,” Mari put in diplomatically. “The luma won’t remain stable without management by Ganesh, and Ganesh isn’t perfect. It’s not anyone’s fault.”

  There was a long, insincere silence and they all avoided looking at each other. Jianni muttered a halfhearted curse and grasped the frame of the hatch.

  “I don’t have time for this shit,” he said. “I’m calling an evacuation.”

  Kalypso gulped. “But Ganesh will self-correct sooner or later. Right?”

  “I hope so, Kalypso.” His eye on her was slightly gentler. “But we can’t count on it. Lassare, I’m overriding you. If you people want to argue, you can stay here and melt when the next thermal hits.”

  He pushed out past Korynne, who was on her way in. It was suddenly obvious just how intoxicated the Mothers were; they appeared dazed.

  Korynne said, “I got the records, but they’re in shorthand. Nobody can find Azamat.”

  She passed a card to Lassare; the rest of the Mothers remained silent. Kalypso felt them closing ranks. When Lassare finally spoke, her tone was almost exaggeratedly formal.

  “Go to your cell, Kalypso. I’ll come and speak to your cluster later. Maybe they can get the truth out of you. Right now, you’re not looking exactly squeaky.”

  “But I would never hurt Ganesh!”

  Wearily, Lassare said, “It’s like the boy who cried wolf.”

  “Fuck you, Lassare.” Suddenly almost in tears at the injustice, Kalypso pushed her way across the room toward the hatch as she delivered the only rebuttal she could think of. “Just . . . just . . . just fuck you.”

  INVERTEBRATE CITY

  YOU CAN SEE OUT. IT’S NOT A LANDSCAPE it’s a cloud sculpture, a parade of forms becoming other forms, indistinguishable from their reflections. The water is vast and utterly still. Cast upon it, the clouds run the gamut from tired yellow to a violet just shy of blue; but the dominant tone of the world at this time of day is dirty brass. There is an impression of weak light coming from now- herein’ particular.

  You can see out, and it’s big. You can see its emptiness.

  You can see out, but you can’t get out. You are wrapped up inside. Inside, the cells are tightly packed, a honeycomb of interdependent hexagonal unit. There is a feeling of walls everywhere, which is only intensified by the presence of windows. Inside, things are highly structured and everything has multiple uses. It’s the ergonomy that gets scary.

  Take this cell, for example. A tallish man could stand in the middle of it and kick each of the 6 walls. It has been built from luma, and its configuration and internal environment are regulated by the AI Ganesh, for each cell possesses a processing node of the original smartship integrated into the very fabric of First. With the exception of the Core, Ganesh is scattered across the entire station in this way. First is an intelligent structure.

  The cell has been imprinted with its occupant’s habits, so it can anticipate every need like a faithful dog. Ganesh—when it’s working—can be accessed through interface, hands-free. The nutrition unit is tucked away inside a structural column and will cool, heat, or blend ingredients at need; food sources are cultured out of sight, also managed by the AI; and the plumbing is similarly efficient and unobtrusive. The bed rolls open and inflates when the occupant’s body temperature drops beneath a certain level. Light is provided by tamed flagrare colonies, and ceiling plants provide a steady supply of fresh oxygen, which can be supplemented from the common stock when there are several people inside. In short, Ganesh takes care of its humans.

  Outside you can’t breathe. Inside you are safe from everything but yourself.

  Until now, anyway.

  Sitting on a shelf that folds out from the wall is Kalypso Deed in the half-lotus position. She’s playing the bass line to “Roundabout,” accurately and at tempo. The drums/organ/guitar/vox digitally isolated from the original recording are being piped through her interface as if the dead band were right here, so she’s working pretty hard, sweating—totally going for it, in fact. She plays rarely, so her fingers are blistering. Just for a minute, inside and outside lose their meaning.

  She’s furious at Lassare’s dismissal. As if she were a child—but there are no children on T’nane any more. No: everyone in every cluster is the same age give or take a handful of years. Around age eight they were all grouped with an intent to balance personalities, talents, and physical makeup. Everything about their existence was carefully planned long ago, on Earth, and the Mothers have attempted to preserve that planning despite the fact that life on T’nane is nothing like what they expected when they left Earth with a mandate to colonize. This control can be stifling: sometimes Kalypso wants to run screaming from her own cluster. But there’s nowhere to run so she has to settle for the isolation loud music can create.

  Only she’s not supposed to be interfacing. And she’s certainly not supposed to be using Earth Archive resources. She’s doing it out of insubordination coupled with a kind of desperate denial of the Crash; a need to prove that Ganesh is still there and won’t eat her alive. But she’s in the middle of the chorus when her accompaniment cuts off—

  She raised her head, dropping out of interface.

  “You’re not supposed to be anywhere near Ganesh,” Ahmed warned.

  She turned. He was in her bed, flanked by Liet and Xiaxiang. The latter was asleep; the former was sucking her thumb.”

  “I can’t believe it’s all going down,” Kalypso whispered. She fingered the strings wistfully, but without amplification could barely hear the tones produced.

  There wasn’t enough air. Sharia was eating a tortilla loudly. Kalypso’s cell was meant to hold one person, or two. Not five. But the cluster was under evacuation orders, merely waiting to be called to a Landing and issued a boat and tentkit. The anticipation had made the others obsessively talkative, and then brought out the sex urge; Kalypso was too conflicted to be interested. Yet she hadn’t slept, either. She’d sat here, playing bass as fast as she could and brooding.

  “Tehar keeps calling for you on radio,” Sharia said, chewing. “But we deemed it best to leave you alone. Are you intox?”

  “What? No. Why.”

  “He said he left you in Maxwell’s.”

  Kalypso felt persecuted.

  “I made a fool of myself in front of him,” she moaned.

  “That wouldn’t be unusual,” Ahmed remarked.

  “Tehar found a problem at rem2ram,” Sharia added.

  “Goddamn Lassare. I didn’t do anything. For once.”

  “What does she say you did?”

  “It’s stupid. The Mothers— get this. The Mothers are bent out of shape because the Crash seems to have been caused by the luma. Jianni’s giving the hell for it in that understated way of his.”


  “What does that have to do with you?”

  “Because it might have started in my unit of the Dreamer. Or been accelerated by the Dreamer. And Marcsson did berk. So they think I was playing and caused a glitch.”

  “Were you?”

  “Not that I know of. Does anybody care that I came that close to berking myself? Does anybody bother to ask me if I’m upset by the fact that some crazy giant could have pulped me? No. Everywhere I turn, accusations . . .”

  Ahmed had disentangled himself from Liet, and now stood. He put his hands on her shoulders an began massaging them. Xiaxiang yawned loudly; she heard Liet squeak as he rolled over.

  “Poor turtle,” Xiaxiang said. “You’re full of shit and you know it.”

  Sharia was frowning: Kalypso could see her posture reflected in the window, hand on one cocked hip, head tilted.

  “Did you deviate from procedures, Kalypso?”

  Liet snorted and took her thumb out of her mouth. Her bleary face was absurdly pretty. “Do the Mothers use Picasso’s Blue?”

  “Because you know how easily Ganesh can get confused. Hey, what are you doing? Stay out of interface! No wonder you’re always in trouble.”

  Kalypso had stretched a hand overhead and pulled down a vid screen. It was faintly translucent: the clouds beyond the window could still be discerned through the screen image. She routed through her visor.

  I’M DOWN, STUPID. GO AWAY.

  “But it’s me,” she verbed. “Kalypso. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  YOU SHOULD HAVE WARNED ME BEFORE YOU TRIED PULLING CODE THROUGH MILES.

  “Pulling code through Miles? I did not! But never mind that— I’m just so glad you’re there!”

  BUT I’M NOT HERE.

  “Are the Earth files undamaged?” she asked.

  EARTH FILES HAVE BEEN CHILD-PROOFED, GANESH VERBED PRIMLY.

  “What about the ones that aren’t?”

  LIKE WHAT?

  “Let me see my personal files.” Suddenly it was important to her that her own piece of history, at least, was safe.

  “Specifically?”

  “Mom & Dad,” she said.

  She got a list of ingredients for rice cookies.

  “Kalypso, will you leave poor Ganesh alone? You’ll only make things worse,” Sharia said from outside the interface.

  Stubbornly, she repeated her request. Out rolled all she would ever know of her parents.

  First Mom, who was dead.

  Five feet even, born on Trinidad; classically trained violinist. Two PhDs: one in physics and the other in economics. Chairman of the Board of a multinat— never mind.

  Then Dad.

  One of the top smart-fiber designers of his generation. Climber of mountains without oxygen in his spare time. Champion bridge player.

  They never lived together, of course. Having Kalypso was a professional decision. Their two sets of genes, combined, were meant to constitute the pinnacle of human potential. They would never know their child, but they would be ensured of the passage of their genes to the new world. It was pure hubris— but irresistible, apparently. Eyes, smells, shared jokes; and skin had played no part in her conception. For, years and years she was a frozen embryo. She had unborn siblings in storage. She would probably never know them.

  “See?” She slipped out of interface and turned to face the others. “All my personal programs are still here. Let’s not blow things out of proportion.”

  “Kalypso.”

  “So I’m going to get some sleep and I want all of you out of my bed now or—”

  “Kalypso.”

  “What?”

  “You shouldn’t have interfaced during a Crash,” Ahmed said sadly, shaking his head. When she glanced back at the screen, the files were quietly imploding and disappearing into noise. Her father’s face morphed into a shoe and vanished. Kalypso gave an impotent little shriek and dropped the bass.

  “No . . . Ganesh? Ganesh?”

  I AM LARGE.

  The interface cut off.

  “I warned you,” Sharia began, and then suddenly stretched out a solicitous hand toward her cluster-sister. “Kalypso? Are you OK?”

  She wasn’t. She wasn’t at all, and she couldn’t explain but she also couldn’t hide her distress from her nestmates, who now gathered around her oozing empathy.

  “Kalypso . . .” Startled eyes, semi-gestures of shoulders and heads: what’s come over her, is she kidding around, Kalypso never gave a shit about anything so what’s this?

  She was trembling with suppressed tears.

  Sharia whispered something to Liet, who nodded.

  “How much zzz did you get dosed with?”

  “I was trying to sub Azamat,” she said dully.

  “Shit, that’s a lot of zzz . . . what do you figure he weighs?”

  “Like . . . a hundred kilos. Maybe more.”

  “That explains it.”

  “Did anyone see what I did with the blue nail polish?”

  “Not now, Liet!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Come here, Kalypso. It’s the drug.”

  She shook her head. “No. No. You don’t understand.”

  “It’s one of the side effects. You have a lot of alcohol in your system, too, and as a by-product of metabolizing the zzz you can get—”

  “Never mind, Sharia. Kalypso, what you’re feeling—it’s chemical. Don’t take it too seriously.”

  Kalypso reached for a sensor point, touched it ruefully. Ganesh.

  “X, what if it is my fault?”

  “Little cornflake, don’t—”

  “I can’t live without Ganesh. Maybe if I never had it to start, but I have and I can’t go back.”

  “We all need Ganesh. It’s very upsetting.”

  “Don’t patronize me. You don’t know what it’s like being a shotgun.”

  Sharia sighed. “We’ve been through this before. You wouldn’t have to be a shotgun if you would just get some of your other skills up to speed—”

  X silenced her with a wave of his hand. “Kalypso, you wanna talk about what happened last night?”

  “No,” she sniffed. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “It must be hard,” Sharia offered, obviously working at being sympathetic, “being forced to stand back and Dream through somebody else’s head. So icky. Especially if they end up berking. I don’t think I could do it.”

  Kalypso said, “I don’t really mind that so much. I know you think it’s just like being a psychic garbage-man, and maybe it is, but people are soft and interesting on the inside. Their garbage is interesting. That’s not the problem.”

  She fingered her interface and fell silent.

  “It’s Ganesh,” X said.

  “Yeah. You don’t know Ganesh like I do. It’s my world. It makes everything . . . more. Just more. Ah, I can’t explain!”

  Ahmed sat down next to her and kicked her foot, setting it swinging.

  “You know what, Kalypso? You’re only upset because you’re upset and you hate being upset. If you know what I mean. Look, it’s OK. Yeah, you don’t like to think of yourself as somebody who gets fazed but you do and it’s no big thing. Sharia’s right. It’s chemical and you’ll get over it.”

  With all of them surrounding her and making a nest of their attention, she almost felt better. She was certainly meant to: the whole idea of clustering the first generation had been to create a substitute for the family unit that would also be practical for dealing with the harsh conditions on T’nane. Kalypso’s cluster possessed a comprehensive array of practical skills embodied in its members; it was also more intimate than a family. Its members had been tuned to one another in the Dreamer. Their internal, subconscious symbologies had been merged to some extent: Kalypso knew this because she’d learned to shotgun by Dreaming with her own cluster to make the group as tight as possible. Ironically, though, it was she who had ended up on the outside. She knew the mental fingerprints of each of her nestmates; maybe she even knew them better tha
n they did themselves, and yet it was Ganesh she had truly bonded with, which was something they would never understand.

  Liet took out a cosmetic pencil and began drawing on Kalypso’s head. She hummed softly as she did this, and her breath grazed Kalypso’s temple. Kalypso closed her eyes.

  “Getting back to the fault in the luma,” X said. “Ahmed, you said before that there have been glitches like this in the past.”

  Ahmed and Tehar were the only two members of the cluster who had any sort of mechanical relationship with the AI, so it now fell to Ahmed to try to explain to the others what had actually happened to the station.

  “Well, in a small way, sure we’ve had problems before. Ganesh uses the magnetosomes to regulate data storage within the microtubules, but magnetic alignment can also affect the consistency of the gel and the distribution of spores. The luma sporulates and desporulates all the time, but we don’t notice because the changes are small and homeostatically balanced.”

  Just as Kalypso had begun to purr, Liet broke off drawing and handed her the pencil. “Hold that for a second. Time for my second coat.” She reached for the nail polish.

  “Jianni said the luma could melt,” Sharia said. “When the thermal comes.”

  “He said that? Well, if Ganesh doesn’t keep control of it, I guess it could. We certainly have no control over the luma except in a very gross structural sense.”

  “You think Ganesh has lost control?” Sharia pounced on the implications of Ahmed’s words.

  Ahmed said, “Only Ganesh really knows that. It was Ganesh’s initiative to spread into the luma—that had less to do with us than the Grunts like to pretend. It is only a happy accident that Sieng found a way to groom the luma to make it usable. If she ever formed a complete theory, we didn’t hear about it. It’s like the Chinese using gunpowder for fireworks without understanding the principles of combustion.”

  Sharia raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t go that far. We know how luma arises naturally and we know how to induce it to solidify. We can exploit its magnetic and mnemonic functions. Well— Ganesh can.”

  “Yes, but Ganesh is working without a theory as such,” Liet murmured. She was heavily engaged in painting her toenails; yet they all turned to look at her. “It’s improvising. That means mistakes. But I wouldn’t worry. Self-preservation is deeply instilled in the Core. Oops. Sorry, Kalypso. Got some polish on your head.”