“That’s good. We have no tank here. It will be better for you if you sleep interfaced.”
“Sleep?” How quaint. She’d tried that last night with Marcsson and it had not been fun. “But that’s not a correct induction.”
“It’s the only way we can do it out here. You’ll get used to it.”
No shotgun, Kalypso thought uneasily. No Dreamtank. She was viscerally afraid. The memory of what had happened before remained vivid and disturbing. She remembered making some snide remark to Tehar about never fucking with latex, and squirmed in the grip of her own hypocrisy.
“Look, it’s not that sim—”
Neko reached out, grabbed her arm, and jerked her to her feet. She wiped the condensation off the canopy and pointed outside. The surrounding luma was blood-red veined with fluorescent green.
“If I throw you off this boat, you’ll die. Is that simple enough?”
Kalypso nodded dumbly. She activated her interface but it didn’t seem to be working. This time there was nothing on channel four but a faint, distant noise.
“It’s dead.”
She felt Neko’s hands on her, pressing her to the bottom of the cockpit. When Neko let go, she didn’t feel the floor, so she was interfacing at least partially.
“It’s dead. It’s not working,” she murmured, yawning. The random sound impressions were soothing. Her imagination began working on them. “Maybe we’re too far away for signals to reach Ganesh. . . .”
Around this time, she lost her sense of what was happening. When she got it back, she wasn’t sure whether she was Dreaming or just dreaming.
She found herself in her own cell, messing around with her bass. It was nearly dark outside, as usual. The hatches leading to the cells of her cluster-siblings were open, but there was no sound of anybody moving around nearby.
“Ganesh?”
Nothing.
“Ganesh, it’s me Kalypso. Come on. I know you’re there.”
She seemed to have misplaced her interface, so she talked to the room at large.
“We’ve been under each other’s skin forever. Come on. Send me a signal, show me a sign.”
It seemed very important that she reach Ganesh. Her throat tensed.
“Remember how you used to tease me with jokes from the Earth Archives? Remember what you used to show me when I complained that the Mothers’ idea of entertainment was too boring? Remember? C’mon, Ganesh, show me again once for old times’ sake.”
She waited.
“OK, I’ll give you a hint. They were frescoes. Yeah? Yeah?”
Nothing.
“Lions eating Christians, silly, remember?” She slapped her knee in nervous amusement. “No? What about the Kama Sutra? I know you couldn’t forget the guided tour you gave me.”
Nothing. Nobody home. Damn. Memories came flooding back. Ganesh’s peculiar gifts, like, for her fourteenth birthday, a full audio reenactment of Ketjak, the Ramayana Monkey Chant, a polyrhythmic, polyphonic sound orgy produced entirely by human voices. For her fifteenth birthday, the Mayan alphabet to decode (IT’S BEEN DONE, Ganesh said. IF A 20TH-CENTURY PHYSICIST COULD DO IT IN HIS SPARE TIME, SO CAN YOU. This was less fun. She failed miserably but asked Ahmed to carve her earrings in the shape of some of the letters. He did, and she promptly lost them during a joyride while fleeing a disgruntled oldster who claimed she’d cheated him at poker. Another story.)
“Ganesh,” she moaned, playing a high G and bending it plaintively to an A flat. “Just show me one tiny thing that says you’re still around. You used to be so sarcastic. I miss that. Remember how I used to complain about eating my veggies?”
The smell of raw seal meat reached her. She shrieked.
“Ganesh! You are there! Thank you! Thank you!”
“Don’t be so stupid,” said a low, smoky voice. “That’s not really Ganesh, it’s just your wishful thinking. You’re in a boat in the Wild, dreaming like a primitive. Ganesh is Dead. The Dead are alive. I’m a genius but you were born. You were fucked before you ever had a chance.”
She turned on her shelf and saw herself in the open hatchway between X’s cell and her own. At least, she looked like herself, but there was something canny in her eyes and the set of her mouth. Something . . . knowing.
“You’re a projection,” Kalypso guessed. “Neko said I might find you here. Are these Earth Archives?”
They were standing in the sand in the middle of a sunbroiled arena. The other Kalypso had multiplied so that there were now a total of five Kalypsos including herself. They looked like her sisters, except for the one clad in witch-doctor red, who looked exactly like Kalypso. They all appeared clever and skeptical. Kalypso’s attention was swiftly diverted by the presence of an enormous, noisy crowd in the stands: she had never seen so many people before.
“Yes, these are the Earth Archives,” said the witch doctor Kalypso with some amusement, “But you’re not smart enough to fulfill your preordained purpose. You can’t do what I can do.”
Kalypso looked at her other self warily. “What is it you can do?”
The witch doctor Kalypso scuffed the sand with her foot to reveal code. The code was alive and moving; the witch doctor Kalypso thrust her hand inside and pulled out a white dove. It fluttered on her wrist.
“What’s that?”
“This is what I can do with math. I have the intellectual power to manipulate these codes directly. I can read and manipulate this” — she gestured to the mass of figures in the sand—“whereas you can only experience it. You lack the intellect.”
“Yeah,” said Kalypso. “Tell me about it.”
The bull prowled the perimeter of the ring, head raised. The matador was coming toward them, affecting an odd, stumbling gait.
“What’s wrong with him? Is he sick?”
The matador’s face was panning from side to side. His hands clutched the cape convulsively. A slip of sympathetic fear went through Kalypso. She had lost sight of the bull.
“What’s wrong with him?” she repeated. “Why doesn’t he fight?”
“He’s blind,” said another Kalypso. “Look out. Here comes the bull.”
The matador rushed at her, sword extended.
“You’re Dead,” he told her.
She screamed and fell down; the bull passed over her and went after the matador. She could smell it and feel its heat, and the ground shook when it landed—the ground shook and cracked open and she never found out what became of the matador because she was now in a boat, drifting through a stinking canal of some place she inferred must be Venice. She stood in the stern, covered with mossy growths that inhibited her movement, being Dead and poling. The gondola was full of baby elephants. It passed under a bridge and stalled. Something from below was pulling it down. When she stuck her pole into the luma—no, water—no, luma — legions of vicious black numbers swarmed up the pole and disappeared beneath the tails of the elephants. The elephants began to sicken. Other boats full of sixteenth-century Venetians slid by, trailing bright silks and quick music. On the bridge was a blind man wearing a little red cape, shaking a can with coins in it. The can said, PICASSO.
Her boat was sinking.
“Ganesh,” she begged. “Help me help you. They think I’m a witch doctor. What’s wrong with the Earth Archives? How can we fix it?”
MY BODY IS NOT A RECTANGLE.
“No, it’s a—”
MY BODY IS NOT A SQUARE.
“Uh-huh, and—”
MY BODY IS NOT A SPIRAL A SPIROCHETE OR A CHORDATE.
“You’ve been at the poetry again, haven’t you? Listen, stick to—”
MY BODY CONSUMED. HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME
Everything collapsed into code. There was nowhere left to go.
Someone’s hands were on her interface; she curled up reflexively in self-protection and startled herself awake. Her eyes came open to darkness decorated by the islands and continents of glowing color on Neko’s body. She sensed that Neko was signing at her, probably
demanding to know whether she’d been successful; but since she couldn’t see, she refused to feel responsible. She took off the face and rolled over, seeking the desolation of sleep.
In the morning it was dark, but the system around them glowed, and the floor of Neko’s boat glowed. The sensation of floating made Kalypso feel once removed from reality. The Dream of the night before still weighed on her. Something was happening inside Ganesh: the fact that she’d been able to Dream at all was encouraging. If nothing else, Neko was pleased. “There seems to be some small progress on Earth Archives,” she observed. “I am glad for you. I was not at all sure Azamat was telling the truth when he said you were a witch doctor.”
“Please may I use the radio? I’m doing all I can, but I must speak to my colleagues.”
Neko was working with the filtration system at the stern of the boat. She appeared deep in concentration as she said, “I don’t believe I trust you with the radio.” She paused, disappearing behind the ocular of the microscope. “Whereas if you at least manage to find a way to communicate via Ganesh, you will have had a demonstrable effect on the problem I’m keeping you alive to solve.”
“But. . .”
“But nothing. Repair the Archives. I will rendezvous with my teammates in a few days, according to our usual schedule. We must travel some distance to reach the meeting point and I have stops to make on the way, so you will have plenty of time to fix the problem.” She turned back to her work.
Kalypso had no intention of going back into Ganesh if she could avoid it. She activated her interface, composed herself as if to Dream, and then switched to radio monitoring. At first she didn’t care what the voices were saying: as long as she could hear them, she felt reassured. She managed to gather that a base of operations had been established at Oxygen 2; that the witch doctors were still inside First, working; and that the Mothers had had to be removed by force. She heard nothing from the Mothers themselves until, flipping channels, she recognized Lassare’s voice.
“We have your position, Azamat. Stop what you’re doing right now. Get out of interface. We’ll jam channel four if we have to.”
Silence. Then: noise on the line: a high-pitched whining; Tehar’s voice. Kalypso’s heart pounded. If only she could transmit. Make them hear her. Tehar was saying, “Don’t even think about it, Lassare. You interfere with him now and we don’t know what will happen.” Pause. Kalypso’s fingers had gone tight on her knees. More noise. “Marcsson, I know you’re listening. Let me talk to Kalypso.”
Kalypso let out an inarticulate cry and Neko’s head shot up.
“Cut it out,” she gestured. “Leave the radio alone.”
Kalypso ignored her. “Kalypso, can you—” Neko cuffed her across the head and she lost the connection.
“You are supposed to be working for me, not listening to radio coms.”
“I can’t interface all the time,” Kalypso wailed, still distracted by the exchange she’d just heard. “It’s exhausting.”
“Then I will give you other work to do. But you will not involve yourself in the affairs of First. I need you to be here.”
She glared at Kalypso until the latter dropped her pose of defiance. “Come. I will teach you some things worth knowing. Later you will resume your repairs.”
All her life Kalypso had been suffering from the dangerous misconception that everything which needed to be done could be broken down into objectives and then attacked. She was caught in the delusion that problems had solutions. Too much Dreaming, probably — or too much success at it—had brought about this hapless condition. After several days in the Wild, she came to the slow and unwelcome realization that the shelter of Neko’s boat was not the end of her ordeal; it was not the beginning of a journey back; it was not the dawn of a new life. Rather it was the negation of everything she’d ever held as true.
“The sky’s so black ever since the last thermal,” she said to Neko once. “The clouds are black. What if the filters can’t handle it?”
“Then we can’t breathe,” Neko replied.
She was tired all the time. Nor was it the kind of fatigue that results from hard work. It was a dissatisfied weariness caused by inadequate food, slow dehydration and insufficient oxygen to operate above a minimal capacity. At first she waited to get used to it, and then by the time she’d accepted that she would never be able to get used to it, she had no reserves of strength left to do anything about it.
Jianni used to lecture the young nestlings about this kind of thing all the time. Unlike any of them, Jianni had actually lived in the Wild, used a tentkit and a surface suit without support from anyone else.
“The hardest thing,” he’d query rhetorically, gazing around at them all sitting Indian-style in the caldera while he narrated with the dark sky behind his balding head. “The hardest thing is the solitude. That’s why all of you will have each other when you go out there. You’ll avoid quarrels and claustrophobia because you’ll already know how it feels to be stuck at close quarters—hell, you’ve been living this way all your lives. And you’ll be able to lean on one another. Every single cluster in this colony is strong enough to act as a seed for an entire colony in its own right. We’ve planned it that way. Time’s gonna come when you’ll scatter, seek your fortunes.”
Actually, he seldom waxed sentimental like this. Usually the discussions were conducted through interface, and were highly technical affairs concerning resource management, how to gauge the variables of potential tentkit sites on the clayfields, the different possible sequences for establishing a foothold. How to set up agro baffles, when to begin farming depending on pH, temperature variables, analysis of resident indigenes, state of extant luma . . . she yawned, remembering. How had she ever sat through those sessions? She had staunchly supported her cluster’s ambitions to be among the first to be given a boat and tentkit, even though she privately had no wish to leave Ganesh and could not in fact imagine living so far from the AI. Now, of course, she wished she had paid more attention. Jianni had been so sensible. All the Grunts were, really. Almost she could forgive them for rolling her up and playing volleyball with her when she was a kid.
The Mothers didn’t like the idea of scattering to tentkits, of course. They kept hoping for a solution to the Oxygen Problem, a way to terraform on a grand scale. The original drawings for the colony still shone on one wall of Maxwell’s. True, they’d been used as a dartboard by the Grunts for years, but so what? The Mothers never stopped believing the gas cycles could be stabilized, the atmosphere rendered breathable — and from that point on, anything might be possible. Lowering sea level to allow stable, usable land to emerge. Management of the thermals. Control of the luma outside First. Once you started listing the possibilities, it sounded like a game of Future.
Now that she was out here in the Wild, just at a time when she was actually equipped to evaluate some of the issues everybody had been discussing ever since she could remember, Kalypso felt in no position to judge anything. However she might have rebelled against the rules set by the Earthborn, she had trusted them as people. How could she not—they were the only flesh-and-blood people she’d ever known— Dream personalities didn’t count. The fact of Neko’s existence meant she had been lied to; but it wasn’t so easy to reject all she’d ever known, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to: Neko was no walk in the park.
It was all so unfair. She couldn’t call her cluster. Neko preempted most of her attempts to monitor the radio via interface. And Ganesh—well, Ganesh was no help. Sometimes when she interfaced she found the bridge and the bricks, but unlike the witch-doctor projection of herself, she could not penetrate these objects to discover the math that made them. She cursed herself for not being clever enough to help Ganesh; yet she was also afraid of it. Sometimes the AI gave her only darkness, yet from all around the sound and smell of the bull, breathing. This terrified her.
It was easier not to think about what was happening to her. Once in a while, like a plant turning toward light, her t
houghts would lean wistfully toward the past; First; her cluster.
This hurt.
She stopped doing it.
Every day was the same. She woke up, put on her suit and checked all its fittings and levels, and went out on the hull to collect. Usually she was looking for a flagellate called MLB-6. These fed off a particular subsystem over the heart of a particular well, where the major source of chemical energy was generated by a moldlike colonial prokaryote whose fibrous colonies grew on sulfur crystals in high concentrations of sulfuric acid. MLB-6 died as soon as they were removed from their temperature zone; on the first day, by the time Kalypso had isolated even a finger-sized collection from the surrounding System, they were all dead. This was unacceptable to Neko.
“How can the subs build the luma if they’re defunct? You have to monitor the temperature of your collection fil more carefully. Pay attention to what you’re doing.”
Neko refused to give her food until she’d gotten it right. Hunger improved Kalypso’s concentration no end. She brought the live samples back to Neko, who introduced them to a meter-long section of tame luma she was growing in a storage basin in the hull, then gave Kalypso her air and food rations. Most days, Kalypso’s suit alone could not keep up with her oxygen needs.
The well that Neko harvested was usually quiescent, but sometimes the luma around it quivered with vibrations sent from deep beneath the sea floor. Luma formed stacks at whiles in certain “hot zones” around the well; Neko tried to explain to her about the particular relationship between some of the subs resident in these sections of luma which caused it to solidify, but Kalypso was as dumb as if Liet were speaking to her.
“The System knows how best to exploit each niche,” was all she could really absorb. Which didn’t provide much insight; but then again she wasn’t really focused on gathering insights.
At night they would curl up in the hollow of Neko’s boat to save resources, and she would be expected to address the Earth Archives and try to fix them. Kalypso didn’t think she came across as a very convincing witch doctor, but then she reminded herself that witch doctoring as she knew it hadn’t existed in the time Neko was living in the interstellar, since Ganesh had only started to use the luma after the Dead were infected. The AI had needed a lot less management in those days, for it still relied mostly on its Core for guidance.
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