Russell E. Barrett, The Last Alchemist
3
Carolyn
Six months after the implantation of Reynolds’ daughter in an artificial womb, I ran into Davis Brent at a pleasure dome where I had taken to spending my afternoons, enjoying the music, writing a memoir of my days with Reynolds, but refraining from infidelity. The child and my concern for Reynolds’ mental state had acted to make me conservative: there were important decisions to be made, disturbing events afoot, and I wanted no distractions.
This particular dome was quite small, its walls Maxfield Parrish holographs—alabaster columns and scrolled archways that opened onto rugged mountains drenched in the colours of a pastel sunset; the patrons sat at marble tables, their drab jumpsuits at odds with the decadence of the decor. Sitting there, writing, I felt like some sad and damaged lady of a forgotten age, brought to the sorry pass of autobiography by a disappointment at love.
Without announcing himself, Brent dropped onto the bench opposite me and stared. A smile nicked the corners of his mouth. I waited for him to speak, and finally asked what he wanted.
‘Merely to offer my congratulations,’ he said.
‘On what occasion?’ I asked.
‘The occasion of your daughter.’
The implantation had been done under a seal of privacy, and I was outraged that he had discovered my secret.
Before I could speak, he favoured me with an unctuous smile and said, ‘As administrator, little that goes on here escapes me.’ From the pocket of his jumpsuit he pulled a leather case of the sort used to carry holographs. ‘I have a daughter myself, a lovely child. I sent her back to Earth some months back.’ He opened the case, studied the contents, and continued, his words freighted with an odd tension. ‘I had the computer do a portrait of how she’ll look in a few years. Care to see it?’
I took the case and was struck numb. The girl depicted was seven or eight, and was the spitting image of myself at her age.
‘I never should have sent her back,’ said Brent. ‘It appears the womb has been misshipped, and I may not be able to find her. Even the records have been misplaced. And the tech who performed the implantation, he returned on the ship with the womb and has dropped out of sight.’
I came to my feet, but he grabbed my arm and sat me back down. ‘Check on it if you wish,’ he said. ‘But it’s the truth. If you want to help find her, you’d be best served by listening.’
‘Where is she?’ A sick chill spread through me, and my heart felt as if it were not beating but trembling.
‘Who knows? Sao Paolo, Paris. Perhaps one of the Urban Reserves.’
‘Please,’ I said, a catch in my voice. ‘Bring her back.’
‘If we work together, I’m certain we can find her.’
‘What do you want, what could you possibly want from me?’
He smiled again. ‘To begin with, I want copies of your husband’s deep files. I need to know what he’s working on.’
I had no compunction against telling him; all my concern was for the child. ‘He’s been investigating the possibility of life on the Sun.’
The answer dismayed him. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘It’s true, he’s found it!’
He gaped at me.
‘He calls it the Sun Spider. It’s huge…and made of some kind of plasma.’
Brent smacked his forehead as if to punish himself for an oversight. ‘Of course! That section in the Diaries.’ He shook his head in wonderment. ‘All that metaphysical gabble about particulate life…I can’t believe that has any basis in fact.’
‘I’ll help you,’ I said. ‘But please bring her back!’
He reached across the table and caressed my cheek. I stiffened but did not draw away. ‘The last thing I want to do is hurt you, Carolyn. Take my word, it’s all under control.’
Under control.
Now it seems to me that he was right, and that the controlling agency was no man or creature, but a coincidence of possibility and wish such as may have been responsible for the spark that first set fire to the stars.
Over the next two weeks I met several times with Brent, on each occasion delivering various of Reynolds’ files; only one remained to be secured, and I assured Brent I would soon have it. How I hated him! And yet we were complicitors. Each time we met in his lab, a place of bare metal walls and computer banks, we would discuss means of distracting Reynolds in order to perform my thefts, and during one occasion I asked why he had chosen Reynolds’ work to pirate, since he had never been an admirer.
‘Oh, but I am an admirer,’ he said. ‘Naturally I despise his personal style, the passing off of drugs and satyrism as scientific method. But I’ve never doubted his genius. Why, I was the one who approved his residency grant.’
Disbelief must have showed on my face, for he went on to say, ‘It’s true. Many of the board were inclined to reject him, thinking he was no longer capable of important work. But when I saw the Solar Equations, I knew he was still a force to reckon with. Have you looked at them?’
‘I don’t understand the mathematics.’
‘Fragmentary as they are, they’re astounding, elegant. There’s something almost mystical about their structure. You get the idea there’s no need to study them, that if you keep staring at them they’ll crawl into your brain to work some change.’ He made a church-and-steeple of his fingers. ‘I hoped he’d finish them here but…well, maybe that last file.’
We went back to planning Reynolds’ distraction. He rarely left the apartment any more, and Brent and I decided that the time to act would be during his birthday party the next week. He would doubtless be heavily drugged, and I would be able to slip into the back room and access his computer. The discussion concluded, Brent stepped to the door that led to his apartment, keyed it open and invited me for a drink. I declined, but he insisted and I preceded him inside.
The apartment was decorated in appallingly bad taste. His furniture was of a translucent material that glowed a sickly bluish-green, providing the only illumination. Matted under glass on one wall was a twentieth-century poster of a poem entitled ‘Desiderata’, whose verses were the height of mawkish romanticism. The other walls were hung with what appeared to be ancient tapestries, but which on close inspection proved to be pornographic counterfeits, depicting subjects such as women mating with stags. Considering these appointments, I found hypocritical Brent’s condemnation of Reynolds’ private life. He poured wine from a decanter and made banal small talk, touching me now and then as he had during our first meeting. I forced an occasional smile, and at last, thinking I had humoured him long enough, I told him I had to leave.
‘Oh, no,’ he said, encircling my waist with an arm. ‘We’re not through.’
I pried his arm loose: he was not very strong.
‘Very well.’ He touched a wall control, and a door to the corridor slid open. ‘Go.’
The harsh white light shining through the door transformed him into a shadowy figure and made his pronouncement seem a threat.
‘Go on.’ He drained his wine. ‘I’ve got no hold on you.’
God, he thought he was clever! And he was…more clever than I, perhaps more so than Reynolds. And though he was to learn that cleverness has its limits, particularly when confronted by the genius of fate, it was sufficient to the moment.
‘I’ll stay,’ I said.
…In the dance of the Spider, in his patterned changes in colour, the rhythmic waving of his fiery arms, was a kind of language, the language that the Equations sought to clarify, the language of my dreams. I sat for hours watching him; I recorded several sequences on pocket holographs and carried them about in hopes that this propinquity would illuminate the missing portions of the Equations. I made some progress, but I had concluded that a journey sunwards was the sort of propinquity I needed—I doubted I had the courage to achieve it. However, legislating against my lack of courage was the beauty I had begun to perceive in the Spider’s dance, the hypnotic grace
: like that of a Balinese dancer, possessing a similar allure. I came to believe that those movements were signalling all knowledge, infinite possibility. My dreams began to be figured with creatures that I would have previously considered impossible—dragons, imps, men with glowing hands or whose entire forms were glowing, all a ghostly, grainy white; now these creatures came to seem not only possible but likely inhabitants of a world that was coming more and more into focus, a world to which I was greatly attracted. Sometimes I would lie in bed all day, hoping for more dreams of that world, of the wizard who controlled it. It may be that I was using the dreams to escape confronting a difficult and frightening choice. But in truth I have lately doubted that it is even mine to make.
Reynolds Dulambre, Collected Notes
4
Reynolds
I remember little of the party, mostly dazed glimpses of breasts and thighs, sweaty bodies, lidded eyes. I remember the drift, which was performed by a group of techs. They played Alex’s music as an hommage, and I was taken back to my years with the old bastard-maker, to memories of beatings, of walking in on him and his lovers, of listening to him pontificate. And, of course, I recalled that night in Mozambique when I watched him claw at his eyes, his face. Spitting missiles of blood, unable to scream, having bitten off his tongue. Sobered, I got to my feet and staggered into the bedroom, where it was less crowded, but still too crowded for my mood. I grabbed a robe, belted it on and keyed my study door.
As I entered, Carolyn leaped up from my computer. On the screen was displayed what looked to be a page from my deep files. She tried to switch off the screen, but I caught her arm and checked the page: I had not been mistaken. ‘What are you doing?’ I shouted, yanking her away from the computer.
‘I was just curious.’ She tried to jerk free.
Then I spotted the microcube barnacled to the computer: she had been recording. ‘What’s that?’ I asked, forcing her to look at it. ‘What’s that? Who the hell are you working for?’
She began to cry, but I wasn’t moved. We had betrayed each other a thousand times, but never to this degree.
‘Damn you!’ I slapped her. ‘Who is it?’
She poured out the story of Brent’s plan, his demands on her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sobbing. ‘I’m sorry.’
I felt so much then, I couldn’t characterize it as fear or anger or any specific emotion. In my mind’s eye I saw the child, that scrap of my soul, disappearing down some earthly sewer. I threw off my robe, stepped into a jumpsuit.
‘Where are you going?’ Carolyn asked, wiping away tears.
I zipped up the jumpsuit.
‘Don’t!’ Carolyn tried to haul me back from the door. ‘You don’t understand!’
I shoved her down, locked the door behind me, and went storming out through the party and into the corridor. Rage flooded me. I needed to hurt Brent. My reason was so obscured that when I reached his apartment, I saw nothing suspicious in the fact that the door was open…though I later realized he must have had a spy at the party to warn him of anything untoward. Inside, Brent was lounging in one of those ridiculous glowing chairs, a self-satisfied look on his face, and it was that look more than anything, more than the faint scraping at my rear, that alerted me to danger. I spun around to see a security guard bringing his laser to bear on me. I dived at him, feeling a discharge of heat next to my ear, and we went down together. He tried to gouge my eyes, but I twisted away, latched both hands in his hair and smashed his head against the wall. The third time his head impacted, it made a softer sound than it had the previous two, and I could feel the skull shifting beneath the skin like pieces of broken tile in a sack. I rolled off the guard, horrified, yet no less enraged. And when I saw that Brent’s chair was empty, when I heard him shouting in the corridor, even though I knew his shouts would bring more guards, my anger grew so great that I cared nothing for myself, I only wanted him dead.
By the time I emerged from the apartment, he was sprinting around a curve in the corridor. My laser scored the metal wall behind him the instant before he went out of sight. I ran after him. Several of the doorways along the corridor slid open, heads popped out, and on seeing me, ducked back in. I rounded the curve, spotted Brent, and fired again…too high by inches. Before I could correct my aim, half a dozen guards boiled out of a side corridor and dragged him into cover. Their beams drew smouldering lines in the metal by my hip, at my feet, and I retreated, firing as I did, pounding on the doors, thinking that I would barricade myself in one of the rooms and try to debunk Brent’s lies, to reveal his deceit over the intercom. But none of the doors opened, their occupants having apparently been frightened by my weapon.
Two guards poked their heads around the curve, fired, and one of the beams came so near that it torched the fabric of my jumpsuit at the knee. I beat out the flames and ran full tilt. Shouts behind me, beams of ruby light skewering the air above my head. Ahead, I made out a red door that led to a docking arm, and having no choice, I keyed it open and raced along the narrow passageway. The first three moorings were empty, but the fourth had a blue light glowing beside the entrance hatch, signalling the presence of a ship. I slipped inside, latched it, and moved along the tunnel into the airlock; I bolted that shut, then went quickly along the mesh-walled catwalk toward the control room, toward the radio. I was on the point of entering the room, when I felt a shudder go all through the ship and knew it had cast loose, that it was headed sunward.
Panicked, I burst into the control room. The chairs fronting the instrument panel were empty, the panel itself aflicker with lights; the ship was being run by computer. I sat at the board, trying to override, but no tactic had any effect. Then Brent’s voice came over the speakers. ‘You’ve bought yourself a little time, Reynolds,’ he said. ‘That’s all. When the ship returns, we’ll have you.’
I laughed.
It had been my hope that he had initiated the ship’s flight, but his comments made clear that I was now headed toward the confrontation I had for so long sought to avoid, brought to this pass by a computer under the control of the creature for whom I had searched my entire life, a creature of fire and dreams, the stuff of souls. I knew I would not survive it. But though I had always dreaded the thought of death, now that death was hard upon me, I was possessed of a strange confidence and calm…calm enough to send this transmission, to explore the confines of this my coffin, even to read the manuals that explain its operation. I had never attempted to understand the workings of the sunships, and I was interested to read of the principles that underlie each flight. As the ship approaches the Sun, it will monitor the magnetic field direction and determine if the Archimedean spiral of the solar wind is oriented outward.
If all is as it should be, the ship will continue to descend and eventually will skip off the open-diverging magnetic field of a coronal hole. It will be travelling at such a tremendous speed, its actions will be rather like those of a charged particle caught in a magnetic field, and as the field opens out, it will be flung upward, back toward Helios…that is, it will be flung up and out if a creature who survives by stripping particles of their charge does not inhabit the coronal hole in question. But there is little chance of that.
I wonder how it will feel to have my charge stripped. I would not care to suffer the agonies of my father.
The closer I come to the Sun, the more calm I become. My mortal imperfections seem to be flaking away. I feel clean and minimal, and I have the notion that I will soon be even simpler, the essential splinter of a man. I have so little desire left that only one further thing occurs to me to say.
Carolyn, I…
…A man walking in a field of golden grass under a bright sky, walking steadfastly, though with no apparent destination, for the grasslands spread to the horizon, and his thoughts are crystal-clear, and his heart, too, is clear, for his past has become an element of his present, and his future—visible as a sweep of golden grass carpeting the distant hills, beyond which lies a city sparkling like a glint of p
ossibility—is as fluent and clear as his thought, and he knows his future will be shaped by his walking, by his thought and the power in his hands, especially by that power, and of all this he wishes now to speak to a woman whose love he denied, whose flesh had the purity of the clear bright sky and the golden grasses who was always the heart of his life even in the country of lies, and here in the heartland of the country of truth is truly loved at last…
The Resolute Lover, part of The White Dragon Cycle
5
Carolyn
After Reynolds had stolen the sunship—this, I was informed, had been the case—Brent confined me to my apartment and accused me of conspiring with Reynolds to kill him. I learned of Reynolds’ death from the security guard who brought me supper that first night; he told me that a prominence (I pictured it to be a fiery fishing lure) had flung itself out from the Sun and incinerated the ship. I wept uncontrollably. Even after the computers began to translate the coded particle bursts emanating from the Spider’s coronal hole, even when these proved to be the completed Solar Equations, embodied not only in mathematics but in forms comprehensible to a layman, still I wept. I was too overwhelmed by grief to realize what they might portend.
Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories Page 26