Furious Gulf

by Gregory Benford

  Some had learned how to beg for ready cash, too. Sitting in a back alley eating a treat, he watched a one-eyed woman who saw better than most could with two. She was getting dressed for her trade and, for a small coin, let Toby watch. Smooth-faced, she daubed on makeup, adding hideous blue hollows under the eyes. A light, comfortable sheath slid over her calf, making her spider-walk like a cripple.

  Toby watched her set up shop on a busy corner. People threw her coins and looked away. Somehow the illogic of it—surely there were treatments for such ailments?—didn’t rob the trade of a jot of its credibility. Toby couldn’t fathom why, but then glimpsed a possibility. She was providing a form of ego-boosting entertainment. Looking at her miserable self, passersby could feel a rush of gladness: troubled they might be, but not that badly. She was in show business.

  These weren’t the demigods who made the Chandeliers, no.

  There was a sprawling tangle of streets designed to separate people looking for amusement from their cash. Games, booths, things to throw at for a prize—and others where somebody got to throw at you. Dance halls open eternally, fever-bright, with syntho-music that wound around on a long loop, filming the air with prickly scents and startling pheromone-triggers. Toby lingered in one, and then in a brief moment when the effects turned off (required by law), he saw what was happening to him and his pocket change. He went back to wandering the streets, which was at least cheaper, though his nervous system kept trying to make his feet circle back.

  There were science games and events, operating right next to fortune-tellers, a tribute to humanity’s ability to believe two contradictory things at once. Hawkers of wonders. Gambling. Feats of strength (care to try?). Dispensers of drugs and even alcohol, all legal and heavily taxed to offset their probable social effects. Soft drink stands, one offering an ancient dark bubbly fluid that Toby hated and threw away, shocking some kids. They seemed insulted that he hadn’t liked the authentic folk treat, Koca-Koola, rich and true. But the paprika was enough to turn his tongue.

  He began to get the sense of a city again, after years on the move. Citadel Bishop had been a rambling, dusty pueblo on a canyon floor. It had water-starved gardens and one broad plaza—nothing compared with this. He had seen ruins of a lesser Arcology at a distance—the mechs were stripping it for materials at the time—and this place resembled that.

  The brisk order reminded him of how restful it was to cook a meal, knowing that lamp oil or salt was just around a corner, available. Of how a girl, crossing a street, never paused but swung her head both ways before stepping off the curb. Of how hypnotizing it had been, as a boy, to sit at an upstairs window and watch the people parade past on a sidewalk, oblivious that they were passing actors in his imaginary dramas. Cities—a magical compression of humanity, a vessel he could learn.

  Toby imagined that his new language-chip must be glowing white-hot, with all the use he was giving it. No set of rigid digital rules can blanket a sprawling, living language, any more than a fine silk handkerchief can cover a slattern. Most of what Toby heard was quick, vivid, direct. Fine for bargaining, but not nuances. He knew as little of those as a dog does of doggerel. Tradeswomen gave him an eye and tried to guess his birthplace from his vowels, thinking he had come from places named Ragpicker, or Avalon, or Tuscaloosa. From his size alone they knew he was from the Hunker Down Families, shaped by mech war and gravity, but they guessed Jacks or Queens, not Bishops or Knights.

  There was a band of kids his own age that showed passing, mild interest in where he was from, what he had seen—and then quickly focused back on their own amusements. Their talk was quick, amusing, slangy, hard to follow. Mostly they just lounged around scruffy back alleys, absorbed, tinkering with gadgets.

  They wore padded goggles, headphones, gloves and boots, curiously heavy things. Toby tried them on while they snickered knowingly, and found himself immersed in a sensorium of a forest. Big animals came charging out of the thickets, roaring and flashing huge teeth. A fierce cat-creature with tawny fur bowled Toby over—an odd sensation, because he also could feel himself still standing upright, while his eyes and ears told him that he was tumbling head over heels.

  After a few minutes he got the knack of this game, though, and started shooting at the animals. They were pretty easy to hit. He tired of that and so tossed aside the weapon he had found in his pseudo-hand. He wrestled the next animal, a big lizard with hot red eyes. It pseudo-scratched and bit him, painful, slashing—all real enough impressions, but somehow disconnected because Toby knew they weren’t anything more than electrical stimuli from a machine, blurred and oddly hollow.

  Then it struck him—his own in-built systems did this, but finer-grained. His eyes could ratchet through the spectrum, pick up Dopplered targets, fix ranges and calibrations with the blink of an eyelid, a touch of a tongue to the right tooth. His servos cut in without prompting. All specialized survival gear, added to him before he could do more than squall and fill his diapers.

  But here, such skills were exotic, down-wonder stuff. Other uses of the same tech were playthings.

  He threw the big scabby lizard a few times and it threw him, until he got tired of the putrid reek of the leathery green skin, a stench of the rotting meat wedged in its teeth. The kids were there in the jungle around him, shooting and laughing and running around—all without having to do anything for real, or even move their own legs or arms.

  They liked Toby’s idea of wrestling the animals, and one of them got mock-crushed by a huge leprous rat with purple whiskers. But then Toby tired of that, too, and took his helmet off. The kids stayed in the game, though, their arms and legs jerking with fake hits and kicks, fingers tightening around imaginary triggers, killing ghost-creatures that seethed before their blinded eyes. He sat and watched them for a while, slumped into doorways, clasped in momentary action, thrilling to pseudo-lives they could lead as an amusement.

  They were fun kids, but to them the world was just a bunch of signs and symbols and electronic fakery. They had elaborate, hip reasons why their world was better than the crude press of slow-witted reality—a philosophy, Toby thought, for people who spent too much time indoors. He wandered off and went for a real walk through a real park and though there were no exciting big green lizards, he liked it better.

  That was where Quath found him. The hulking mass did not need to fight the crowds; they got out of the way. And Toby knew she was coming before he even saw her. Into his sensonium pushed a brooding, anxious curtain. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

  SEVEN

  Animal Spirits

 

  “By you, anyway, big-bug,” Toby said to cover his surprise. “People give you any trouble getting here?”

 

  “That big, I guess you can not notice whatever you like. Then too, I don’t think the devil himself on red stilts would turn many heads here.”

  Quath clanked and squeaked and many-legged her way into a sitting posture, which Toby knew was a sign that she was serious. Her great head lowered to get under a willowy tree limb.

  “You couldn’t have gotten in the door,” Toby said with a lightness he didn’t feel.

 

  “What’d they want to know? I mean, after they’d read our Legacies?” Toby asked bitterly.

 

  “You told them?”

 

  “Mechs get in here much?”

 

  “They’d better be pretty fine ones.” Toby liked the lush greenery of this park, but it missed a quiet, slumbering ambience of Citadel Bisbop’s—at lea
st, in boyhood memory. Neither did this city equal those lost, charming avenues he had toddled along, led by his mother’s hand. And he knew that nothing ever could.

 

  “Aunt who?”

  Quath made a metallic rrrrrttttt that might be something like laughter, though Toby had never been able to tell. She made the same sound at times that weren’t remotely funny, at least to Toby. When the rrrrrttttt stopped, she told Toby about how ordinary matter had an opposite kind, and if they met, both kinds disappeared in a flash of light.

  “Seems dangerous stuff to tinker with,” Toby mused.

 

  Toby shook his head. “I want to understand this place, Quath—don’t trouble my head with tales of stars.”

 

  “That’s small talk?” Toby paced in the little grove, listening to the mutter of people and commerce only a block away. Even this scrap of the natural world, a few trees and bushes, was enough to make him realize how much he had missed it. “I think I know what you’re working up to, though. My dad wants me back, tail between my legs—right?”

 

  “But I’m dead on target?”

 

  “Let him. After he’s bargained away the Legacies, why be choosy?”

 

  “Fashion, huh?”

 

  “Hey, you stick on an extra eye or leg fast as I can change my shirt.”

 

  “Hey! I forget, sure, but—”

 

  Toby didn’t see why, but he felt something in Quath’s manner that made him uneasy. “Why come looking for me, mother of all cockroaches?”

 

  Toby kicked at a fallen branch. “Should I care? Let him sell his teeth for it.”

 

  “Me? I haven’t got anything.”

 

  “Sure, but—say, what’s my dad been negotiating?”

 

  Toby felt cold, sharp horror strike into him. “Shibo.”

 

  “I don’t like that.”

 

  Toby blushed. He tottered, reeled—and sat down abruptly, head swimming. The air swarmed with blue-white dots. His chest heaved to drag in thick, moist gasps. He knew what Killeen wanted was wrong in some dark, terrible way, but he could not muster arguments. “I . . . I don’t know.”

 

  “They’ll confer with her?”

 

  “Sure, it’ll have to be through me.”

  His head pounded and his hands clenched, strangely cold, but he made himself think. He had only to turn his attention inward and Shibo’s Personality rose like a massive stony wedge inside his mind.

  It is tempting to go back into all that. I will have to think about it.

  “What?” he asked her soundlessly. “But we’re so close. I’ve hardly even started to learn what you’re really like. Your memories, I love them.”

  They are digital dust.

  “They’re just as real as, as this grass, those trees.”

  You do not believe that. Remember the ones who fought the fake animals? They embraced the simulated over the real. You laughed at them.

  “But your self, it’ll last forever in chipstore.” He was grasping at straws of logic and hoped she could not sense that.

  Nothing replaces life. Still, there are flavors here that you do not taste. Hard to describe, gray and cool and restful.

  Craftily he said to her, “Let’s get through this trouble, then talk about this so-called Restorer.”

  There is some sense to that, I admit.

  “Good. Just let me straighten things out with my dad, just you and me, and—”

  I have been thinking. Such a transformation might not make for happiness in myself or in Killeen. He is changed. Harder.

  “He is that.”

  I treasure this remove. Here I am free of the coarse and momentary, of jars and needs.

  Toby caught a sliver of pale spaces, strangely delicious, of smooth surfaces flowing in a timeless place. “I see.”

  You cannot. But I thank you for trying.

  He gulped, his hands trembling, and gazed defiantly up into Quath’s hovering head. “I . . . I won’t let Killeen have her chip.”

 

  “I have rights!”

 

  He jerked angrily to his feet. “That’s not Family custom!”

 

  “Humanity must’ve had this, sometime ’way back, or else these people here wouldn’t have it. But our customs, they’re ancient—and they don’t say anything about bringing Personalities back.”

 

  So simply put, the brutality of it was unanswerable. “Look, I still won’t give her up.”

 

  “Exploration?” Toby could not get his mind off the prospect before him. And something more dried his mouth, tightened his throat—the strange currents running like searing rivulets when he thought of Shibo.

 

  “I need to think this over.” Toby got up unsteadily. Shibo herself was not causing this seethe inside him. It was something he felt, something about him and Shibo together, that he could not voice. Each time he tried, he felt a sickening churn, a whirlpool of coming nausea.

 

  “I won’t go back.”

  “Oh yeasay—you will,” his father said.

  Toby whirled. “No!”

  Killeen and Cermo emerged from the nearby trees, fully suited. His father’s face was lined and drawn, as though he had gone sleepless all these days. “I knew Quath would be better at searching than we are,” he said with a tight smile. “You stepped-down your sensorium so much we couldn’t pick you up on the grid.”

  “Dad, don’t do this.”

  “I have to.”

  “I’m carrying the chip, so Family law says I decide for the Personality.”

  “Except when Family survival demands. That’s the law, too.”

  Toby thought fast. He had never paid much attention to the endless wranglings of Family law and custom, the adults’ yack-yack and breezy bluster, and now regretted it. “We’re safe here. Nothing’s threatening our survival.”

  “Not so. But look, son—I want Shibo back. I think you can understand why.”

  “I don’t think it’s for the best,” Toby temporized.

  “Nonsense. We’ll be
together again, the three of us, a real family.”

  Toby shook his head violently. “Not the same, not the same.”

  “Sure it will. Shibo, in the flesh—just think of it.” For the first time Toby could remember Killeen’s face lit with joy.

  “That’s not why we came here, Dad, and anyway—” He stopped. “No—this was why you came, wasn’t it?”

  Wariness swallowed Killeen’s brief delight. “Not the main reason, no, but—sure, I guessed there was something like the Restorer here. The message in that Chandelier, remember? And other old sayings, myths. You should see the real thing, son! Magnificent, huge, flexible glass and metal you can see through, tech that can restore anybody, given enough data. You’ll be—”

  “You don’t need her now, Dad. Later, maybe, when we’ve found Abraham, gone—”

  “Abraham!” Killeen’s sunny elation returned. “I got his message. He sent coordinates of where he is. They’re not reliable, Andro says, but they’ll get us to the neighborhood. Abraham is alive—here! Somehow he got away from the Citadel. Said to bring you for sure and—”

  “Shibo can come after that. She’s personal business, Dad. Abraham, all the rest—that’s Family Bishop business. First deal with that.”

  “There’s more beyond to discover, I can smell it. I need Shibo. She was my, my core, son. You can’t understand that, I know, but . . .”

  In Killeen’s face unease and uncertainty warred with his set-piece Cap’n’s hard-mouthed mask. Toby realized suddenly how much a shield that calm, resolute image had been, for years now.

  “I need her. I want to have her back before we go searching for Abraham. It’s an emergency, so I’m setting aside the usual Family customs—”

  “We’re safe! No mechs here, even. You can’t invoke some—”

  “I already have.” Killeen’s mask had returned at Toby’s outburst, the window between them closing in an eye-blink. Killeen and Cermo stood together, tall and certain, Cermo chunky and giving away his apprehension with elbows cocked, knees loose. The crevices in Killeen’s face seemed deep, shadowed, hiding something. Yet the voice was mild, calming as he argued further. Toby had heard him use the same tones on a crewman who had stepped out of line and needed herding back in.