The Very Pulse of the Machine

by Michael Swanwick

  Trudge, drag, trudge, drag.

  So, okay, yes, she had an ego problem. She was an overambitious, self-centered bitch. So what? It had gotten her this far, where a more reasonable attitude would have left her back in the slums of greater Levittown. Making do with an eight-byten room with bathroom rights and a job as a dental assistant. Kelp and talapia every night, and rabbit on Sunday. The hell with that. She was alive and Burton wasn't–by any rational standard that made her the winner.

  "Are you. Listening?"

  "Not really, no."

  She topped yet another rise. And stopped dead. Down below was a dark expanse of molten sulfur. It stretched, wide and black, across the streaked orange plains. A

  lake. Her helmet readouts ran a thermal topography from the negative 230°F at her feet to 65°F at the edge of the lava flow. Nice and balmy. The molten sulfur itself, of course, existed at higher ambient temperatures.

  It lay dead in her way.

  They'd named it Lake Styx.

  Martha spent half an hour muttering over her topo maps, trying to figure out how she'd gone so far astray. Not that it wasn't obvious. All that stumbling around.

  Little errors that she'd made, adding up. A tendency to favor one leg over the other. It had been an iffy thing from the beginning, trying to navigate by dead reckoning.

  Finally, though, it was obvious. Here she was. On the shores of Lake Styx. Not all that far off course after all. Three miles, maybe, tops.

  Despair filled her.

  They'd named the lake during their first loop through the Galilean system, what the engineers had called the "mapping run." It was one of the largest features they'd seen that wasn't already on the maps from satellite probes or Earth-based reconnaissance. Hols had thought it might be a new phenomenon–a lake that had achieved its current size within the past ten years or so. Burton had thought it would be fun to check it out. And Martha hadn't cared, so long as she wasn't left behind. So they'd added the lake to their itinerary.

  She had been so transparently eager to be in on the first landing, so afraid that she'd be left behind, that when she suggested they match fingers, odd man out, for who stayed, both Burton and Hols had laughed. "I'll play mother," Hols had said magnanimously, "for the first landing. Burton for Ganymede and then you for Europa. Fair enough?" And ruffled her hair.

  She'd been so relieved, and so grateful, and so humiliated too. It was ironic. Now it looked like Hols–who would never have gotten so far off course as to go down the wrong side of the Styx–wasn't going to get to touch rock at all. Not this expedition.

  "Stupid, stupid, stupid," Martha muttered, though she didn't know if she were condemning Hols or Burton or herself. Lake Styx was horseshoe-shaped and twelve miles long. And she was standing right at the inner toe of the horseshoe.

  There was no way she could retrace her steps back around the lake and still get to the lander before her air ran out. The lake was dense enough that she could almost swim across it, if it weren't for the viscosity of the sulfur, which would coat her heat radiators and burn out her suit in no time flat. And the heat of the liquid. And whatever internal flows and undertows it might have. As it was, the experience would be like drowning in molasses. Slow and sticky.

  She sat down and began to cry.

  After a time she began to build up her nerve to grope for the snap-coupling to her airpack. There was a safety for it, but among those familiar with the rig it was an open secret that if you held the safety down with your thumb and yanked suddenly on the coupling, the whole thing would come undone, emptying the suit in less than a second. The gesture was so distinctive that hot young astronauts-intraining would mime it when one of their number said something particularly stupid. It was called the suicide flick.

  There were worse ways of dying.

  "Will build. Bridge. Have enough. Fine control of. Physical processes. To build.

  Bridge."

  "Yeah, right, very nice, you do that," Martha said absently. If you can't be polite to your own hallucinations ... She didn't bother finishing the thought. Little crawly things were creeping about on the surface of her skin. Best to ignore them.

  "Wait. Here. Rest. Now."

  She said nothing but only sat, not resting. Building up her courage. Thinking about everything and nothing. Clutching her knees and rocking back and forth.

  Eventually, without meaning to, she fell asleep.

  "Wake. Up. Wake. Up. Wake. Up."

  "Uhh?"

  Martha struggled up into awareness. Something was happening before her, out on the lake. Physical processes were at work. Things were moving.

  As she watched, the white crust at the edge of the dark lake bulged outward, shooting out crystals, extending. Lacy as a snowflake. Pale as frost. Reaching across the molten blackness. Until there was a narrow white bridge stretching all the way to the far shore.

  "You must. Wait," Io said. "Ten minutes and. You can. Walk across. It. With ease."

  "Son of a bitch!" Martha murmured. "I'm sane."

  In wondering silence, she crossed the bridge that Io had enchanted across the dark lake. Once or twice the surface felt a little mushy underfoot, but it always held.

  It was an exalting experience. Like passing over from Death into Life.

  At the far side of the Styx, the pyroclastic plains rose gently toward a distant horizon. She stared up yet another long, crystal-flower-covered slope. Two in one day. What were the odds against that?

  She struggled upward, flowers exploding as they were touched by her boots. At the top of the rise, the flowers gave way to sulfur hardpan again. Looking back, she could see the path she had crunched through the flowers begin to erase itself.

  For a long moment she stood still, venting heat. Crystals shattered soundlessly about her in a slowly expanding circle.

  She was itching something awful now. Time to freshen up. Six quick taps brought up a message on her visor: Warning: Continued use of this drug at current levels can result in paranoia, psychosis, hallucinations, misperceptions, and hypomania, as well as impaired judgment.

  Fuck that noise. Martha dealt herself another hit.

  It took a few seconds. Then–whoops. She was feeling light and full of energy again. Best check the airpack reading. Man, that didn't look good. She had to giggle.

  Which was downright scary.

  Nothing could have sobered her up faster than that high little druggie laugh. It terrified her. Her life depended on her ability to maintain. She had to keep taking meth to keep going, but she also had to keep going under the drug. She couldn't let it start calling the shots. Focus. Time to switch over to the last airpack.

  Burton's airpack. "I've got eight hours of oxygen left. I've got twelve miles yet to go. It can be done," she said grimly. "I'm going to do it now."

  If only her skin weren't itching. If only her head weren't crawling. If only her brain weren't busily expanding in all directions.

  Trudge, drag, trudge, drag. All through the night. The trouble with repetitive labor was that it gave you time to think. Time to think when you were speeding also meant time to think about the quality of your own thought.

  You didn't dream in real-time, she'd been told. You get it all in one flash, just as you're about to wake up, and in that instant extrapolate a complex dream all in one whole. It feels as if you've been dreaming for hours. But you've only had one split second of intense nonreality.

  Maybe that's what's happening here.

  She had a job to do. She had to keep a clear head. It was important that she get back to the lander. People had to know. They weren't alone anymore. Damnit, she'd just made the biggest discovery since fire!

  Either that, or she was so crazy she was hallucinating that Io was a gigantic alien machine. So crazy she'd lost herself within the convolutions of her own brain.

  Which was another terrifying thing she wished she hadn't thought of. She'd been a loner as a child. Never made friends easily. Never had or been a best friend to anybody. Had spent ha
lf her girlhood buried in books. Solipsism terrified her–she'd lived right on the edge of it for too long. So it was vitally important that she determine whether the voice of Io had an objective, external reality. Or not.

  Well, how could she test it?

  Sulfur was triboelectric, Io had said. Implying that it was in some way an electrical phenomenon. If so, then it ought to be physically demonstrable.

  Martha directed her helmet to show her the electrical charges within the sulfur plains. Crank it up to the max.

  The land before her flickered once, then lit up in fairyland colors. Light! Pale oceans of light overlaying light, shifting between pastels, from faded rose to boreal blue, multilayered, labyrinthine, and all pulsing gently within the heart of the sulfur rock. It looked like thought made visual. It looked like something straight out of DisneyVirtual, and not one of the nature channels either–definitely DV-3.

  "Damn," she muttered. Right under her nose. She'd had no idea.

  Glowing lines veined the warping wings of subterranean electromagnetic forces.

  Almost like circuit wires. They crisscrossed the plains in all directions, combining and then converging–not upon her, but in a nexus at the sled. Burton's corpse was lit up like neon. Her head, packed in sulfur dioxide snow, strobed and stuttered with light so rapidly that it shone like the sun.

  Sulfur was triboelectric. Which meant that it built up a charge when rubbed.

  She'd been dragging Burton's sledge over the sulfur surface of Io for how many hours? You could build up a hell of a charge that way.

  So, okay. There was a physical mechanism for what she was seeing. Assuming that Io really was a machine, a triboelectric alien device the size of Earth's moon, built eons ago for who knows what purpose by who knows what godlike monstrosities, then, yes, it might be able to communicate with her. A lot could be done with electricity.

  Lesser, smaller, and dimmer "circuitry" reached for Martha as well. She looked down at her feet. When she lifted one from the surface, the contact was broken, and the lines of force collapsed. Other lines were born when she put her foot down again. Whatever slight contact might be made was being constantly broken.

  Whereas Burton's sledge was in constant contact with the sulfur surface of Io.

  That hole in Burton's skull would be a highway straight into her brain. And she'd packed it in solid SO2 as well. Conductive and supercooled. She'd made things easy for Io.

  She shifted back to augmented real-color. The DV-3 SFX faded away.

  Accepting as a tentative hypothesis that the voice was a real rather than a psychological phenomenon. That Io was able to communicate with her. That it was a machine. That it had been built ...

  Who, then, had built it?

  Click.

  "Io? Are you listening?"

  "Calm on the listening ear of night. Come Heaven's melodious strains. Edmund Hamilton Sears."

  "Yeah, wonderful, great. Listen, there's something I'd kinda like to know–who built you?"

  "You. Did."

  Slyly, Martha said, "So I'm your creator, right?"

  "Yes."

  "What do I look like when I'm at home?"

  "Whatever. You wish. To."

  "Do I breathe oxygen? Methane? Do I have antennae? Tentacles? Wings? How many legs do I have? How many eyes? How many heads?"

  "If. You wish. As many as. You wish."

  "How many of me are there?"

  "One." A pause. "Now."

  "I was here before, right? People like me. Mobile intelligent life forms. And I left.

  How long have I been gone?"

  Silence. "How long–" she began again.

  "Long time. Lonely. So very. Long time."

  Trudge, drag. Trudge, drag. Trudge, drag. How many centuries had she been walking? Felt like a lot. It was night again. Her arms felt like they were going to fall out of their sockets.

  Really, she ought to leave Burton behind. She'd never said anything to make Martha think she cared one way or the other where her body wound up. Probably would've thought a burial on Io was pretty damn nifty. But Martha wasn't doing this for her. She was doing it for herself. To prove that she wasn't entirely selfish.

  That she did too have feelings for others. That she was motivated by more than just the desire for fame and glory.

  Which, of course, was a sign of selfishness in itself. The desire to be known as selfless. It was hopeless. You could nail yourself to a fucking cross, and it would still be proof of your innate selfishness.

  "You still there, Io?"

  Click.

  "Am. Listening."

  "Tell me about this fine control of yours. How much do you have? Can you bring me to the lander faster than I'm going now? Can you bring the lander to me? Can you return me to the orbiter? Can you provide me with more oxygen?"

  "Dead egg, I lie. Whole. On a whole world I cannot touch. Plath."

  "You're not much use, then, are you?"

  There was no answer. Not that she had expected one. Or needed it, either. She checked the topos and found herself another eighth-mile closer to the lander. She could even see it now under her helmet photomultipliers, a dim glint upon the horizon. Wonderful things, photomultipliers. The sun here provided about as much light as a full moon did back on Earth. Jupiter by itself provided even less.

  Yet crank up the magnification, and she could see the airlock awaiting the grateful touch of her gloved hand.

  Trudge, drag, trudge. Martha ran and reran and rereran the math in her head. She had only three miles to go, and enough oxygen for as many hours. The lander had its own air supply. She was going to make it.

  Maybe she wasn't the total loser she'd always thought she was. Maybe there was hope for her, after all.

  Click.

  "Brace. Yourself."

  "What for?"

  The ground rose up beneath her and knocked her off her feet.

  When the shaking stopped, Martha clambered unsteadily to her feet again. The land before her was all a jumble, as if a careless deity had lifted the entire plain up a foot and then dropped it. The silvery glint of the lander on the horizon was gone. When she pushed her helmet's magnification to the max, she could see a metal leg rising crookedly from the rubbled ground.

  Martha knew the shear strength of every bolt and failure point of every welding seam in the lander. She knew exactly how fragile it was. That was one device that was never going to fly again.

  She stood motionless. Unblinking. Unseeing. Feeling nothing. Nothing at all.

  Eventually she pulled herself together enough to think. Maybe it was time to admit it: She never had believed she was going to make it. Not really. Not Martha Kivelsen. All her life she'd been a loser. Sometimes–like when she qualified for the expedition–she lost at a higher level than usual. But she never got whatever it was she really wanted.

  Why was that, she wondered? When had she ever desired anything bad? When you get right down to it, all she'd ever wanted was to kick God in the butt and get his attention. To be a big noise. To be the biggest fucking noise in the universe.

  Was that so unreasonable?

  Now she was going to wind up as a footnote in the annals of humanity's expansion into space. A sad little cautionary tale for mommy astronauts to tell their baby astronauts on cold winter nights. Maybe Burton could've gotten back to the lander. Or Hols. But not her. It just wasn't in the cards.

  Click.

  "Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system."

  "You fucking bastard! Why didn't you warn me?"

  "Did. Not. Know."

  Now her emotions returned to her in full force. She wanted to run and scream and break things. Only there wasn't anything in sight that hadn't already been broken.

  "You shithead!" she cried. "You idiot machine! What use are you? What goddamn use at all?"

  "Can give you. Eternal life. Communion of the soul. Unlimited processing power.

  Can give Burton. Same."

  "Hah?"

&nb
sp; "After the first death. There is no other. Dylan Thomas."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  Silence.

  "Damn you, you fucking machine! What are you trying to say?"

  Then the devil took Jesus up into the holy city and set him on the highest point of the temple, and said to him, "If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written he shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up."

  Burton wasn't the only one who could quote scripture. You didn't have to be Catholic, like her. Presbyterians could do it too.

  Martha wasn't sure what you'd call this feature. A volcanic phenomenon of some sort. It wasn't very big. Maybe twenty meters across, not much higher. Call it a crater, and let be. She stood shivering at its lip. There was a black pool of molten sulfur at its bottom, just as she'd been told. Supposedly its roots reached all the way down to Tartarus.

  Her head ached so badly.

  Io claimed–had said–that if she threw herself in, it would be able to absorb her, duplicate her neural patterning, and so restore her to life. A transformed sort of life, but life nonetheless. "Throw Burton in," it had said. "Throw yourself in.

  Physical configuration will be. Destroyed. Neural configuration will be.

  Preserved. Maybe."

  "Maybe?"

  "Burton had limited. Biological training. Understanding of neural functions may be. Imperfect."

  "Wonderful."

  "Or. Maybe not."

  "Gotcha."

  Heat radiated up from the bottom of the crater. Even protected and shielded as she was by her suit's HVAC systems, she felt the difference between front and back. It was like standing in front of a fire on a very cold night.

  They had talked, or maybe negotiated was a better word for it, for a long time.

  Finally Martha had said, "You savvy Morse code? You savvy orthodox spelling?"

  "Whatever Burton. Understood. Is. Understood."

  "Yes or no, damnit!"