The Bohr Maker

by Linda Nagata

  But Fox took no notice. He was shaking his head. “It’s not over yet,” he said. “You still have a few more weeks. Sit tight, Nikko. Don’t expose yourself. I need this time. I might have a way to hide you, but—” He turned away, his hands pulling at his red hair in frustration. “Love and Nature! I’m not ready to talk about this yet.” He stomped toward the door.

  But Nikko had tasted a hint of something forbidden. He sprang up from the couch. “Fox, don’t fade on me now. What are you working on?”

  Fox shook his head and waved his hand in dismissal. He took another two steps toward the door. But then he seemed to reconsider. He turned to face Nikko. “We may be able to code you into the biogenesis function,” he blurted out.

  “The biogenesis function?” Nikko couldn’t keep the scorn out of his voice. “That’s no refuge. It’s a fantasy.”

  The biogenesis function was Fox’s pet project—a theoretical complex of assembly codes that would define every element of Summer House and its internal environment in a sequenced construction plan. Wrap the code in a packet of assembly Makers, drop it on an appropriate substrate, and—in theory at least—it would be possible to replicate the entire House.

  In theory.

  “The biogenesis function is never going to exist, Fox. It’s too complex.”

  “Its complexity can hide you,” Fox said softly, in a voice that betrayed his own uncertainty.

  “I don’t want to be a string of code! I want to be alive. I would do anything to stay alive.”

  Fox nodded grimly. “I know. You’ve proved that with Kirstin.” He started for the door again.

  Nikko’s kisheer trembled in anger. But his bitter retort was silenced by a sudden wave of dizziness, a psychic breeze that blew over him, sweeping away his strength. He stared at Fox’s retreating back in confusion. He wanted to call out to Fox for help, but words eluded him. He watched the door open; watched Fox leave. The door closed, leaving him alone in the room, questions crowding his mind but the will to speak them oddly gone. He sagged back down onto the couch, his body weak, his mind reeling. The sensation frightened him. He didn’t know what to make of it. It occurred to him that he might be dying much sooner than expected.

  A figure moved near the door. He saw it on the periphery of his vision and relief washed over him. Fox had come back. “Dad?” he croaked.

  The bout of dizziness was passing, though the tremor in his hands had gotten worse. He lifted his head. It wasn’t Fox standing near the door. It was a little gentleman, whom Nikko was quite sure he’d never seen before. “Who the hell are you?” he growled. “And how did you get in here?”

  The stranger was small and lithe, with skin as milky-white as Nikko’s little brother, Sandor, and with hair as blond. He drew himself up, his chest puffed out like some cartoon caricature. “You’ve taken something that doesn’t belong to you!” he announced imperiously. “I command you to give it back. Give it back, or—”

  Nikko laughed. He couldn’t help it. This little man was about as fierce as a tiger cub imitating a tiger. “Nature save us twice,” he chuckled. “And whose joke are you?”

  The stranger’s scowl collapsed. His puffed-up belligerence vanished like yesterday’s rumors. His eyes roved restlessly from side to side as if he were mentally searching for guidance.

  “Oh, bother.” He turned half away from Nikko, his left hand working in a nervous fist. A faint flush troubled the moonlight complexion of his face. “I just can’t pull this sort of thing off,” he muttered. “I’ve never had it in me. Well. I still have to do it, don’t I? Of course. That’s why I came.” He stomped his foot heartily, than gazed up at Nikko, his jaw thrust forward in a comical display of determination. “Look,” he said at last. “You’ve got to give it back, that’s all. Just give it back. You don’t really want it, you know.”

  “What?” Nikko asked. A wave of anxiety rippled through his kisheer.

  “The Maker! The Maker, of course. The one that you’ve stolen. Oh, you’re good.” He shook his head in what seemed to be a gesture of admiration. “People have tried before. Of course, of course. Nothing new under the sun. Everything there is to do, has been done, time and time again. So many people. Impossible to be the first or the only anymore.” He frowned. “Except of course you’ve done it. That’s why I’m here. That’s right. You were the first to succeed. Oh, you’re good. But—”

  He shook his head again, this time in a seeming gesture of despair. “How I run on! Do forgive me. Back to the Maker: it’ll bring you nothing but trouble. That’s what I wanted to say. The police won’t rest until they have you—”

  At mention of the police, Nikko’s kisheer went still. So he had a trail to cover. What Maker did this gentleman mean? Where? He searched his memory. He had ghosts pursuing several research projects, but he’d received nothing illegal lately. He stared at the little man, mystified. But of course his uninvited guest could read nothing of that on his expressionless face. “Are you a cop?” Nikko asked softly.

  “No, no of course not. If I were, I wouldn’t have bothered to come here. You’d already be arrested.”

  “Then who—?” He jumped as the door opened.

  Fox had come back. Nikko turned to him with a rush of relief. But Fox would have none of it. He didn’t even glance at the little man. His pointing finger and his red-faced anger were directed solely at Nikko.

  “You’ve been drawing Sandor into your schemes again! I’ve just had a call from Castle. You’ve been tampering with his schedule. I won’t have it, Nikko! Risk yourself if that’s what you feel you must do. It’s your business. I can’t stop you. But don’t involve your brother!”

  Nikko looked between Fox and the odd little gentleman. “You don’t see him, do you, Fox?”

  Something in Nikko’s voice must have registered with Fox, because he hesitated, and glanced around as if he suddenly sensed something odd afoot. His gaze swept across the little man without slowing.

  Nikko felt his heart freeze. When it started beating again, it thundered in his chest.

  The little man looked chagrined. “Didn’t you know I was a ghost? That was the whole point of this effort! How could I hope to terrify you in person? Well. You’ve finally worked it out. I certainly am a ghost.”

  A cold, thorny lump of fear settled in the bottom of Nikko’s stomach. “I didn’t open my atrium to you,” he whispered.

  The little man grinned in relief. “Exactly!” he cried. “I opened it. I can command it. You see, that’s the point. I’ve gotten past your defensive Makers and now I can admit anything into your atrium. And I can order your atrium to admit anything to your mind. I can destroy you.” He looked down, as if a trifle embarrassed at this last statement. “Well, I don’t want to, you know. But if you don’t give up the Maker, I’ll have to do it. I will. And that’ll be that for you.”

  Nikko’s kisheer began to tremble again. It was one thing for this man to invade his apartment. Another thing entirely to invade his mind. He started to rise from the couch.

  “Nikko!” Fox demanded. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Nikko commanded his atrium to shut down. It wouldn’t obey him. He commanded it to evict any present persona. Nothing happened.

  “Useless,” the little man said. “Until I turn control back over to you.”

  Nikko turned to Fox. Fox could rid him of this ridiculous parasite. Fox knew defensive Makers better than anyone. . . .

  “I’ve been poisoned,” Nikko hissed.

  “Oh stop!” the little stranger said. “Keep this to yourself. Don’t let it get out of hand.” He deliberately stepped in front of Fox. “Look. I’ve got one of your ghosts. The very thief, in fact, who stole my Maker. I’m going to dump it on you. I have to do it that way, you see, so you’ll know that I can. But I’ll be back. I want that Maker.” He vanished.

  Nikko stared at the spot where he’d been standing. Then his chin snapped up as a tone in the mid-range hummed in his head. He’d never heard the signal befor
e and it took him a second to dredge up the implanted memory of an emergency beacon. A ghost was coming in, and it wouldn’t stop at Summer House plexus to await an invitation. It would drop directly into his atrium and he had no way to stop it. The tone stretched from one second to three. Only he, Fox, and his brother Sandor possessed his emergency code.

  “Nikko!” Fox shouted. His hands were on Nikko’s shoulders. “What’s wrong with—”

  The ghost flooded his atrium. A disembodied face flickered into existence. He recognized Sandor. The fingers of his left hand hammered against the smooth enamel of his thigh. “Sandor?” he croaked, uncertain. Sandor was only eighteen and Earth-side for the first time. Leave him out of this! Nikko thought fervently. Let it be me. For he’d developed the vice of ghosting behind his brother’s face. Sandor was human-ordinary . . . far more difficult to trace than Nikko. And Sandor had a pretty face, a face that people warmed to instinctively.

  “It’s Nikko!” the ghost barked, removing all doubt. “We’ve got trouble—”

  The unheard-of happened. The ghost slipped out of the atrium and poured itself into his mind. Not the slow soak of an ordinary return, when the atrium gradually layered the memories of the ghost onto his original self. But a sudden, horrible awakening, a discovery of a past he hadn’t lived and couldn’t be responsible for.

  A moment later the available blood sugars in his brain had been consumed. He dropped to the floor.

  Scattered impressions swept over him as his heart pumped tides of energy to his brain, enough to sustain a pulsing consciousness. The soft carpet against his forehead . . . now against his back. Soft light in his eyes. Fox, voice anxious, shouting, shaking him by the shoulders . . . the foot of the sofa pressed into the carpet. . . .

  Earth-side: the quest for the Bohr Maker.

  Ah ha! The Bohr Maker! That was what the little gentleman had meant. Then he’d done it, he’d actually done it. He’d lifted the Maker right out of police files. Oh, the little man had been right. He was good. But then—

  Disaster. Failure.

  “Nikko!” a stranger shouted at him. “Wake up! Answer me!” A sharp slap to his face, then another. “Nikko!”

  “Leave me alone!” he growled. He rolled over onto his stomach, shoved himself up on hands and knees. His head still swam. An IV ran out of his shaking arm.

  “Stay down,” the medic urged, applying gentle pressure to his shoulder. “We only want you awake, not ambulatory.” She almost succeeded in tipping him over.

  “Leave me alone!” Nikko roared, slapping her hand away. He sat back, panting. A niggling pain stung his arm. He looked down at the IV; yanked it out. It left a drop of blood behind.

  “Dammit!” the medic cursed, trying to slap a patch on the wound.

  An arm encircled his heaving shoulders. Fox leaned close to him. “Nikko, you fainted,” he said softly. “Sit still a moment, before you go down again.”

  “Leave me alone,” he whispered.

  The odd little man might return at any moment. Nikko didn’t think he could stand that. He wanted the atrium out of his head. He wanted it out now. He wanted it off. He issued the order.

  To his surprise, the atrium obeyed him. It shut itself off. He sagged against Fox in relief.

  “That’s right,” Fox crooned, hugging him. “Relax. Lie down—” Nikko shoved his arms away and struggled to his feet. He had the Bohr Maker! But Fox would never condone that. Too dangerous to cross the police. . . .

  His legs felt rubbery, his brain abuzz. He leaned against a wall and forced himself to laugh. “Told you my time was up,” he said to Fox, trying to turn the whole incident into a dark-humored joke. “An attack like that has to be a precursor to The End.”

  Fox clearly didn’t believe him. “That wasn’t part of the syndrome,” he said. “You were with a ghost.”

  “No.” He pushed himself away from the wall. Scooping the camera pack from the couch, he slung it over his shoulder and staggered drunkenly toward the door, feeling as if his blood had been drained and replaced with water.

  Fox caught his arm. “I want you in the hospital.”

  “I’m all right!” Nikko shouted. He yanked his arm out of Fox’s grip and shrugged into the camera pack. “And like you said, Dad. It’s my business.”

  The door slid open for him. He lurched across the corridor to the transit node.

  “Nikko, let me help you,” Fox pleaded.

  “Not this time, Dad.”

  He plunged into the thick jelly of the transit’s protoplasmic column. Summer House immediately evacuated a transit bubble around him: an oval cell of soft, fleshy brown walls, with an extruded seat that would cradle him against acceleration. Tentatively, he switched on the atrium, just long enough to tell Summer House his destination. “Anywhere outside, by the fastest route.”

  The bubble that contained him shot into the transport system, whisking him through the city and between the great cells of the oceans to the outer walls. He shrugged his trembling kisheer up over his face. The respiratory organ’s supple tissue fused with the papillae in his nose and mouth, and sealed across his ears. A burst of mildly euphoric chemicals accompanied the closure, easing him past the gag reflex that Fox had not quite engineered out. A moment later, a flood of sweet oxygen flowed from the accessory organ into his respiratory tract. He breathed it gratefully. The oxygen was harvested from waste carbon dioxide in his blood and breath, in a process fueled by his own metabolism. In theory, the system could operate indefinitely, allowing him to live for weeks in the void, without respite. He might even hide from the police for a while, in the vast glassine forests. The thought teased at his mind, though it stirred dread in him rather than hope. He didn’t think of himself as a creature of the void, but rather as a creature of the strand, moving freely between the worlds of air and vacuum. And besides, he could not eat with the kisheer in place. While his body’s waste products could be effectively recycled by his genital organ, the thought of living off an intravenous line seemed absurd to him. He would not live out his last weeks as a refugee. He would not let the police—or anyone else—force him to that.

  A warning chime sounded. A moment later, Summer House spilled him into the void.

  Chapter

  5

  He emerged near the top of the inhabited portion of Summer House. The zone of the vacuum-adapted, glassine forest that Kirstin admired began here, on the narrowing slopes of the cone-shaped habitat. Over the years, the forest had spread almost a quarter way up the thirty-two-kilometer tether that bound the habitat to a chondritic asteroid.

  Habitat and asteroid: they functioned as counterweights on the ends of the tether. The whole arrangement spun once every five and a half minutes, generating a pseudogravity in the habitat that at its maximum was three-quarters that of Earth. A hundred kilometers away, the cylindrical shape of the city’s magnetic launch tube winked in metallic gold.

  Nikko climbed the forest. Though the gravity at this elevation was less than two-thirds Earth normal, it was still hard going. He felt crippled by his trembling hands. It was a struggle just to get his fingers to work in concert. But he pushed on through the tangle of black glass trees, driven by a primal, irrational instinct to flee—as if he could run away from the bastard who’d poisoned him. It was senseless, he knew it. But he needed the exertion to burn out his terror, his awful sense of helplessness.

  In a few minutes he reached the top of the habitat. The grade changed abruptly from a steep slope to perpendicular as he moved onto the tether, but otherwise there was no change in the composition of the airless forest.

  He kept at his frantic pace for nearly an hour, climbing three kilometers up the tether before he finally collapsed, exhausted, at the base of one of the thousands of black glass trees. His fingers twitched frantically, like worms cast into a fire. There wasn’t enough strength left in them to make a fist.

  He sucked air in harsh gasps from the kisheer. The organ didn’t seem to be producing enough oxygen. It was star
ving him. He wanted to spit it out. He longed for atmosphere. But he knew that desire would pass. He didn’t have to fear the void. He’d been designed for it. All he had to do was relax. . . .

  Ignoring his hands, he lay still, gazing up at the tree’s coin-shaped silver leaves, waiting for his breathing to slow. Incoherent snatches of memory boiled through his mind, so that his thoughts resembled a fragmented dream . . . or nightmare. Visions of hell: beggars squatting in the paltry shade of a dying banyan tree, their cracked plastic bowls thrust in his face. Uniformed thugs armed with kem-wands. Himself, a fugitive, trapped inside the cardboard walls of a squalid little hotel room, the heat so torrid he felt as if he’d been buried in hot sand, impossible to breathe it, to move through it. Regret and fear as thick as the air. Riotous laughter from another room. The Bohr Maker.

  How could things have gone so wrong? Where had he been? He couldn’t tell, just yet. His brain was exhausted; his recollections confused. Relax, he told himself. And things will fall into place.

  So far only one thing was clear: he’d been poisoned. Someone had infected him with a Maker that had slipped right past his own defensive molecules to meddle with his atrium, revising the access codes and tearing his mind wide open to the whims of a stranger. Anger started to boil again inside him as he thought about it. Summer House had been placed in a deliberately remote orbit: sunside of Venus and at an angle to the plane of the ecliptic. It was not easy to get to. Someone must have begun moving against him months ago to have a Maker in place at Summer House. Someone had been stalking him, watching him for Nature knew how long, and he’d never even suspected.

  As his heart began to calm and his breathing to slow, he bestirred himself long enough to climb the slick trunk of the tree, moving in clumsy fits and starts until he lay prone on one of the major branches.