The Bohr Maker

by Linda Nagata

  He reached for her then, and enfolded her in his arms. His scent swept around her in an intoxicating cloud. She wanted to make love. She wanted to feel the false promises that came with orgasm, the lying certainty that everything would be all right, all right. But she knew that nothing would ever be all right so long as the spirit of Leander commanded her.

  She clung to Sandor. She pulled him against her with all her strength, as if by sheer physical pressure she could force him to become part of her, so that his soul might dilute the influence of Bohr. “Help me, Sandor, please. Bring me back. Bring me back to what I was. You knew me best. You can do that.”

  He shook his head slightly. His lips brushed her cheek. His breath washed against her skin, warm and full of life. More life than most living men could command. He was only a ghost. She could taste his regret, like a bitter tea. “I don’t know what’s happened to you,” he whispered. “But I do know there’s no going back. I’ve learned that at least. You taught me. You’ve pulled me past all the horrors, Phousita. God, you have to pull us past this too.”

  “But I can’t,” she moaned. “I can’t get rid of him.” Leander couldn’t be exorcised. He was too thoroughly entangled in her memories. She could never remove him.

  “It’s true,” Sandor said. “You can’t get rid of anything. It all stays with you, becomes part of you. I remember—” But he caught himself. He wouldn’t speak of it. Still, she knew. She’d lived his memories too. “You can get past it,” he insisted. “Set yourself apart from your memories. Make yourself new. It’s the only way to move on.”

  Make yourself new? She clung to him, savoring this idea.

  Could it be possible to simply—

  —leave Leander behind?

  But if she did that, wouldn’t she risk losing other things along the way? Sandor’s arms tightened around her. She could smell his fear. He sensed the danger too.

  She pressed her head against his chest. “I have to send you away,” she whispered. “We’ve come to Summer House. They’re waiting for you. They want to make you real again.”

  He sucked in a harsh breath. His grip tightened further. “Come with me.”

  “I’ll follow. I promise.”

  He didn’t believe her. “Phousita!” he pleaded, his doubt palpable. “You come and go, and go and go. I can’t hold on to you.”

  “No,” she agreed. “It’s useless to try.”

  They were insubstantial ghosts, ever-changing vapors adrift in time, impossible to hold onto anything with the damnably infirm grip of a human hand. “But I will follow,” she swore. “I will.” She kissed him deeply, then let him fade away.

  She left the rock shelf to stroll among the trees. The humus felt coarse beneath her feet, warm, and full of living things. She knelt down, and scooped a handful of it, breathed upon it to blow some of the finer particles away, then watched the tiny, crawling beings that inhabited it as they went about their instinctive business. She must go beyond instinct, beyond any pattern set down in her cells. She must write her own future. Was it possible?

  She gazed at the tiny crawly things, with their many legs, their simple lives, and tentatively, she began to weave her spell. The effort was spontaneous, not intellectual. She worked with a visceral sense, feeling, never planning. How could she plan? She’d descended into the handful of humus and become a worm, blind and dumb and living in darkness, chewing through the humus of the forest floor, eating experience, her own, and that of others. Digesting memories. She spun the silk of her spell, wove it around herself, wrapped herself up in it until she could no longer move. She became a pupa, outwardly quiescent, sheltered in darkness. Changing. From the pupa hatched a small brown moth. It crawled up through the humus to the surface of the forest floor and stretched its wings. Suddenly, she shuddered. Everything was so much brighter here, more intense. She caught the fading scent of Sandor’s love upon the air. She drew it into her mind, and as she held it there it seemed to swell and grow, filling her until she thought she would burst; a terrible, sublime ache that spilled across the plain of her experience like cold moonlight, touching everything she knew.

  And then it was gone. Her eyes flew open; she gasped for breath. Her soul was a small brown moth, and everything was brighter, more intense. And she realized: it must be so. If she would fly above the plain of her experience, then every new sensation must fall across her with the intensity of a first encounter. But like rain on the scales of a moth’s wing, the experience would flow away, a flash flood of emotion awash on the plain below.

  Far above the flat Earth, her wings dried rapidly in the sun. She grew lighter, flew higher. She had no master. Certainly not Leander, though he was part of her. And not Arif, or the old woman, or the pimp who’d owned her long ago. Or even Sandor. They were all there below her. She could see them, taste the scents they’d given to her life, but they couldn’t hold her. She was a small brown moth fluttering so far above their heads they couldn’t see her. She was free.

  Chapter

  26

  The biogenesis function was an awesome assemblage of information. As Kirstin watched the investigative staff aboard Galapagos wade through its complexities, she began to feel as if they were attempting to decode the entire history of life on Earth. Hours passed. No one was allowed to go off duty. Sleep suppressants were passed around. Meals were served on the bridge. The work continued.

  Odd reports began to come in from the scattered officers sent to patrol the House. Most of the animal life had disappeared from the rainforest. The trees were beginning to wither, and the light to fade. Most of the adult human population had also vanished, leaving the children to run about the corridors of the House, unattended. And the kids wouldn’t come near the cops, wouldn’t talk to them. They were like wild animals, loose in a deteriorating habitat, refusing the help of human hands. A few officers had tried to catch some of the errant children. But the kids had slipped out of sight and disappeared. Just disappeared. Not knowing where they went—that was hard on the officers. They could rationalize it; intellectually convince themselves that nothing bad had happened to the little ones. But there were always nagging doubts. And after a while, the cops left the kids alone. No one wanted to be responsible for the loss of a child.

  The House itself continued to cooperate with the police except when their inquiries trespassed on secure information avenues—but those roads became more and more common as time wore on.

  Kirstin could not foresee a neat end to the situation.

  She watched the newsfeed out of Castle. Like most major corporations, Summer House operated its own public information channel. The kids had taken that over too, suspending the usual programming, and replacing it with roving footage gathered from around the eerily empty House. There was no narrative. Just endless pictures of the silent kids, the fading city, leaving the viewer to doubt and wonder and doubt. Always, the invisible conductor behind this orchestrated decline played on doubt.

  The general newsfeeds loved it. They picked up the vids for system-wide audiences, and added narratives of their own—shameless speculation about the role of the police in initiating “The Incident.”

  The Incident: that was what the debacle at Summer House was being called, a vague term for a vague event that no one outside the House could really explain.

  And the system-wide audience grew steadily larger. Billions hung on every lurid speculation, and increasingly, convoluted logic worked up the police as the culprits, the instigators, the party responsible for this slowly unfolding disaster. Kirstin watched the programming and felt her coin shrink. She knew that even on Castle, the very heart of the Commonwealth, the mood was turning against the police. People feared the police reaction more than the odd events on Summer House. Even Congress had publicly called for a cautious response, as if the party to be mistrusted was the police and not the deviant House. It was a masterful feat of propaganda, engineered by an invisible hand. And it worried Kirstin. If the time came, would she be allowed to carry ou
t her duty to safeguard the Commonwealth?

  Thirty hours into the investigation, with these and other thoughts on her mind, she was on the bridge of the Galapagos, huddled in a strategy session with that ship’s commander. A staff of twenty investigators surrounded them, all working on a three-tiered horseshoe ring of consoles facing the command podium. Above the general speculative mutter of the investigators, one voice suddenly rose in masculine triumph: “We found your nemesis, Chief!”

  Silence immediately enveloped the room. Kirstin looked up. Her gaze fixed on the speaker. “Which nemesis?” she growled.

  “Nikko Jiang-Tibayan,” he announced. “The one who instigated this whole affair.”

  Nikko? Kirstin straightened, hardly daring to breathe as she approached the console. “You found him?” She glanced at the display, but all she saw was a screen full of genetic code.

  “Yep, that’s him,” the officer said. “That’s the DNA sequence coding for the enamel in his carapace—or at least a major segment of the gene. As soon as I decode the end markers, we’ll be able to tease out the sequence defining his entire composition. We’ve got him.”

  She turned away, a cold feeling in her chest. She didn’t bother to point out to the officer that Nikko was already dead, that he’d been killed a day ago by the Galapagos’s missiles, that the genetic description just found was that of a deceased being, and that what she really wanted was the author of that description. She didn’t bother. Congress had convened its daily session less than an hour ago, and if this fool couldn’t deliver her Fox, she could at least use his fool’s gold to blind the eyes of Congress. “I want a Congressional report in twenty minutes,” she said. “Forward it to my mule on Castle.”

  As she returned to the command podium, she felt the gaze of the Galapagos’s commander. “What are you up to, Kirstin?”

  “We’ve just proved Summer House has used the biogenesis function to disguise illegal data. I’m going to petition Congress for permission to destroy the function. That’ll either force the Board of Directors out of hiding or inspire them to move against us.”

  Either way, it would bring the issue to a head.

  The Congressional response came twenty minutes later in the form of an order to proceed. Kirstin read through it grimly, then opened a line to the acting president of Summer House. The gum-chewing kid appeared on her console. His desk had already received a copy of the order. “We’re coming,” Kirstin told him.

  Judging from the cold glare on his face, he was finally taking the police presence seriously. He cracked his gum, his gaze reflecting the considerable passion an adolescent could muster. “You can’t touch us,” he said.

  Kirstin bit down hard on her retort, reminding herself that this kid was not Summer House. He was just a dumb terminal plunked down in front of a camera to frustrate her. Arguing with him would be the equivalent of arguing with a piece of furniture. “We’re coming,” she told him again, fulfilling her legal duty to notify.

  He only shrugged. “Come ahead. We won’t stop you. ’Cause you can’t touch us. You can’t touch the biogenesis function. It’ll be a real laugh, watching you try.”

  The gum popped and cracked. He glared a lost-rebel glare. And then he cut the connection.

  A sudden commotion broke out on the bridge. Kirstin whirled around, to see several of the investigators on their feet. Others were hammering at their consoles. “We’ve lost it!” one of them shouted. His voice rose above the general cacophony.

  “Silence!” Kirstin barked. The black-uniformed mob froze obediently, but fury showed in the eyes of more than one. She pointed a finger at the senior officer. “Report.”

  “We’ve lost the biogenesis function,” he said. “It’s disappeared from the House plexus. Disappeared, just like everything else in this house of horrors.”

  “Love and Nature,” Kirstin swore softly. “Why are they going this far? Don’t they believe we’ll respond?”

  The officer grunted his disdain. “What do they need to worry about?” he asked curtly. “They’ve eaten every one of our assault Makers like so much caviar. They’ve got the molecular arsenal to beat.”

  She stared past him, gathering her thoughts. The situation was out of control, and her options were narrowing.

  Chapter

  27

  Sandor approached consciousness gradually, first aware of himself, then more slowly, his surroundings. He found his gaze fixed on the curved wall of a transit bubble only a few centimeters away. He stared at it in confusion. How had he come to be in a transit bubble?

  Lifting his head, he looked around. It was a large transit bubble, at least eight feet long. He lay on the floor. Fox sat cross-legged beside him. Tears stood in the old man’s eyes.

  Sandor stared at him a moment. He couldn’t say he was surprised to see Fox. Not intellectually, anyway. Phousita had told him they wanted him back. Still, he felt viscerally astounded. Emotionally confused. Not well grounded in reality anymore, he suspected.

  “Fox!” he blurted out, sitting up. “I never thought I’d—” But words failed him, so he simply spread his arms and they embraced. “I don’t know what’s real anymore, Fox. I’m so glad to be home.”

  He felt the old man stiffen a little. But then Fox tenderly stroked his head. That’s when Sandor noticed they’d forgotten the hair. His pate was as barren as the moon. The rest of his body, too, was smooth and hairless. His finger and toe nails were stumps. “They’ll grow out in time,” Fox assured him. “See?” He rubbed Sandor’s head again. “I can feel a hint of stubble already.”

  “Where’s Phousita?”

  Fox’s momentary good humor vanished. “She’s nearby.”

  “Is she all right?”

  Fox’s arms dropped from around Sandor. He backed off a little. “Not really. She’s withdrawn. She’s—” He frowned unhappily. “Truth is, she’s comatose. She’s been that way since she delivered your code. I don’t know why.”

  “I do. Where is she, Dad?”

  “Nearby.”

  “You said that. What’s going on? Why are we in a transit bubble?”

  Fox sighed. “Well, the police are here, and we’re in hiding. Actually, the House is in revolt.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. Well, the cops guessed Nikko’s code was hidden in the biogenesis function. They’ve found it at last. Of course we knew they would, if they really started looking.”

  “Have they erased him?”

  “They want to erase the whole project.”

  “Oh.”

  “We won’t allow it, of course.”

  “No?”

  “The decision’s been made. The people seem to agree.”

  “I don’t understand, Fox.”

  Fox glanced away for a moment. He seemed mildly troubled, mildly pleased, like a father at the start of his wife’s labor. “We knew it had to happen sooner or later. This is a bit sooner than expected, but we’re ready just the same.

  “The House is coming apart, Sandor. This is what the biogenesis function is all about. The House is already in the process of absorbing all interior structures. When that’s done, it’ll divide into a thousand propagules, little vehicles of life, each one capable of regenerating a new House once it latches onto an appropriate substrate.”

  Sandor blinked, astounded. Fox had never talked about this vision before. “And the people?” he asked, too stunned to disbelieve anything Fox said.

  Fox smiled and nodded. “It didn’t sit well with a lot of the citizens to be reduced to code. You’ve been through that. Guess it’s a helpless feeling.”

  Sandor shrugged. He hadn’t done so well when he was corporeal either.

  “Well, that’s the general feeling anyway. So most of us will continue to exist in the tissue of the largest propagules.” He grinned. “Like legendary homunculi embedded in the ovaries of a fecund mother.” Sandor stared at him blankly. “Well,” he said with a shrug, “you were never much for biology. But the point is, there’ll b
e too many of us to police. That’s the beauty of it. The status quo will have to change.” Fox’s eyes shone as he spoke of it. But he sobered quickly. “The cops are hot on us, though. If that Kirstin Adair suspects what we’re doing, she could finish us with one missile.”

  “I’ve met her,” Sandor said. They were silent a moment. Finally, he thought to ask: “Did you get the Bohr Maker from Phousita?”

  Fox shrugged. “We don’t need it. The House can do more than Bohr ever did. Much more.”

  Sandor looked at his father with a measure of suspicion. The cops had pursued Bohr’s Maker so relentlessly that he’d been forced to assume it was of stellar importance. How could Fox dismiss it so easily?

  “Oh, I don’t dismiss it,” Fox explained when pressed. “The Bohr Maker, from what I’ve heard, is an amazing adaptation. But you see, the House represents a completely different solution to a similar problem: how to harness the powers of molecular technology. The House is an external solution. It can be used by great numbers of individuals as an external creative and computative organ, and because of its vast size, its complexity, and the sheer volume of resources it can command at a mature stage, it will always represent a superior solution to an internally contained modification such as the Bohr Maker. The limits imposed by the minute volume of a human body will always dictate a lower limit on creative and computational abilities.”

  “With the trade-off being individual freedom,” Sandor said.

  “Yes. That’s right. I’m a conservative old man. I don’t mind limits, so long as I impose them on myself. And I’m pretty typical of the population here.”

  “Phousita wants to go back to Earth.”

  “Does she?” Fox seemed mildly surprised. But then, he’d never been able to understand why anyone would want to go there.

  “She’d be taking the Bohr Maker with her.”