Adam Roberts - Stone(2002)

by Anonymous Author

  Finally I awoke properly, and did stagger outside to drink. Then I pissed, long and smellily, on the ground as was the custom on that world. The rain was falling light and fragrant, almost drifting down. I went through and lay down again, staring at the ceiling and slowly coming back to consciousness. It seemed almost too good to be true but I felt much recovered.

  Enkida reappeared. 'There you are! I was wondering if you've changed your fashion statement to sleep, you've been unconscious for so long.'

  'I'd like more food,' I said.

  She fetched me some and I ate furtively. Enkida sat on the end of my mattress and smiled at me. I could not, for my life, understand why she had taken this liking for me.

  'I was dancing,' she said. 'Then I went off with a group of people. You notice the wide nostrils so many people have here?'

  She made a general gesture with one arm. I looked around, and indeed most of the people in the dormitory had the enlarged nostrils and striking noses. This was a widespread fashion, clearly; dotTech reshaping the face to exaggerate nostrils and nose. 'Yes,' I said.

  'You know why they do it, so many of them?'

  I shook my head, finishing my food.

  Enkida smiled, and nodded her head. 'I went in to watch it. It's a sexual thing, you see.' She gestured at her own, retrousse nose. 'It creates two new orifices for sex. The dotTech restructures the sinuses as well as the nostrils, and at the necessary moment it promotes the flow of mucus as a lubricant.'

  I considered this information, looking around me again. 'Really?' I said.

  'Yes indeed,' said Enkida eagerly. 'It's fascinating. People hereabouts swear that it's unlike any other kind of sex. The possibilities are extraordinary – I've been thinking about it.'

  'You plan,' I said, looking at her, 'to have your own dotTech reshape your own nostrils?'

  'Oh I think so, don't you? It's so nicely cross-gendered. I get bored shifting genders, one to the other. It will be nice to have something that is equally male and female. You should do it as well. Or will you persevere with your . . . your sickness thing?'

  I raised myself on my elbows. 'I think so,' I said, as drily as I could. 'I think I will.'

  'You're wearing your illness a little less today,' she said, giving me a shrewd look.[9]

  'It was too much,' I agreed, inwardly thankful that my symptoms had lessened. 'I could hardly walk up the steps.'

  'Yes, it looked very uncomfortable,' she agreed. 'You are going up to the top?'

  I had already decided this in my mind. I would get up to the top of the cliff and hide out in the jungle up there. 'I intend,' I lied to her, 'to examine some of these retreats, these ascetic retreats.'

  She simpered, and leant closer. 'I like you better wearing your illness less,' she said. 'It suits you more. You said you would soon come on heat?'

  I couldn't think of a way of denying this without contradicting myself from earlier. So I conceded the point.

  'If you postpone your visit to the ascetic retreats at the top,' she said, leaning closer, 'you'll give my dotTech time to change me. I'll grow the wider nostrils and you and I could explore what all these southerners get up to. Imagine!'

  But I had no desire for this. 'Really,' I said, getting up. 'How interesting that is.' I started out of the shelter and made my way, still unsteady, along the street until I found the upward stairs again.

  'Are you going now?' came Enkida's voice, disappointed behind me. 'But I wanted to go to a certain party to which I have been invited?'

  'Perhaps I'll see you again,' I said, putting my foot on the step.

  4th

  Dear Stone,

  I climbed to the top of that cliff, overlooking the little port, and rested. At the top there were, indeed, plenty of trees that grew money-leaves, and I was sure to collect a fair number for myself.

  Night came, and the air was filled with clear invisible raindrops, prickles against the skin. I rested again, falling asleep, but (judging from the fact that it was still dark when I awoke) for only a few hours. So I sat and looked down upon the sea. Only one of the two moons was in the sky. The little moonlight that made its way through the cloud cover glimmered on the black water in shreds of half-light scattered evenly across the vista. At my toes a puddle trembled with the raindrops. I could feel the rain, against my aching feet, more than I could see it.

  I thought to myself about the culture of this world, and of its absurd celebration of the primitive. I suppose I felt I myself proved how absurd it was; this supposed 'primitiveness' depended completely upon the advanced nanotechnology on which the t'T was based. Live on Rain without that dotTech, as I was forced to do, and the place became a kind of hell. Nonetheless, I mused, it was better than my prison.

  As the sky paled, the clouds growing with light, I got up and walked around. My legs itched and hurt in equal measure. I was hungry, and decided to wait on the clifftop until I could 'buy' breakfast, and then strike out into the jungle. Soon enough it was light, and a man set up a griddle selling hot bark-nuts and sea-truffles.

  As I was eating these, Enkida came upon me again. 'Wellhello!' she said. 'I knew you'd wait for me.'

  'Wellhello,' I said, without enthusiasm. Her nose had not, as yet, been visibly altered by the dotTech. It was the same narrow protrusion.

  She bought some breakfast and stood beside me eating it. I finished my own food feeling considerably refreshed, and stretched myself awkwardly in the warm morning rain.

  'You're going to seek out an ascetic retreat now?' she said.

  'I am.'

  'I am too. I decided it. I'll come with you.'

  Now, dear stone, I could have tried to dissuade her, or I could have point-blank refused to have her go with me. But in the event I merely sighed. Perhaps some part of me was too tired to fight. Perhaps I worried that I might alert her to my fugitive status. It is even possible that, on some level, I was flattered by her devotion to me. I realised, of course, that as far as she was concerned this was nothing more than following the latest fad that presented itself before her, but that didn't matter overmuch.

  Actually, as we walked away from breakfast towards the trees arm-in-arm it even occurred to me that she might be 'police'. That would explain her interest in me, but if it was so then I could not understand why she did not immediately 'arrest' me, sedate me, have me taken back to the jailstar. Besides, I told myself, she was hardly intelligent enough for such work. It was too obvious that her mental capacity was not great.

  We walked for several hours, most of the time with her talking and me silent. My legs pained me the most, but my throat seemed less sore than it had been, and I thought I could feel glimmerings of strength in my arm. 'I must rest here,' I told her.

  I sat down with my back against the gristly bark of a tree, and Enkida sat herself crosslegged at my feet. I put my head back and drifted, not into sleep exactly, but away from full consciousness. My mind floated. The rain fell lightly, pattering through the fragmentary roof of leaves. Drops seemed to clot together, falling ripe and full to splatch against my body, against my legs, upon the top of my head. There was something almost peaceful about it. The sensation and the sound. It occurred to me that the illnesses I had been suffering had distracted me from the silence in my head. Then I found, thinking about it, that I missed the sound of the AI, its weird triple-voice. From there my thoughts somehow found their way to the prospect of Enkida. I imagined what it would be like having sex with her; it having been such a long time since I had had sexual relations with anybody but myself.

  I shook my head a little to wake myself up, and looked at Enkida's face.

  'Is it only my imagination,' I asked, smiling a little, 'or have your nostrils begun to flare out somewhat?'

  She put her fingers to her face self-consciously and then laughed. 'I hope so,' she said. 'I keep thinking: here is a way of having sex I have never before experienced. That does excite me. Doesn't it excite you?'

  'Perhaps I am less sexual than some people,' I said,
not really thinking about what I was saying.

  She shuffled closer to me, put her fingers on my foot. 'I think that is why I am drawn to you,' she said. 'Your oppositeness! Most people attempt to make themselves more attractive. You, by wearing your illness the way you do, attempt the opposite. It's as if you want to repel people. Your scars, your complexion with its spots.' She looked directly into my eyes. 'It is really exciting. I've never known anything like it. Your . . . scabs. The . . . sores, on your body.' She started sliding her hand up my leg, putting her fingers underneath the fabric of my trousers.

  I'll admit I was very engaged by her desire; perhaps I even identified, in some small way (although not really a sexual one) with precisely the back-to-front logic she was talking about. The transgressive has always been exciting; and what is more transgressive in a culture of perfect dotTech-guaranteed health than deliberate sickness and deformity?

  She gasped a little as her fingers went over the scabs and infestation-pits on my lower legs. 'Your dotTech mimics this so well,' she said, parting her lips. 'It is extraordinary.'

  'I'm glad you like it.' Despite myself I was becoming aroused. I made no resistance when she pushed the fabric of my trousers up my legs to the knee and examined my wounds in the leaf-green tinted light of the forest. 'Oh!' she said. 'Oh!'

  Looking down made my stomach twitch nauseously a little; the sores were so numerous and prominent. But I could see that there was also something exciting about it, something deeper, something my own visceral response was acknowledging.

  'Look at this,' she said, leaning close to a broad scab in my shin. 'Look at this.' She touched a pus-slick scab on the side of my calf. I winced. I couldn't help it.

  She noticed at once. 'Does it hurt? ' she asked, incredulous.

  'Only a little. I make it hurt, to experience the full effect,' I lied. 'I have my dotTech give me little twinges from time to time.'

  'Amazing,' she said, smiling. 'Such attention to detail! And look at this – it's even moving.'' She leant forward.

  A red-sore bump on the skin of my calf swivelled a little; a bead of blood appeared, and the skin tore. Then a shiny maggot wriggled and poked its snub head through the slime of the new wound. It twisted for a moment, and then started squeezing itself out.

  'Oh!' said Enkida, in a small voice, startled.

  It was almost free of my leg when she quickly caught it up between her finger and thumb. She examined it closely, holding it up before her eyes. I poked my finger at the wound it had left in my leg, wincing again.

  'My life!' said Enkida, creasing up her face in disgust. She looked up at me, looked back at the maggot. A strange stillness seemed to have settled on things.

  A rustling shower passed overhead, scattering water like dust and moving on. The leaves shuddered and were still.

  'This is not dotTech,' said Enkida, the truth of the situation dawning on her. She looked up at me again. 'This is a . . . maggot.''

  'A maggot,' I agreed. I was thinking quickly.

  'But this is not simply a fashion statement,' she said. 'This is an actual illness. I don't understand.'

  I nodded, smiling at her.

  'I don't understand,' she repeated. 'The dotTech could create the sores and the scabs, but it could not create this. This is not of your body at all. It's a parasite.'

  I reached, slowly, behind myself. I still had the knife I had bought on the raft coming down the river. Glancing about I reassured myself that there were no other people around.

  Realising that she was dealing with authentic sickness rather than merely simulated fashion-dressing, Enkida twitched and dropped the maggot. It twisted into the mud, buried itself and was gone. 'Ugh!' she said. 'That is revolting!'

  I had the knife now. I could feel where it was tucked into my trouser-tops and was securing my grip upon its handle.

  'What I don't understand,' she said, 'is why your dotTech doesn't simply cure you?' She was looking at me, all the arousal in her face replaced with revulsion. 'Why does your dotTech allow you to be ill? I don't think it can allow you to be ill that way. I don't think that's possible.'

  Even at this late stage, stone, I'll tell you (and I have no reason to lie) that I hesitated. I did not want to kill her. But I was losing options. What could I do? I tried the truth.

  'Enkida,' I said, my voice wheedling. 'I do not have any dotTech in my body.'

  She blinked, blinked again. This was hard for her to believe. 'No nanotechnology inside you?' she repeated. 'None at all?'

  'None,' I said. 'That is why I am ill. I'm sorry I didn't tell you before, but I was ashamed.'

  'Don't be stupid.'

  'I'm sorry. That's the way it is.'

  She sat back on her rear, looking strangely at me. 'I don't get it,' she said. 'How can you not have the dotTech? That's absurd.'

  I smiled, my hand still behind my back where the knife was tucked into my waistband. 'I'm from the Wheah,' I said.

  'From the Wheah?' she repeated.

  'We're not all barbarians,' I said, as blithely as I could. 'I wanted to see what civilisation was like. So I have come to the t'T. Perhaps you understand why I had to hide my true identity.'

  'I've met several Wheah,' Enkida said, eyeing me with increasing suspicion. 'They come over the Tongue at its narrowest point, if they come at all, and come first to Nu Hirsch. I met several of them there.' She clucked her tongue. 'You don't look like a Wheah.'

  I was about to say Of course, my dotTech has changed my appearance so that I fit in better when I remembered that I didn't have any dotTech; and that as Wheah I wouldn't have any anyway. My smile was frozen now. My options were disappearing.

  'I heard a rumour,' Enkida went on, 'that there was a prisoner in the jailstar they have hereabouts. The rumour was that she had escaped, that she might be on Rain.'

  'Ridiculous,' I said.

  'I thought so. Why would the t'T need a prison? But several people were talking about it in Plotown. They said that she had been deprived of her dotTech, you know.'

  'Why?' I insisted, stalling. 'Why would anybody be deprived of his dotTech?'

  'I don't know,' she said, open-faced. 'I suppose, for his crimes.' She, like most of the people of the t'T, had no conception of what a crime might be, beyond a dry and purely semantic understanding of the word – which is to say, an understanding that there was such a word in the Glice language.

  'Crime,' I said, as light-heartedly as I could.

  But she was looking at me so strangely now that I felt I had no choice. I leant forward, bringing my face closer to hers. She did not flinch away. Why should she flinch away? In her universe there was no reason to be wary of any other human being. She felt blithe; if puzzled; and I felt intense. I had felt this feeling before; a strange feeling of focus right inside my head, so strong as to be almost a smell – it sounds odd, I know, to put it that way. There was the piquancy of her innocence, her not knowing what was going to happen to her. It was almost cruel.

  I brought the knife round and punched it out in front of me. It met the resistance of her chest, and I heaved to force it further onwards. There was a gasp.

  I think the knife went into her heart. That would have been where I aimed it. I leaned away a little as I forced the blade in as far as it would go, and my change in posture twisted it inside her. When I tried to pull it out, it had stuck against her ribs. I had to wriggle it out to get it free.

  Since that moment I have sometimes tried to imagine the whole scene spun about, from her point of view. She did gasp, it is true; but maybe that was an involuntary noise. My blow probably did force air out of her lungs. Almost certainly, she felt a severe pain when the blade went in; but less than a second would have passed before the dotTech realised what was happening and reacted. It would have blocked down the pain pathways, and rushed in bulk to the wound site. Some blood came out, but quickly stopped, as the millions of tiny machines sutured and staunched the relevant severed blood vessels. The heart muscle was doubtless shredded by
the blow, and millions of other machines would rush there and begin reknitting the fibres, one by one. But this process, the dotTech would compute, would take some hours, and without a heart blood would not circulate; so millions more of the miniature devices would begin travelling to the lungs under their own power, taking up oxygen, and ferrying it to the brain.

  'You slipped,' she said, huskily. Her eyes still had no recognition in them that I meant to do her harm.

  I had much more work to do. The wound I had given her would be repaired by the dotTech; it was not enough, of itself, to end her life. I stood up and pushed her with my foot. Her frozen body flopped to the side. Crouching over it, I began to saw at the back of her neck.

  The blade had only shallow serrations on its blade, and this was hard work. To try and loosen the meat a little I grasped the knife overhand and stabbed it down half a dozen times, cutting into the back of her neck. I believe I severed the spinal column. A small amount of blood spattered out, but the dotTech quickly reacted to this new situation. It flattened the blood vessels and drew the precious blood away from the area. This meant that I could cut through without much mess.

  I hacked and sawed through most of the neck, but the plasticky resilience of the gullet was tough to cut through. I started to lose my self-possession, shrieking and sobbing to myself. The dumb flesh seemed to be resisting me. It was as if the whole universe were taunting me. With several huge blows, one or two of which seemed to go astray, I finally cut the head free from the body.

  It lay on the mud on its cheek, its eyes still open, still looking puzzled. With a surge of revulsion for it, which was probably really revulsion for myself, I kicked it with my foot. It rolled through the mud and came to a stop two or three metres from the body.

  Then I sat down. I was crying. There was a horrible concatenation of emotions swirling and storming around inside me; added to which I felt ill and tired. I had not killed somebody in such a long time, I had forgotten how visceral and savage the feeling is. More than that, this was the first time I had killed anybody without the buffer of dotTech in my bloodstream to protect against the wash of hormonal intensity that accompanies the act. How did our ancestors ever do such brutal things without howling, without crying and breaking down?