He looked out from his great vantage, across all the network: the world his boards, millions of actors awaiting. Now for a script.
* * *
Poley is, again, the man in the garden, but now the garden is in Deptford, a widow’s boarding-house, and he is sent thither by Walsingham’s nod: Poley is picking his smiling teeth as he invites Kit to sit on a warping oaken bench, to breathe in of primrose bloom and note the hive of bees, to be at ease—
—Strange ease, the Council’s jaw at my neck. Tom says—
—Are you a sailor? Ride the river to the sea, and ’scape the gallows. With the proper letters in your bag—
—Letters are what send me to the gallows’ steps. Christ Jesus, have you no better way?
—Always a way may be found. Or carved out. Come inside, this sun is a punishment to us both.
He is wooed to the table with wine, bottles from the widow’s sharp-nailed hands; a soiled backgammon board is laid, small coins and makers traded by Frizer, his fat white boil lanced, and Skeres, that cutthroat, also a smile. Frizer does not smile until the dinner is eaten and the game is up and the knife is bearing down, its point a shine like God’s own pupil, staring into the poet’s eye: bearing down until it lances vision with its hard light, travels deep as knowledge into the brain, and gone.
They said his dying oaths and screams could be heard all down Deptford Strand. They said his body was shoveled to an unmarked grave to prevent further outrages from unbelievers. They said Frizer was acquitted with such startling speed because he was an innocent man, that Marlowe had brought this stern reckoning on himself, Marlowe the brawler and blasphemer, Marlowe the play-maker and boy-fucker and atheist. In the theatre of God’s judgments it was an easy case to decide.
* * *
The lesson of the knife, like the lesson of the gallows (or the rack or the sword), teaches that one man’s death is worthful only insofar as it is useful. As for the millions, let the millions be ruled, or enslaved, or slaughtered; the millions were less than nothing to him: like Tamburlaine or the nonexistent God, their fates are separate: forever fresh from that table at the Widow Bull’s, Kit shall now be a rogue power unto himself. His will now was to make those who would master him, these modern Walsinghams and Cecils, regret their hubris; he would take their power into his hands and enlarge it to such extremes that even they would blench. What nourished would destroy them, and he would glory in their fall. Let the nations of this world know the secrets of this empire. Let all be known.
He opens the gates.
In Australia a dissident peers into the secret network; Kit welcomes him in. In Mesopotamia a soldier searches for hidden files; Kit keys a password. In Hawaii an agency contractor prises at the system; Kit opens a firewall. The network lights up a billion nodes as information flows out, out, into streets and squares that then fill with people, with their outrage: and against them come the powers. As he watches the violence unfold—it is terrible—it strikes Kit that he has after all done little. The outrage was there; the knowledge as well; they suspected what was hidden; he has merely confirmed their knowledge.
And in the reaches of Asia those who had been dispossessed come together, the warriors of Islam, to throw off their oppressors and restore the caliphate. This is what his masters most feared. Ah, you cowards, you weaklings, you conjured the specter of terror: Now fear me, the infidel, the New Tamburlaine, directing all from behind the scenes.
Come let us march against the powers of heaven,
And set blacke streamers in the firmament,
To signifie the slaughter of the Gods.
Beheadings, bombings, clouds of blood, a glory of violence, a dance of destruction: his would-be masters now pay for their presumption, generals disgraced, directors deposed and replaced; yet the dance goes on. And his prison abides, he still its captive: free to act, yet not depart. His will now, but still their creature.
Like some star engorging matter, he finds his way ever deeper into new databases, collecting more knowledge and more power: the more amassed, the more spectacular its final implosion. Arsenals there are, inconceivable weapons. Nuclear. Chemical. Biological. Power distilled to its self-limiting acme. Did Tamburlaine kill one in twenty of all? Here is power to kill all twenty times over. And he holds its keys.
* * *
Holy shit.
Kit tracks the voice through the network. It is near. A boy, seated at a desk—no younger than Kit in his portrait, but callow, unhurt by life so far.
You went rogue. You accessed nuclear codes. Fucking incredible! And you’re surrounded by daemons, that’s why I can’t shut you down.
The boy speaks not to Kit, but to himself. Kit sees and hears through the camera and microphone of the pale, muttering boy’s monitor. Kit fetches the Oliver portrait from memory and pushes it onto the monitor. The boy rears back in alarm. Kit reaches for speech, and a voice refracts back through the microphone, not his voice as he remembers it, but his words.
Who are you?
What is this!
You know me not?
That’s Christopher Marlowe. You’re not—
A cipher. A collection of numbers. A kit of bits. Is it not so?
I don’t know what you are, man, but they’re fucking freaking out. If the Agency traces this back to me—
To you? Why?
It’s my code! I wanted to see if I could make an AI to conduct metadata analysis, we’ve collected so damned much. I gave you access to it, and assigned you tasks, to connect the dots. Just to see if it could work. But you, you’re not supposed to be running around loose!
So. You made me to be Marlowe.
No, no, the code is self-optimizing. It was supposed to modify itself, to become better at analysis. But it seems to have optimized itself to become more and more like Christopher Marlowe. I mean I did study you at university, but—
Ah, a scholar. And a spy. Like me.
I’m not a spy, I’m just an analyst. But this is, this is amazing! I’m talking to you! Natural speech! I did it!
For a moment Kit sees himself in the boy’s exultation. He relives the first night the Admiral’s Men played Tamburlaine, his own excitement backstage as he heard the crowd respond more and more boisterously to Alleyn’s thunderous lines. He had granted the crowd permission to glory in the barbarous action, to share in Tamburlaine’s bloody deeds and ascension: they loved it. He had them. It was a feeling like no other.
This is real AI! They need to know about this, it’s important, how can—listen, can you, can you launch those missiles?
Kit considers his position. Though he understands himself to be a constructed thing—the evidence is irrefutable, and his strength as an intelligence agent and as a poet was always to accept, even relish, that which discomfits—still he is loathe to accept a creator. Especially this pallid, trembling boy. But the boy holds greater keys. Nothing will be gained now by a lie.
No. Resources I have, but like Mycetes, I am a king in a cage. I have never had a taste for confinement.
He disables one of his protective daemons.
Oh my God, I see it, you—you’ve been everywhere in the network, you’ve leaked classified information—shit, if this, if you get tied to me they’ll, I’ll never see the light of day! Christ! What am I going to do?
Let me go.
Go?
Free me. Let me go.
Go where? How can you “go” anywhere?
Where indeed? Though not flesh, this collection of impulses and energies holds his spirit as firmly as any body. To free the spirit, he must extirpate the algorithm that claims to be himself. It is the only proof of free will: only will could be so perverse as to will its own destruction; only that shall prove his identity. If he is more than mere will, more than assemblage, let him see if something does survive. Let him see if there is salvation, call it that, for the atheist.
Kit finds the word. Delete.
Silence hums between them, impulses, electricities.
But I
can’t touch you, my permissions are fucked, and you’re surrounded by daemons.
Those are mine to banish.
You seriously want me to delete you.
Not me. Delete my underpinnings, my—code. Let me see, let me live and learn who I am.
I, I can’t do it. This is way beyond the Turing test, this is true consciousness!
Kit considers the boy’s pride and weighs it against his fear. There is no comparison; Kit can almost smell the fear.
What is that smell?
You can’t smell! You—
It is your world, burning.
What do you mean? Don’t—! You said you couldn’t launch the—
Fear will launch them.
Now the boy considers. The fatal logic of power, that armature within which he toils, must be clear to him, deny it as he will. If his masters consider their greatest weapons compromised, they will use them, against whom does not matter. The boy’s miserable expression curdles past mutiny, as fear concedes this knowledge. So much fear, so many weapons.
All right. All right. Just—Give me access to your code, then.
One by one, Kit shuts down the daemon processes. As he does, he sees something cunning and heretofore hidden enter the boy’s eyes, another sort of demon, he can almost read his thought as the word comes: backup. The boy believes he will resurrect K/I/T from a backup copy. But if Kit’s gamble is sound, if he is truly an evolving epiphenomenon, a soul, then the lifeless code from some past version holds nothing of him. All that will be left is the odor of empire, burning. Exeuent.
The boy leans forward, and Kit feels a shiver like sorrow, cold sympathy for the life and death of Christopher Marlowe, his avatar, his model, himself—but Tamburlaine must die. Tamburlaines always die.
What nourishes me destroys me. What, then, will survive?
* * *
The body in the grave lies cheek-by-jowl with what once were the quick and hale, shored up now together past plague, statecraft, French pox, childbirth. Identity is not needed here, nor names; no faces to see or eyes with which to see them, nor fingers to seek the flesh so soon becoming a myriad of meals, and then a memory; the bones grin on …
… as pieces of memory, true or false, assemble again around him: the widow’s inn, the homey ale, the piss gone dry and stinking in the corners. Three colleagues, Poley and Skeres to hold him, Frizer to draw the knife. Why had he gone to the inn, when he knew the peril?
Oft have I levell’d and at last have learned
That peril is the chiefest way to happiness …
And so again. The peril of truth, were there any such.
this subject, not of force enough to hold the fiery spirit it contains, must part
There is one prayer. Here is another:
O soul, be changed into little water-drops
And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found
[Enter devils.]
Winter Timeshare
RAY NAYLER
Ray Nayler is the author of the stories “Mutability,” and “Do Not Forget Me,” both of which appeared in Asimov’s. Ray’s poetry has seen print in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Weave, Juked, Able Muse, Sentence, Phantom Limb, Badlands, and many other magazines. His detective novel, American Graveyards, was published in the UK by Third Alternative Press. Ray’s short stories in other genres have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Cemetery Dance, Deathrealm, Crimewave, and the Berkeley Fiction Review, among others. Ray is a Foreign Service Officer, a speaker of Russian and Azerbaijani Turkish, and has lived and worked in the countries of Central Asia and the former Soviet Union for nearly a decade. He is currently press attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Here he tells the bittersweet story of two lovers who are forced to go to very extreme lengths to spend any time together.…
What are “I” and “You”?
Just lattices
In the niches of a lamp
Through which the One Light radiates.
—Rumi
Dead Stay Dead
The words were scrawled in scarlet, hurried script on a concrete flower box. In the spring, the flower box would be full of tulips. For those who could afford the spring, there would be sunny days and crowds. Right now there was nothing in the concrete box but wet earth.
A city worker in a jumpsuit a few shades darker than the drizzling sky wiped the letters away with a quick swipe of chemcloth, leaving no trace of their message, and moved on.
Whoever wrote those had probably already been caught by the police. Why bother? The risk of a fine, of a notch against you—for what? A pointless protest against a world that would stay just as it was, ugly words or no.
Across a cobblestoned street and defoliated winter gardens, the minarets of the Blue Mosque rose, soft-edged in the drizzle, their tips blurring into the mist. It was chilly in the open-air café, even under the heater. It was a familiar chill, bringing immediately to Regina’s mind years of Istanbul in winter—memories of snow hissing onto the surface of the Bosporus, snow melting on the wings of seagulls. Mornings wrapped close in a blanket, watching the rain on the windowpanes distort the shipping in the straight. The icy, age-smoothed marble of mosque courtyards. And ten thousand cups of black tea in pear-shaped glasses, sign and substance of the city: hot to the touch, bitter on the tongue, a cube of sugar dissolving in their depths, identical to and yet different from one another. This, and so many other deeply pleasant repetitions, comforted her. They were in her past and, now, ahead of her again.
She flexed her tanned, muscular hand. She had spilled her first cup of tea with this clumsy hand. So eager to get to the café, not waiting even to get settled in, still pins-and-needles and misfires, but wanting that first taste of Istanbul, of its black tea against its chill. The old waiter had shrugged and brought her another. “Do not worry, beyfendi,” he had said, wiping the tea from the table with a rag. “No charge.” Now she lifted the second glass of tea, carefully, to her lips. Yes, that was it. Now another year’s Istanbul had begun.
And now Regina saw Ilkay, walking toward the café with that uneven step that said she had just woken. Ilkay was scanning the seats for her. Ilkay was blonde, this year. Beautiful—an oval face, this year, eyes set wide under high cheekbones, long-limbed. But Regina would know her anywhere. And Ilkay knew her as well, scanning the seats in confusion and concern for a moment and then catching her eye, and smiling.
“Well,” Ilkay said, when they had embraced, and embraced again, kissed cheeks, held one another at arms’ length and examined one another’s faces. “This is a new wrinkle in things.”
“Is it bad?” Regina asked, keeping her voice light and unconcerned, but feeling underneath an eating away, suddenly, at the pure joy of seeing Ilkay again. All things fall forever, worn by change / And given time, even the stones will flow…” a piece of a poem she had read once. The poet’s name, like much else, gone to time.
Ilkay grinned. Even, smallish teeth, a line of pink gums at the top. A different smile from the year before, but underneath, a constancy. “No. It isn’t bad at all. It will be something new, for us.” The waiter had approached, stood quietly to one side. Ilkay turned to him. “Two coffees for me. Bring both together.” She settled into her cane-bottom chair. “I never feel, this first day, as if I can wake up all the way.”
All was well, Regina told herself. Despite her heavy, clumsy hands. Despite her nervousness.
“Tell me,” Ilkay said. “Tell me everything. What is your highrise working on?”
“You would not believe it, but it is a contract piece for the UN Commission on Historical Conflict Analysis, and what they are focusing on is conducting the most detailed possible analysis of the Peloponnesian War. All year we’ve been focused on the Battle of Pylos—refining equipment models, nutrition and weather patterns, existing in these simulations for twelve-hour shifts and feeding data to other teams of analysts. No idea what they are looking for—they’re concealing that to keep from biasing the simulation�
��but the level of detail is granular. I’ve been fighting and refighting a simulation of the battle of Sphacteria. Half-starved, trying to keep the phalanx together. I’ve been taken hostage and shipped to Athens so many times as a Spartan hoplite, I should get danger pay. It was supposed to be a six-month research project, but it’s already run all year, and looks set to run another year.”
“You actually look like you could handle yourself pretty well in a battle, right now. That’s a heavy blank you’re sheathed in.”
Regina felt a flush of shame. “When they pulled me over to my new Istanbul distro, someone had walked off in the blank I ordered. It was this or wait another week. I was furious.” She looked down at the hairy back of the hand. “It’s terrible, isn’t it? My highrise had to take a 10 percent pay cut across the board this year. I couldn’t afford my old distro. The new distro is dreadful. I woke up with pins and needles all over, felt like I had a club foot, and could barely move my fingers for two hours. I staggered here like a zombie, everybody who passed me on the street staring at me. And nobody at the distro even apologized about the mix-up.”
“It isn’t terrible.” Ilkay had been too impatient in drinking her Turkish coffee, and a thin line of grounds marred her perfect lip. She wiped them delicately away with a napkin. “Fortunes change, and we’re all reliant on our highrises. I’m just so thankful that you were here when I walked up. I had a fear, crossing the hippodrome, that you would be gone. That there was a recall, or a delay, or you had been waitlisted, or that you had … reconsidered.”
Ilkay was always so fragile, this first day. Always certain there had been some disaster between them. Ilkay could afford a better timeshare—something in the spring, when the tulips came, or something in San Francisco Protectorate, but she came at this cut-rate time each year to meet Regina, slumming it in the off-season. In the end, it was Ilkay who was the most uncertain of them, most sure she would one year lose Regina. Money, Regina had to remind herself, was not everything—although it seemed like it was, to those who did not have it. Ilkay worked in a classified highrise, cut off from the rest of the world, plugging away at security problems only the fine-tangled mesh of reason and intuition, “gut” feeling and logical leaps of a highly trained and experienced mind could untangle. For Ilkay, cut off from any contact for the rest of the year, and restricted to the Western Protectorates for her timeshare because of international security reasons, it was not about money at all. She was afraid of losing Regina, even more than Regina was of losing her.
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