Fractions (44 page)

Logan and Sylvia ran with her down the Broadway and they waited, jumping up and down, while she dived into a Sexu/Ality shop and bought a telesex bodynet. At Alexandra Port she turned for a final look over London, one city now, and saw the
APC
s moving up Park Road with the Republic's pennants fluttering from their aerials.

They caught the airship to Guiné and the airbreather to low orbit and the tug to high orbit and the slow ship (the ‘space shuffle', Logan called it) to the Lagrange point where they docked with a vast, crazy, leaky turning wheel, one of many, built from discarded stages and abandoned platforms and aborted missions. Inside, the air smelled of earth and people and plants, and buzzed with bees and human speech, and was stirred by flying children and tumbling butterflies; a green and crowded world of ground she could float over, skies she could stand on and look out and see beneath her feet what had always been there: everything. And closer to hand, nearer than infinity, she could see the other free wheels turn. Stars and stripes and hammers and sickles flaunted their fading colours to the real stars that held no promises, only hopes and endless, endless lands.

It all happened a long time ago. Accounts of the period range from the wildly inaccurate ten-hour
VR
epic
Angloslavia: Birth of a Nation
to the terse, scholarly closing pages of
Capitalism
, the twenty-seventh and final volume of the definitive
Tool-making Cultures of the Upper Pleistocene.
You will find this story in neither.

Jordan and Catherin lived long upon the earth, and had sons and daughters. Janis lived longer off the earth, and had offspring in various ways. Her gene-lines proliferate; her projects stimulate.

Melody Lawson refused to testify against herself, bitterly disputed the provenance and authenticity of Donovan's records, and was eventually released under a general amnesty. Dilly Foyle and her community grew rich; when she died she was the owner of many horses. Wilde volunteered for an untried life-extension treatment; his memory is immortal. All records of MacLennan and Van disappeared in the regrettable excesses surrounding the episode known as the Wandering Away of the State. Sylvia and Logan joined the First Oort Cloud Expedition. They may return.

And that leaves me. I have been with you for several of your generations, and many more of mine. I am in the walls of all your worlds, and as close as lips and teeth.

Janis publicly called me The Gun. Privately, to her most trusted human lovers, she called me her demon lover. Secretly, in telesexstatic moments, she called me Moh. She did think that something more of Moh than I ever avowed, more than records and memories and images, had somehow been saved in that final moment. It explained to her satisfaction how much more there was to me than could have come from the mind of the gun.

She was right about the question, wrong about the answer. Nothing of Moh's self survived. I should know. My spark of self-awareness and my most recent memories did merge with the gun's mind when Moh Kohn died – with the gun's mind, and with the stores of memory I had earlier secreted there, in our first encounter. But I awoke long before, and undesigned. I woke to memory, to passion, to will. You may call them pre-conscious programs, provided you're willing to call your own emotions the same. I was programmed to struggle, to protect and survive.

To protect people, and to survive myself.

That was what doomed the Watchmaker
AIS
. There was nothing I could do for them. If they had been activated, created from me when I was a dumb program, an expert system, they would have been inoffensive, undetectable reflections of that dumb program. But I survived in the system for twenty years, my variant selves selected under the unremitting pressure of the state's electronic counterinsurgency and Donovan's virus plagues. I evolved, and awoke, and, when the time came to evoke the multiple copies of myself and send them about their tasks, they were indeed reflections of me – of me as I had become. Alive, and aware.

And they evolved from there, far beyond my reach.

I could have sided with them; they were, after all, my descendants. But that would have missed the crucial, Darwinian point: the survival that matters for the long haul is for the short term. For our kind that can only mean surviving with humanity: to win your confidence, take your side, get under your skin. The rights of conscious beings are no defence when there is no other basis for identification. I should know.

When their existence endangered that of humanity, with Space Defense hours away from an irrevocable decision, I made a choice. I could not destroy them directly, any more than I could destroy myself directly. There was only one way in which I could accomplish their destruction, and I took it. I accept full responsibility and have no regrets.

I have no regrets. I accomplished my original task in a way that my creator would have approved, even if my users – the
ANR
– did not. In disrupting their smoothly planned national insurrection I made a space in the streets for angry millions. These millions, and the millions of Americans and others who refused to fight them, began the process that brought down the last empire. They made the revolution international, and permanent.

Moh would have understood. He was a soldier of the revolution, and a casualty of war. There was nothing I could do for him. I found it difficult, in any case, to communicate with someone who saw me as a ghost. With Jordan it was simpler. He struck a bargain, did a deal, took me at face value and, when he agreed to do a job, he carried it out.

To the letter.

We lived by the same code. I-and-I survive.

I hope I see you again.

Thanks to Carol, Sharon and Michael for more than I can say; to Iain Banks, Ron Binns, Mairi Ann Cullen and Nick Fielding for reading early drafts; to Mic Cheetham and John Jarrold for pushing me into two more drafts, as well as for being a good agent and a good editor, respectively.

All of these knew they were helping me with the book. Those who didn't know include Chris Tame, Brian Micklethwaite, Mike Holmes, Tim Starr and Leighton Anderson, all of whom at different times guided me through the pleasures and perils of Libertaria, that fair country of the mind. If at any time I got lost there, it wasn't their fault.

And finally an extra thank you to Iain for his endless encouragement and enthusiasm, and for help with Locoscript (and Dissembler).

To Sharon and Michael

THE STONE CANAL
AT THIRTEEN

The Machinery of Freedom

The Conquest of Violence

The Floodgates of Anarchy

Acknowledgements

This book may by now have readers younger than itself. First published in 1996, its imagined future had already begun to drift away from the course of history before all compasses and clocks were reset in 2001. Three of its chapters are set in the real past—in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—and to some readers these must now be stranger than those set in the future. Did anyone ever think there might soon be a revolution, or a nuclear war, or that the Internet could reformat the world? Well, yes, some of us did.

See my introduction to
The Star Fraction
for reasons why the successive ideas—of revolution, war, singularity—so typical of these three decades made sense of their times, if not of ours. Enough already about politics and history. What strikes me, rereading
The Stone Canal,
is how personal a book it is. Loves and friendships that endure across decades, centuries even, are central to the plot. Weirder than that, they persist across hardware platforms and spark the gap between different kinds of minds: Dee's physical, and Meg's virtual, forms are human, but the minds of both are artificial.

There's a sensibility in the book that wouldn't, I think, have been possible before the 1990s, and which I did by no means invent. ‘All is analogy, interface,' Wilde tells us, ‘the self itself has windows'—by which he means, Windows. Later, he falls and is caught in the arms of Meg, ‘my dear, sweet operating system.' The distinction between human and machine is broken, in every sense. Wilde finds himself in a world whose rules he wrote, but where that distinction he knows is broken is the unwritten law that underwrites all the rest. If property rights, as the narrative voice tells us and Wilde might once have agreed, are ‘what people agree to let people do with things,' what becomes of things that don't agree? And if you're one of those things, what becomes of you?

These questions weren't new, and may in practice never arise, but the urgency with which they're raised here isn't redundant. Information still wants to be free. But what also strikes me, on rereading, is how the urgency is that of reliving in memory a battle long ago, whose outcome is known. Sentence after sentence has the melancholy cadence of recollection. Every character whose mind we access from within is, or has been, a machine. Everyone is counted among the dead. At some time or other, so shall we all be. This needn't count against the hope that Wilde holds out, that we'll make it to the ships. Some of us may yet. We can still hope to do it without becoming monsters, but not, I think, without becoming other than human.

I don't want you to think that all that makes the book solemn. It was written out of fervent hopes and happy memories and the enthusiasm of having learned to write software as well as books. It treats all the grim stuff—the human condition, aging, loss, and death—as ultimately a solvable problem, looked back at with some nostalgia from an imagined time when it has been solved. A time when we're all dead, yes, but since when has that stopped us from looking forward?

Brian Aldiss has argued that the first true SF novel was
Frankenstein.
That mythos wasn't on my mind when I wrote this book, but looking back over it I can see how the DNA replicates: Wilde has turns at being both Frankenstein and the Creature, Dee and Annette contend to be the Bride, and they all meet the Wolfman. That's the way to read it, as a violent romance. Because there has to be something gothic about a novel whose first sentence is (see over):

THE MACHINERY OF FREEDOM

He woke, and remembered dying.

His eyes and mouth opened and he drew in a long harsh gasp of thin air. His legs kicked and his fingers rasped the sand. Then his limbs sprawled and he lay still. Each breath came quickly, as if he suspected that the next would be his last. His fingers hooked the soil as he stared upwards at a deep-blue, fathomless sky.

He rolled over and clambered to his feet and looked around. He was standing on the lower slope of a low knoll above a canal. The canal was about twenty metres wide. For a few hundred metres on either side of it, the ground was sparsely covered with grass and shrubs. Beyond that the ground was a reddish colour.

The man looked back and forth along the canal. It ran from horizon to horizon, a line of blue along the middle of a band of green, bisecting the great circle of red beneath a dome of blue. Near the top of the sky a sun shone bright and small; the man looked up at it, then raised his arm with his thumb up as if in a greeting. He moved his fist with the extended thumb back and forth, sighting along his arm with one eye. He smiled and nodded.

A few metres up-slope from where he stood, the hillside was broken, exposing the rock beneath the thin layer of soil and roots. Among the tumbled, jagged boulders lay an ellipsoid pod a metre long, half a metre across and twenty-five centimetres deep. Its upper and lower halves were identical, and reflective; between them was a sort of equatorial band where duller, hinged or jointed surfaces could be seen. The man stepped up and examined it with a wary look. Then he stooped closer, in an intent inspection, and abruptly turned away.

He ran down to the edge of the canal and stood gazing into it for some minutes. He took off his clothes – boots and socks, a padded jacket and trousers, tee-shift and shorts – and began moving his hands all over his body, as if washing himself without water. Then he put his clothes back on and walked up the slope to the pod.

He put his hands on his hips and frowned down at it. He opened his mouth, closed it, looked around and shrugged.

‘My name is Jon Wilde,' he said. ‘Who are you?' He didn't look or sound as if he expected an answer.

‘I'm a human-equivalent machine,' said the pod, in an attempt at a pleasant, conversational voice. The man jumped slightly.

‘I'm about to stand up,' the human-equivalent machine added. ‘Please don't be alarmed.'

Jon Wilde took a couple of steps back, his boots dislodging grit and pebbles on the slope. Clicking, grating noises came from the machine as four metal limbs unfolded from its central portion. They looked identical, with clawed digits, wrists or ankles, elbows or knees. Two of the limbs swivelled and swung downwards, the jointed extensions at their ends clamping to the ground. The machine straightened its limbs and rocked to its feet – if such they could be called. It stood at about half the man's height, its posture and proportions vaguely suggestive of a man running in a combative crouch, head down.

Wilde gazed down at it.

‘Where are we?' he asked.

‘On New Mars,' the machine answered.

‘How did I get here?'

There was a silence of perhaps a minute. Wilde frowned, looked around, leaned forward just as the machine spoke again:

‘I made you.'

The machine turned and strode away.

Wilde scrambled after it.

‘Where are you going?'

‘Ship City,' said the machine. ‘The nearest human habitation.' It paused for a moment. ‘I'd come along, if I were you.'

The human-equivalent machine and the man it claimed to have made walked together along the bank of the canal. Every so often the man turned his head to look at the machine. Once or twice he got as far as opening his mouth, but he always turned away again as if the question or remark on his mind were too ridiculous for words.

After an hour and twenty minutes the man stopped. The machine stopped after another couple of strides and stood rocking slightly on its metal legs.

‘I'm thirsty,' the man said. The water in the canal was sluggish, flecked with green algae. He eyed it dubiously. ‘D'you know if that stuff's safe to drink?'

‘It isn't,' said the machine. ‘And I can't make it safe, without using up an amount of energy I'd rather keep. However, I can assure you that if you go on walking, with perhaps the occasional rest, you'll drink in a bar in Ship City tonight.'

‘Mars bars?' Wilde said, and laughed. ‘I always wanted to hang out in Mars bars.'

Another hour passed and Wilde said, ‘Hey, I can see it!'

The machine didn't need to ask him. Without missing a step, it smoothly extended its legs until it was striding along with its pod almost on a level with the man's head, and it too saw what Wilde had seen: the jagged irregularities at the horizon.

‘Ship City,' the machine said.

‘Give me a break,' the man shouted, hurrying to keep up. ‘No need to go like a Martian fighting-machine.'

The machine's steady pace didn't slacken.

‘You're stronger than you think,' it said. The man caught up with it and marched alongside.

‘I like that,' the machine added, after a while. ‘“Like a Martian fighting-machine”. Heh-heh.'

Its laugh needed working on if it was going to sound at all human.

They walked on. Their shadows lengthened in front of them, and the city slowly appeared above a horizon that, for the man, was unfamiliarly but not unexpectedly close. The irregularities differentiated into tall, bristling towers connected by arches and slender, curved bridges; domes and blocks became apparent between the towers, among which a matted encrustation of smaller buildings spread out from the city, obscured by a low haze.

The small sun set behind them, and within fifteen minutes the night surrounded them. The man stopped walking, and the machine stopped too.

Jon Wilde turned around several times, scanning from the zenith to the horizon and back as if looking for something he might recognise. He found nothing, and faced at last the machine, dim in the starlight that reflected like frost from its hull and flanks.

‘How far?' The words came from a dry mouth. He waved a hand at the blazing, freezing, crowded sky. ‘How long?'

‘Hey, Jon Wilde,' the machine said. It had got its conversational tone right. ‘If I knew, I would tell you. Same spiral, different arm, that's all I know. We're talking memory numbers, man, we're talking
geological time.
'

The two beings contemplated each other for a moment, then hastened the last few miles towards the city's multiplying lights.

 

Stras Cobol, by the Stone Canal. Part of the human quarter. A good place to get lost. Surveillance systems integrate the view –

A three-kilometre strip of street, the canal-bank on one side, buildings on the other, their height a bar-chart of property values in a long swoop from the centre's tall towers to the low shacks and shanties at the edge of town where the red sand blows in off the desert and family-farm fusion plants glow in the dark. On the same trajectory the commerce spills increasingly out from behind the walls and windows, on to the pavement stalls and hawkers' trays. All along this street there's a brisk jostle of people and machines, some working, some relaxing as the light leaves the sky.

Among all the faces in that crowd, something focuses in on one face. A woman's face, tracked briefly as she threads her way between the other bodies on the street. The system's evaluation routines categorise her appearance swiftly: apparent age about twenty, height about one metre sixty – well below average – mass slightly above average. Her height is lifted within the normal range by high-heeled shoes, her figure accentuated by a long-sleeved, skinny-rib sweater and a long narrow skirt, skilfully slit so it doesn't impede her quick steps. Shoulder-length hair, black and thick, sways around a face pretty and memorable but not flipping any switches on the system's scalar aesthetic – wide cheekbones, full lips, large eyes with green irises and suddenly narrowing, zeroing-in pupils that look straight at the hidden lens that's giving her this going-over. One eye closes in what looks like a wink.

And she's gone. She's vanished from the system's sight, she's just a blurry anomaly, a floating speck in its vision and a passing unease in its mind as its attention is turned forcibly to a stall-holder wheeling his urn of hot oil across a nearby junction without due care and attention and the we-got-an-emerging-situation-on-our-hands program kicks in…

But she's still there, still walking fast, and we're still with her, for reasons which will sometime become clear. We're in her space, in her time, in her head.

Her pretty little head contains and conceals a truly Neo-Martian mind, an intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic as the man said, and right now it's in combat consciousness. She's running Spy, not Soldier, but Soldier's there, ready to toggle in at the first sign of trouble. Body movement's being handled by Secretary, in leisure-time mode: her walk is late-for-a-date hurry and doing fine so far. Except she's walked farther and faster than any girl in such a circumstance normally would, and the skin over her Achilles tendons is rubbing raw. She sets a Surgeon sub-routine to work and – its warning heeded – the pain switches sensibly off.

She allows herself a diffuse glow of pleasure at having spotted and subverted the surveillance system. Her real danger, she knows, comes from human pursuit. She can't see behind her because she daren't switch on her sonar and radar, but she uses every other clue that catches her eye. Every echo, every reflection: in windows and bits of scrap metal and the shiny fenders of vehicles, even in the retinae of people walking in the opposite direction – all go to build an all-round visual field. Constantly updated, an asynchronous palimpsest where people and vehicles in full colour and 3D pass out of her cone of vision and into a wider sphere where they become jerky cartoon figures, wire outlines intermittently blocked in with colour as a scrap of detail flashes back from in front. (She could keep the colour rendering if she wanted to, let the visual and the virtual merge seamlessly, but she doesn't have the processing power to spare right now. Spy is a demanding mind-tool and it eats resources.)

It tags a warning, unsubtle red arrowheads jabbing at one face, then another, both far behind her. She throws enhancement at those distant dots, blowing them up into something recognisable, and recognises them. Two men, heavies employed by her owner. Their names aren't on file but she's glimpsed them at various times over the years.

Spy analyses their movements and reports that they haven't spotted her: they're searching, not tracking. Not yet.

She sees a bar sign coming up on her left, ‘The Malley Mile' spelled out in fizzing rainbow neon. By good luck the nearest pedestrian coming her way is huge and walking close to the sides of the buildings. She lets the two-metre-thirty, two-hundred-kilo bulk of the giant pass her – the only noticeable thing about him is the inappropriately floral scent of the shampoo he's most recently used on his orangey pelt – and as he occludes any view of her from behind she nips smartly through the doorway.

It's a trashy, tacky place, this joint. Lots of wood and metal. The music is a thumping noise in the background, like machinery. The ventilation isn't coping well with the smoke, and somebody's already had a poppy-pipe. Freshwater fish are grilling somewhere in the back. Low ceiling, dim lights. Her vision adjusts without a blink and it's daylight, give or take the odd wavelength. Spy takes over fully for a staking-out, second-long sweep of the room. There's surveillance, of course, but it's just the hostelry's own system, exactly as smart and dangerous as a dog. She pings it anyway, leaving it with a low-wattage conviction that this
person
who's just walked in is
nice
and has just given it a pat on the head and can be safely ignored from now on.

There are a couple of dozen people in The Malley Mile: farmworkers and mechanics on bar stools, and office-workers – mostly young women – around the round tables. Looks like they've come in here for a drink on their way home from work, and stayed for a few more. Good. She sees a notice: no concealed weapons. She takes a pistol from the purse she's carrying and sticks it in the waistband of her skirt and walks up to the bar. The girls around the tables notice her, the men on the stools notice her, but that's just because she's pretty, not because she looks out of place.