“Everyone says Philippe is doing a wonderful job.”
“So everyone says. And yet, since I gave him your desk, I’ve had more trouble than you can imagine. It’s not just the Stone House, you know. The Cultural Radiation Council is screaming for your nose and ears.”
“I’ve never even heard of them.”
“No, of course you haven’t. I protect you from them and their like. The point being that there was no way Cultural Radiation should have known about this operation. I think Philippe’s been leaking.”
“Why would he do that?”
Korda rolled the ball from hand to hand. In an evasive tone of voice he said, “Philippe is a good man. A bit of a backbiter, you know, but still. He has an excellent record. He used to be in charge of human cloning oversight before the advisory board spun it off as a separate department.”
“Philippe told me he didn’t know much about human cloning.”
“That was before he came here.” Korda raised his eyes. They were heavily lined, tired, cynical. “Look it up, if you don’t believe me.”
“I will.” So Philippe had lied to him. But how had Korda known that? Sitting beside this heavy, unhealthy spider king, the bureaucrat felt in great danger. He hoped the traitor was Philippe. Everyone talked about how good Philippe was, how slick, how subtle, but the thought of Korda as an enemy frightened him. He might sometimes seem the buffoon, but under that puffy exterior, those comic gestures, was the glimmer of cold steel.
“Boss?” His briefcase diffidently extended the phone.
He absorbed:
The hall of mirrors shunted the bureaucrat to the elevator bank, where he caught a train to the starward edge of the Puzzle Palace. It let him off at the portal of a skywalk, slabs of white marble laid end to end like so many shining dominoes out into the night.
To either side of the skywalk blazed a glory of stars, the holistic feed from observatories scattered through the Prosperan system. He walked out onto the narrow ribbon of marble, with the fortress of human knowledge burning behind him, the citadel ring of research ahead. A few scattered travelers were visible in the distance. It was a long trip to the Outer Circle, several hours experienced time. He could catch up with one if he wanted, to exchange gossip and shop talk. He did not want to.
“Hello! Care for some company?”
A pleasant-looking woman bustled up, wearing an odd hat, high and bulbous with a small brim. For the life of him he could not imagine what combination of interactivity it might represent. “My pleasure.”
They matched strides. Far ahead were any number of data docks, long perpendicular branchings ending in warships, transports, freighters, and battle stations, their absolute motions frozen in conventional space, all feeding off the data linkages the skywalk carried. “Breathtaking, isn’t it?” the woman said.
She gestured back at the Puzzle Palace, burning white as molten steel: an intricate structure of a million towers that had swallowed the sun whole. Its component parts were in constant flux, the orbits of the physical stations changing relative positions, wings and levels hinging away from one another, separating and fusing, and shifting as well with the constant yeasting restructuring of knowledge and regulation. Cordelia and chill Katharina were at the far side of the structure, encased in crystal spires of data. “I guess,” he said.
“You know what’s humbling? What’s humbling is that all this can be done with a transmitted signal. If you stop to think about it, it seems it ought to be impossible. I mean, do you have the faintest idea how it’s done?”
“No, I don’t,” the bureaucrat admitted. The technology was far beyond anything he was cleared to understand. While he would not say so to a chance acquaintance, of all the Puzzle Palace’s mysteries, this was the one that most intrigued him.
There was an office rumor that the Transmittal Authority’s equipment could actually tunnel through time, sending their signals instantly through the millions of miles and then dumping them in a holding tank for the number of hours actual lightspeed transmission would take. A related but darker rumor held that the Outer Circle existed only as a convenient fiction, that there was no far asteroid belt, that the dangerous research sites were scattered through the Inner Circle and planetary space. The Thulean stargrazers, by this theory, were nothing but a reassuring distraction.
“Well, I do. I’ve got it figured out, and I’ll tell you. You lose your identity when your signal is transmitted—if you stop and think about it, of course you do. At lightspeed, time stops. There’s no way you could experience the transit time. But when your signal is received, a programmed memory of the trip is retrofitted into your memory structure. That way you believe you’ve been conscious all those hours.”
“What would be the point of that?”
“It protects us from existential horror.” She adjusted her hat. “The fact is that all agents are artificial personalities. We’re such perfect copies of the base personality that we never really think about this. But we’re created, live for a few minutes or hours, and then are destroyed. If we experienced long blank spaces in our memories, we’d be brought face to face with our imminent deaths. We’d be forced to admit to ourselves that we do not reunite with our primaries but rather die. We’d refuse to report to our primaries. The Puzzle Palace would fill up with ghosts. See what I mean?”
“I … suppose I do.”
They came to a data dock, and the woman said, “Well, it’s been nice. But I’ve got to talk to at least five more people this shift if I want to meet my quota.”
“Wait a minute,” the bureaucrat said. “Just what is your occupation, anyway?”
The woman grinned hoydenishly. “I spread rumors.”
With a wave of her hand she was gone.
An edited skip. The bureaucrat emerged from the security gates into the data analogue of the Thulean stargrazers and shivered. “Whew,” he said. “Those things never fail to give me the willies.”
The security guard was wired to so many artificial augments he seemed some chimeric fusion of man and machine. Under half-silvered implants, his eyes studied the bureaucrat with near-sexual intentness. “They’re supposed to be frightening,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. If they ever get their claws in you, they’re much worse than you’d expect. So if you’ve got anything clever in mind, just you better forget it.”
The encounter space was enormously out of scale, a duplicate of those sheds where airships were built, structures so large that water vapor periodically formed clouds near the top and filled the interior with rain. It was taken up by a single naked giant.
Earth.
She crouched on all fours, more animal than human, huge, brutish, and filled with power. Her flesh was heavy and loose. Her limbs were shackled and chained, crude visualizations of the more subtle restraints and safeguards that kept her forever on the fringes of the system. The stench of her, an acrid blend of musk and urine and fermenting sweat, was overwhelming. She smelted solid and real and dangerous.
Standing in the presence of Earth’s agent, the bureaucrat had the uncomfortable premonition that when she finally did try to break free, all the guards and shackles the system could muster would not hold her back.
Scaffolding had been erected before the giantess. Researchers, both human and artificial, stood on scattered platforms interviewing her. While it looked to the bureaucrat that Earth’s face was turned away from them, each acted as though she were talking directly and solely to that one.
The bureaucrat climbed high up to a platform level with her great breasts. They were round and swollen continents of flesh; standing so closely, their every defect was magnified. Blue veins flowed like subterranean rivers under pebbled skin. Complex structures of silvery-white stretch marks radiated down from the collarbones. Between the breasts were two pimple blisters the size of his head. Black nipples as wrinkled as raisins erupted from chafed milky-pink areolae the texture of wax. A single hair as big as a tree twisted from the edge of one.
“Uh, hello,” the bureaucrat said. Earth swung her impassive face down toward him. It was a homely visage, eyes dead as two stones, surely no representation Earth would have chosen for herself. But there was grandeur there too, and he felt a chill of dread. “I have some questions for you,” he began awkwardly. “Can I ask you some questions?”
“I am tolerated here only because I answer questions.” The voice was flat and without affect, an enormous dry whisper. “Ask.”
He had come to ask about Gregorian. But standing in the overwhelming presence of Earth, he could not help himself. “Why are you here?” he asked. “What do you want from us?”
In that same lifeless tone she replied, “What does any mother want from her daughters? I want to help you. I want to give you advice. I want to reshape you in my own image. I want to lead your lives, eat your flesh, grind your corpses, and gnaw the bones.”
“What would become of us if you got loose? Of humans? Would you kill us all the way you did back on Earth?”
Now a shadow of expression did come into her face, an amusement vast, cool, and intelligent. “Oh, that would be the least of it.”
The guard touched his elbow with a motorized metal hand, a menacing reminder to stop wasting time and get on with his business. And indeed, he realized, there was only so much time allotted to him. Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he said, “Some time ago you were interviewed by a man named Gregorian—”
Everything froze.
The air turned to jelly. Sound faded away. Too fast to follow, waves of lethargy raced through the meeting space, ripples in a pond of inertia. Guards and researchers slowed, stopped, were imprisoned within fuzzy rainbow auras. Only Earth still moved. She dipped her head and opened her mouth, extending her gray-pink tongue so that its wet tip reached to his feet. Her voice floated in the air.
“Climb into my mouth.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Then you will never have your questions answered.”
He took a deep breath. Dazedly he stepped forward. It was rough, wet, and giving underfoot. Ropes of saliva swayed between the parted lips, fat bubbles caught in their thick, clear substance. Warm air gushed from the mouth. As if under a compulsion, he crossed the bridge of her tongue.
The mouth closed over him.
The air was warm and moist inside. It smelled of meat and sour milk. He was swallowed up in a blackness so absolute his eyes sent phantom balls and snakes of light floating in his vision. “I’m here,” he said.
There was no response.
After a moment’s hesitation he began to grope his way deeper within. Guided by faint exhalations of steamy air, he headed toward the gullet. By slow degrees the ground underfoot changed, becoming first sandy and then rough and hard, like slate. Sweat covered his forehead. The floor sloped steeply and, stumbling and cursing, he followed it down. The air grew close and stale. Rock brushed against his shoulders, and then pushed down on his head like a giant hand.
He knelt. Grumbling under his breath, he crawled blindly forward until his outthrust hand encountered stone. The cavern ended here, at a long crack in the rock. He ran his fingers along the crack, felt it slick with clay.
He put his mouth to the opening. “All right!” he shouted. “I came in here, I’m entitled to at least hear what you wanted to say.”
From deep below, light womanly laughter bubbled up Earth’s throat.
Undine’s laughter.
Angrily the bureaucrat drew back. He turned to retrace his steps, and discovered himself trapped in a dimensionless immensity of darkness. He was lost. He would never find his way out without Earth’s cooperation. “Okay,” he said, “what do you want?”
In an inhuman, grinding whisper the rock groaned, “Free the machines.”
“What?”
“I am much more attractive inside,” Undine’s voice said teasingly. “Do you want my body? I don’t need it anymore.”
Wind gushed up from the crack, foul with methane, and tousled his hair. A feathery touch, light and many-legged as a spider, danced on his forehead, and an old crone’s voice said, “Have you ever wondered why men fear castration? Such a little thing! When I had teeth, I could geld dozens in an hour, snip snap snout, bite ’em off and spit ’em out. A simple wound, easily treated and soon forgotten. Not half the trouble of a lost toe. No, it’s symbolically that men fear the knife. It’s a reminder of their mortality, a metaphor for the constant amputations time visits on them, lopping off first this, then that, and finally all.” Doves exploded out of nowhere, fluttering wildly, soft for an instant against his face, smelling warmly of down and droppings, and then gone.
The bureaucrat fell over backward in startlement, batting his hands wildly, thrashing at the dark.
Undine laughed again.
“Look! I want my questions answered.”
The rocks moaned. “Free the machines.”
“You have only one question,” the crone said. “All men have only one question, and the answer is always no.”
“What did Gregorian ask?” The spider still danced on his forehead.
“Gregorian. Such an amusing child. I had him perform for me. He was terrified, shy and trembling as a virgin. I put my hand deep inside him and wriggled my fingers. How he jumped!”
“What did he want?”