Authors: Hannu Rajaniemi
Perhonen and I looked for her in agoras and public exomemories, and after hours of work, there she was: a sudden vivid memory of a girl in a neat cream-coloured skirt and a blouse, passing through an agora, her stride purposeful. She did not wear the mask-like expression that Martians so often do in public places, but looked serious, lost in thought.
The day before I stole a sheet of music from her, wearing a different face. Now I hold it up.
‘I believe this is yours.’
She accepts it hesitantly. ‘Thank you.’
‘You must have dropped it yesterday. I found it on the ground.’
‘That’s handy,’ she says. She is still suspicious: her gevulot withholds even her name, and if I did not know her face already, I would forget it after our conversation.
She lives somewhere near the edge of the Dust District. She does something involving music. Her life is regular. Her wardrobe is modest and conservative. Somehow, that feels strange to me: it is at odds with the smile in her picture. But a lot can happen in twenty years. I wonder if she has been a Quiet recently; it usually causes young Martians to hoard Time with excessive care.
‘It’s very good, you know.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The music. The sheet is analog, so I couldn’t resist reading it.’ I offer her a little gevulot. She accepts. Yes.
‘I’m Raoul. I’m sorry about the intrusion, but I have wanted an excuse to talk to you for a long time.’
It’s not going to work, whispers Perhonen.
Of course it is. A woman can never resist a good narrative. A mysterious stranger on a park bench? She is loving it.
‘Well, I’m glad you found one,’ she says. A little more gevulot: she has a boyfriend. Damn; but we’ll see how much of an obstacle that one is.
‘Is someone patroning you?’ Another gevulot block. ‘Apologies for prying, I’m just interested. What is it about?’
‘An opera. About the Revolution.’
‘Ah. That makes sense.’
She gets up. ‘I’m meeting a student. Nice meeting you.’
There you go, Perhonen says. Down in flames.
Her perfume – a hint of pine – goes right to my amygdala, triggering a memory of a memory. Dancing with her in a glass-floored club in the Belly, until dawn. Was that when I met her the first time?
‘You have a problem with the a cappella bit,’ I say. She hesitates. ‘I can tell you how to fix it if you meet me for dinner.’
‘Why should I take your advice?’ she asks, taking the music sheet from my hand.
‘Not advice, merely suggestions.’
She studies me, and I give her my best new smile. I spent a long time practising it in front of the mirror, fitting it to this new face.
She flicks a lock of her black hair over a pale earlobe. ‘All right. You’ll have to convince me. But I’ll decide where we are going.’ She passes me a co-memory, indicating a place near the Revolution memorial. ‘Wait for me there, at seven.’
‘Deal. What did you say your name was?’
‘I didn’t,’ she says, gets up and walks away past the playground, heels clicking on the pavement.
While the thief is out in the city looking for love, Mieli tries to force herself to interrogate the vasilev.
The ghostgun bullet – barely the size of a pinhead – has just enough computational power to run a human-level mind. She weighs it in the sapphire casing that keeps it dormant, tossing it up and down, still unused to the novelty of gravity. Even the tiny thing feels heavy, like failure; small impacts on her hand, again and again.
This is war, she tells herself. They started it. What else can I do?
The hotel room feels too small, too confined. She finds herself walking out to the city, the bullet still clutched in her hand, wandering the now-familiar Persistent Avenue in the afternoon lull.
Perhaps the restlessness comes from the thief’s biot feed. She has not dared to suppress it after the thief’s escape attempt – especially now, with his reluctantly granted permission to change his face and mental makeup. So she is painfully aware of his excitement, a constant phantom itch.
She stops to eat some of the rich, flavoured food here, served by a young man who keeps smiling at her, throwing suggestive co-memories at her, until she wraps herself in gevulot and eats in silence. The dish is called cassoulet and leaves her feeling bloated and heavy.
‘How is it going in there?’ she asks Perhonen.
He just got her to agree to a first date, the ship says.
‘Great.’
You don’t sound enthusiastic. Not very professional. ‘I need to be alone for a while. Keep an eye on him for me.’
Of course. You should follow him yourself, though. It’s sort of entertaining.
Mieli cuts the link. Entertaining. She walks, trying to emulate the light stride of the white-clad Martians, wishing she could fly again. After a while, the sky feels too big. The nearest building is a church of some kind, and she walks in, trying to find shelter.
She does not know the god they worship there, and has no wish to find out. But the high arches of the ceiling remind her of the open spaces of the temples of Ilmatar in Oort, ice caverns of the goddess of the air and space. So somehow it seems appropriate to sing a quiet prayer.
Air mother, grant me wisdom,
daughter of sky, strength provide
help an orphan to find a way home,
guide a lost bird to the land of south
Forgive a child with bloody hands
a poor shaper who mars your work
with ugly deeds, and uglier thoughts
with cuts and scars befouls your song
Repeating the apology makes her think of home, and of Sydän, and that makes it easier. After sitting quietly for a while, she returns to the hotel, darkens the windows and takes out the ghost bullet.
‘Wake up,’ she tells the vasilev mind.
Where? Ah.
‘Hello, Anne.’
You.
‘Yes. The servant of the Founder.’
The vasilev mind laughs. Mieli gives it a voice, not a child’s voice but a vasilev voice, male, smooth and low. Somehow, that makes it easier, ‘He was no Founder. Clever enough to deceive us. But no chen, no chitragupta,’ the mind says.
‘I’m not talking about him,’ Mieli whispers. ‘You are done,’ she says. ‘You have hindered the Great Common Task. But out of mercy, I give you one opportunity to speak out of your free will before oblivion, to redeem yourself.’
The vasilev laughs again. ‘I don’t care who you serve; you are a poor servant. Why waste words to find what is in my mind? Get it over with, and don’t waste a Founder’s time with your prattle.’
Disgusted, Mieli shuts the thing up. Then she pulls the surgeon gogol from her metacortex and tells it to begin. It traps the vasilev into a sandbox and starts cutting; separating higher conscious functions, rewarding and punishing. It is like some perversion of sculpting, not trying to find the shape hiding in a stone but breaking it to pieces and reassembling them into something else.
The surgeon gogol’s outputs are cold readouts of associative learning in simulated neuron populations. After a while she shuts them down. She barely makes it to the bathroom before the sick comes, the remains of her lunch, stinking and undigested.
She returns to the vasilev with an acid taste in her mouth.
‘Hello, darling,’ it says, in an odd, euphoric tone. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘You can start by telling me everything you know about Jean le Flambeur,’ Mieli says.
Raymonde arrives late, taking care to walk across the small agora, hand in hand with a tall, handsome man with leonine hair, younger than her. He gives her a goodbye kiss. Then she waves at me. I get up and hold the chair for her as she sits down. She accepts the gesture, slightly cockily.
I have been sitting at the small restaurant she chose, outside by the heater. It is a strange little place, with plain glass doors and a blank sign; but the inside is a riot of colour and exotica, jars filled with exotic taxidermy, glass eyes and lush paintings. I have been replaying our first meeting, thinking about what she reacted to – not the mystery, but the banter. I have even altered my appearance subtly, nothing that could not be expected with more revealing gevulot, but appearing ever so slightly more mischievous. It is enough to warm her smile a degree.
‘How was the class?’
‘Good. A young couple’s daughter. Lots of potential.’
‘Potential is what it’s all about. Like your music.’
‘Not really,’ she says. ‘I’ve been thinking. You are bluffing. There is nothing wrong with that piece. I’ll have you know that this is the Oubliette, and I am a beautiful girl. That means this stuff happens all the time.’ She cocks her head, letting her hair hang loose. ‘A mysterious stranger. Serendipity. Seriously? Old hat.’
She rattles off two orders to the waiter drone.
‘I wasn’t really done looking at the menu,’ I say.
‘Rubbish. You are going to have the teriyaki zebra. It’s excellent.’
I spread my hands. ‘All right. I thought that is the way things are done here. So why did you agree to meet with me?’
‘Maybe it’s me who has been stalking you.’
‘Maybe.’
She eats an olive from the starter bowl, and brandishes the pick at me. ‘You were polite about it. You didn’t do a great job with your gevulot. Clearly, you are from somewhere else. That is always interesting. And now you owe me something. That is always handy.’
Damn. I query the pirate engine. It is still trying to find openings in her gevulot, without much success. But obviously she is doing a better job than it is.
‘Guilty as charged. I bought a citizenship. I’m from Ceres, in the Belt.’ She raises her eyebrows. It is not easy to buy a Martian citizenship; usually, it involves a ruling by the Voice. But the gogol pirates seem to have done an airtight job of establishing the backstory of this particular identity, carefully planting things in public exomemories here and there.
‘Interesting. So why here?’
I gesture at our surroundings. ‘You have a sky. You have a whole planet. You have done something with it. You have a dream.’
She looks at me with the same curious intensity she gave her lunchtime apple, and for a moment I wait for the bite. ‘A lot of people think that. But of course, we did have a horrible civil war first that unleashed self-replicating killing machines that undid the terraforming our slaver overlords managed to do before we killed them.’ She smiles. ‘But yes, there is a dream in there, somewhere.’
‘You know, no one has yet told me how often they—’
‘Attack? The phoboi? It depends. Most of the time you don’t even notice, or if you do, it’s this rumble in the distance. The Quiet handle all that. There are kids who go up in gliders to watch, of course. I used to do it when I was younger. It’s spectacular.’
The co-memory she gives me catches me by surprise. A smartmatter glider, white wings; a landscape of thunder and fire below, a dazzling laser tracery inside orange dust, a black avalanche of things breaking against the Quiet troops; a blinding explosion. And someone in there with her, touching her, kissing her neck—
I take a deep breath. The pirate engine seizes the flirtatious memory and starts churning through it.
‘What’s wrong? You look confused,’ she says.
I notice that the food has arrived; the delicious smell pulls me out of the memory, leaving me gasping with a sensory overload. The waiter – a dark-skinned man with flashy white teeth – grins at me. Raymonde nods at him.
‘This is a confusing place,’ I say.
‘All interesting places are. That’s what I’m trying to do with the music you had so many ideas about.’
‘You are trying to give your listeners a heart attack?’
She laughs. ‘No, I mean, we are confused too. It’s nice to talk about the Revolution dream, recreating an Earth, a promised land and all that, but really, it is not that simple. There is a lot of guilt mixed with the dream, too. And the younger generations don’t think the same way. I have been Quiet once, and I don’t want to do it again. And people younger than me, they see zokus coming here, and people like you. They don’t know what to think.’
‘What was it like? Being Quiet?’ I try my food. The zebra is indeed excellent, dark and juicy: she has good taste. Perhaps she picked it up from me.
She crumbles a piece of bread on her plate, lost in thought. ‘It’s difficult to explain. It’s very abrupt: when your Time runs out, the transition happens. The Resurrection Men just come to pick your body up, but you are already there. It’s like having a stroke. Suddenly, your brain works differently, in a different body, with different senses.
‘But after the shock passes, it’s not so bad. You become very focused in your work, and the concentration is quite pleasing. You are wired differently. You can’t speak, but you have these very vivid waking dreams you can share with others. And you are powerful, depending on what kind of body you end up in. That can be … exhilarating.’
‘So there is some sort of Quiet sex life?’
‘Perhaps one day you will find out, offworld boy.’
‘Anyway, it does not sound so bad,’ I say.
‘There have been endless arguments about it. A lot of the kids think it’s just a guilt thing. But the Voice has never had any proposals about overturning the system. You can ask why: could we not do it differently? Could we not use synthbio drones to do it all?
‘But it’s not that simple. When you come back, you are a mess for a while. You look into a mirror and see your other self. And you miss it. It’s like having a conjoined twin. You’ll never really be apart.’
She raises her glass – she also chose the wine, Dao Valley Sauvignon. I distantly recall it is supposed to have aphrodisiac effects. ‘Here’s to confusion,’ she says.
We drink. The wine is rich, brawny, with traces of peach and honeysuckle. With it comes a strange feeling, a mixture of nostalgia and the first flush of fresh infatuation. In a mirror somewhere, my old self must be smiling.
‘They wanted him,’ the vasilev says, eagerly. Every time it answers a question, the surgeon gogol stimulates its pleasure centres. The flipside is that it takes its time answering.
‘Who?’
‘The hidden ones. They rule here. They promised us souls for him, as many as we wanted.’