Tony Daniel (22 page)

Claude shunted back to his dorm room feeling as if he’d been hit in the head with a wooden beam. He spent the next day fretting, and showed up for the following lesson exactly on time. Despacio was waiting in the sitting room as usual, but there was something profoundly different. With a start, Claude realized that the Berkhultz grand was gone. Now there was only a table and two chairs. Despacio was sitting in one; he motioned for Claude to take the other.

“There is something inside you,” Despacio began without preamble, “that will not let you play.”

Today the composer was dressed in a plaid shirt and blue jeans. He had grown a big mane of a beard whose hair was snow-white. This was, Claude knew, his “Ben Johnston” body.

“I have come to the conclusion,” he continued, “that we will never make a performer out of you. That is, you will never be a great performer, or even a very good one. I don’t know what the problem is, but it is beyond my skills to correct.”

“I’m sorry,” Claude said. Again the fist in his stomach, clenching.

“There is no need to be sorry,” said Despacio. “I am certain that it is beyond your powers to influence what has happened to you or the abilities with which you have been born.”

“Yes,” said Claude. “I suppose you’re right, sir.”

“Don’t give me that ‘sir’ bullshit,” Despacio suddenly exclaimed. “Don’t you think I’ve noticed by now that, with you, ‘sir’ is a term of anger, a pointed way of stabbing out using respect as a weapon?”

Claude was silent. He didn’t know what to make of Despacio’s comment.

“It doesn’t matter,” said the composer. “What matters is this: Do you want to continue with music?”

“Yes,” Claude answered without hesitation.

“Why?”

“It’s . . . the only thing I have.”

“You will never have it.”

Again Claude was silent.

“But there is something,” said Despacio. “Something harder. From now on, you and I are going to work on composition only, my boy. I think it is the only way”—he tugged at his beard, fixed Claude in his gaze—“for someone like you.”

Then the cool air-conditioning flowed in Claude’s mind. The fist unclenched. A little.

“I don’t care how hard it is,” Claude said. “Sir.”

“Of course you don’t,” replied Despacio, “because you are a hard thing, yourself.”

Claude crossed his arms and looked into Despacio’s eyes, now big and dark. “What is it you want me to do?” he asked.

from

Quatermain’s Guide

The Advantages of the Strong Force

A Guide to and History of the Met

by Leo Y. Sherman

For several years in the late twenty-fifth century, it seemed certain that even if it were possible, a structure such as the Met could not be built. The politics were all wrong; the science and engineering seemed chancy, if not misguided, to many of the decision-makers of the day. If not for the almost superhuman drive of Amanda Breadwinner, who would later be the Met’s first chief engineer, the Met might never have been built.

Breadwinner was born in Dublin, in the old E.U., in 2429, the daughter of American immigrant writers. She grew up in Ireland, then obtained her graduate education at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. The mid twenty-fifth century on Earth was dominated by the ECHO Alliance, a consortium of transnational information brokers. Growth and commerce, though sluggish, were generally steady. For the arts and sciences, however, it was an era of stagnation.

This was the century immediately preceding the astonishing 2500s and 2600s when the discoveries of Merced would revitalize physics from the ground up, and create new technologies that weren’t dreamed of in the malaise of the 2400s. It was generally believed around 2450, that all of the fundamental discoveries in science had been made, and the task remaining for present scientists was to refine and reconfirm the work of their predecessors. In the arts, the 2400s are known as the Ironic Age.

Breadwinner had wanted to be an architect, but was dissuaded after learning that she would not be licensed to produce a new work until she had produced three perfect copies of previously built edifices on the same scale as the projected new project. Since she had mathematical aptitude, Breadwinner moved into the sciences and searched until she found an area where original work was being done. And in the 2400s, the only technological advances that were being made were occurring in the field of nanotechnology.

In the pre-grist era, nano was being perfected as a method of construction, and astonishing feats were becoming commonplace—that is, in the laboratory. Because of the odd architectural and structural engineering practices of the day, new methods of building were looked upon not as forbidden but, worse, as vulgar and déclassé. Fortunately, by that time construction had begun on the first of the planetary orbital tethers, and nano was allowed to be used for the completion of their construction. The principles of “space elevators” had been known since the twentieth century. It was clear even to pre-space-age humans that putting an enormously long string into geosynchronous orbit about the Earth would provide a much easier and more cost-effective means of getting out of Earth’s gravity well than did the reaction-mass rockets that had then not even made it to the moon.

It was in researching the twentieth century in preparation for some of the background material for her thesis that Breadwinner first discovered a way out for her frustrated artistic side.

“For better or worse, those people did not let the past dictate the terms of the present,” she said. “I never was much of a philosopher, but I thought this sounded like a pretty good way to live. And if the world didn’t want to let me . . . well, I knew how to make and use nano, so the world had better watch out.”

Breadwinner entered a series of engineering competitions, and when her designs inevitably lost because of their new approaches, she, and a group of nanotechnological compatriots whom she gathered around her, built the structures themselves, using micro-instantiation processes. In one case, they even built a bridge in two nights. The winning proposal had outlined a
five-year
construction period, and a cost several million times greater than Breadwinner’s, who financed the construction by selling her car, a personal transport used on Earth at the time.

Such antics soon brought Breadwinner into conflict with the authorities, in particular with Bron Hofink, who was the Sub-sub-librarian of Technology in the ECHO Alliance and so, in charge of an immense bureaucracy that oversaw all major construction on Earth. Hofink was a dedicated postdecadent who professed to be annoyed by anyone who claimed they could produce “anything new under the sun.” In a famous hearing in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., of Earth, Hofink and Breadwinner clashed before an audience of several million during a broadcast on the old Web, the electromagnetic predecessor to our merci.

It was in this hearing that Breadwinner made an offhand comment about the possibility of the Met. Enraged by Hofink’s scoffing, Breadwinner proceeded to build a convincing case for the Met in an extemporaneous tirade (Breadwinner’s temper was legendary). At the end of the hearing, Hofink yanked Breadwinner’s engineering license, but several influential politicians in opposition parties were watching the webcast, and, in the following year, a combination of the Anarchy, State, and Utopia parties swept the ECHO Alliance away in the planetary elections. Breadwinner, a longtime Anarcho-libertarian, was given Hofink’s job.

Beginning construction on the Met was not as simple as selling a car and building a bridge on Earth. Breadwinner proved up to the task, however. Within ten years, she had cajoled and flattered politician after politician into providing the necessary funds to complete the space tethers and to begin construction of the Aldiss, the first radial-like cable that would connect the Earth and the Moon. In another ten years, the Aldiss was complete, and was a complete success. Initial construction began on the Diaphany. The year was 2475.

Breadwinner continued in her job until her retirement in 2511, coincidentally the year of Raphael Merced’s birth. She took the position as the director of the newly established Breadwinner Labs within the first Met bolsa to be constructed on the Diaphany, Apiana. It was twenty years later at Breadwinner Labs that a young engineer named Feur Otto Bring, who suffered from incurable Tourette’s Syndrome, would obtain his first internship in nanotech construction techniques. Bring would soon be fired by Breadwinner after questioning her parentage during a laboratory dispute. Bring would then end up at Bradbury University on Mars, where he eventually met Raphael Merced, and the grist as we know it today was invented.

“The situation at the hospital has gotten a lot worse, hasn’t it?” Sherman was out of the virtuality, back in his apartment. He spoke to the walls of the spire, and Dahlia’s voice answered from a speaker.

Dahlia’s voice was the same smoky alto, with the same cold delivery. Since the divorce ten years before, Sherman had kept in sporadic touch with his ex-wife. They shared two sons, after all, although both children were long gone to their separate fates. It was the death of Teddy, the eldest, that had led to the breakup between Sherman and Dahlia. When Teddy died, Sherman’s normal irascible nature had become, for a time, absolutely odious. Repulsive. It had certainly repulsed Dahlia.

“There’s a huge crush of incoming patients at the hospital,” she said. “Broca grist breakdown in all the patients. There are sixty . . . no, sixty-two people who have come down with the malady. And that’s just those who have been brought in by someone.”

“Communications warfare,” Sherman said to his ex-wife through the merci.

“What are you talking about?”

“You attach riders to incoming information. Viruses. In the more sophisticated scenarios, you let them build up to a certain critical mass. And then something triggers them, either internally or externally.”

Sherman bit his lower lip, frowned, touched his chin once more. There was definite real stubble developing there. Maybe it was time to regrow the beard. Shaving was a pleasure he perhaps would not have time for.

“The original personality is erased,” he said.

“I can’t believe it’s come to this, Roger,” she finally said. “I can’t believe anyone is capable of it.”

“Believe it,” he said.

“Your people . . . you arrogant . . . I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say such a thing. I know you’re not like that, despite everything . . . that you would never—”

“You’re wrong about that,” Sherman replied. “And I hope that you can get used to the knowledge.” He took a breath, buttoned his jacket, getting ready to return to the base. “You see, there is nothing I won’t do to protect those whom I’m sworn to.
Nothing
. War is horror. Complete, unmitigated horror. That horror is my business. Bringing that horror back to my foe. Causing him to understand the extent of it, the completeness of what he has wrought. I’ve never thought otherwise. I hope you and I . . . I hope—”

“Well then,” Dahlia replied. “I guess we’d both better get back to our jobs.”

Sherman nodded. “Yes.” He wanted to apologize. For something. For everything. He might never speak with her again. Things were going to get that bad. He knew they were.

“Roger?” Dahlia said.

“Yes?”

“Good luck.”

“Thank you.”

“Stop this madness.”

“I will try.”

This time Dahlia signed off before he did. And that was that. He would do as she asked. It was as clear a duty as any other.

His off-duty time was over—it was going to be over for a long, long time, Sherman suspected. He made his way back to his hopper. Within minutes, he was springing into action over the spires of his city and into the idiocy that it was his job to somehow hold at bay.

Despacio slipped into his brown study. It was not really a study, and it was not really brown, but that was what he called it. He was a thing not of flesh and blood, and he did not feel the need to sustain the illusion when he was alone. He imagined this place, his special place, might seem to a flesh-and-blood human like a swim in a still, muddy lake. There were “regions” of warmth, and “regions” of cold, and a bottom that wasn’t really a bottom at all, but something shifting that was never the same “shape.” Of course he had no way of knowing what swimming in a lake might actually feel like.

He considered many things, all at once. He was transcribing a piece of his for violin. He thought of who might play it. For a moment, he considered making it impossible for the human fingers to perform. But that would be a trick, and Despacio had long ago dispensed with tricks of that kind. Besides, somebody would probably figure out how to do it. It seemed to him that he had lived a long time. There were many reflections of him in many possible worlds who had died so that he might live. Quantum evolution of artificial intelligence, one of the programmers had called it. But Despacio did not consider these reflections as flawed. And he did not really think they were dead. They were inside him, membranes stacked one on top of another and rolled so tightly that they resembled a single line, a single entity. But he felt their potentiality, the infinite possibility within him. All those lives waiting to come to life in his music.

He was writing a new piece. It was a simple cycle of songs, taking for text some of the poems of the American Emily Dickinson. Her verses fit precisely into the signature of ancient church hymns, the common time. He was enjoying working with the simplicity and the deceptive grace of that form. What was coming out of his “pen,” though, was an eerie series of melodies that frightened Despacio, though he did not know why. He did not believe in ghosts, but he believed in something like them when he was working on his cycle.

And Despacio was thinking of his pupil, Claude Schlencker. The young man was devoted to music, and there was music somewhere in his soul—but how to bring it out? Perhaps Schlencker was best suited to remaining a listener for the rest of his life. He had good taste and an excellent ear. But Claude wanted so much more.