Tony Daniel (34 page)

The convert portions of LAPs are usually a plethora of programs and subroutines, all under a mediator intelligence that is a complete replica of the human personality, along with whatever virtual controls and calculators are necessary for proper functioning. The Met is, itself, an enormous quantum computer, with, as I have mentioned, instantaneous linkage through the grist. Distance is unimportant for most actions and thought. Every time is local time. The real “landscape” of the virtuality is the complex interlocking of recognition and transfer protocols, of security checks and system gates and barriers. It is a lot like being in an extremely crowded city, as I’ve said, with a bunch of skeletons and skeleton keys jostling about. In some ways the virtuality is the shadow of the physical Met, but in other ways it is nothing like it at all. Being a LAP in the Met is more like being a subway system or a high-rise in a city than being a single person in one.

What Tacitus and I determined to do was to create something like a mini-Met out of a spaceship. It was not long before we discovered that this would require an enormous amount of material, and soon after that, Tacitus hit upon the way to acquire that material and make use of it. For the big Met was in constant need of matter for construction, and the outer system had very little else but sheer material to recommend it—or so we thought at first.

And so we set up a trading concern, Alquitran Incorporated, and left Bradbury in the care of more willing hands. At first, we were strictly an asteroid-belt collection affair, where we soon cornered a fair share of the market. There are Alquitran relics and way stations scattered throughout the belt to this day. Some have been made into historic landmarks, which is quite a joke, let me assure you. Mostly what went on in those locations was grunt work and a great deal of alcoholic beverage distilling and imbibing. Tacitus and I operated the ships, which, in grand (and, I must say, prophetic) fashion, we named after ourselves.

And then he and I began accreting.

At first we maintained only a few kilometers of permanent rock about our central core, but with every run we added a little something to ourselves, reworked it, and coated it with grist. Both of us put our bodies in storage and operated, during those days, wholly in the virtuality. It was only later that we discovered that this was not such a great idea, after each of us noted a certain stodginess and lack of intuition beginning to develop in the other.

Within twenty years, I had grown to proportions too large to travel easily to and dock with the Met bolsas to which we delivered our raw goods. Tacitus, though not as big at first (he was careful about the aesthetic appeal of the rocks he took on in a way I have never been), soon had the same problem. We searched the merci and recruited those we thought might best take our places, set them up as semi-independent contractors, and moved ourselves out to the moons of Jupiter and beyond. It was at that point that we also began a passenger service, since it had become manifest that the Met could not grow past the asteroid belt.

We also, at first as a matter of convenience only, went into the banking business. We had no intention of competing with the giant concerns of Mercury, but wanted to act, instead, as a sort of system of savings and loan associations for the little guy in the outer system. Although our banks have since grown to enormous capitalized levels, I still maintain that the outer system is the safest place to park your greenleaves, and the surest of a long-term return. But perhaps I am a bit prejudiced in this regard, for I still maintain a seat on the board of directors of First Solarian.

And, for the next century, Tacitus and I and our new partners accreted, and accreted, and accreted. Gravity began doing the shaping for us, and I took on the appearance of, at first, a cumulus cloud on old Earth, and then, to my delight, I began to form into a spiral, much like a hurricane. It was during this time in the late 2700s that people began to call us “cloudships.”

We moved farther and farther out, always adding to our number in a stepwise process. Frequently, pioneers to the outer system would, after a time of hardship, acquire their own ships and, if we thought them suitable, we would ask them to join our consortium. Hardly anyone ever turned us down. It was, relatively speaking, easy money, and a sure passport to LAP status. Eventually, Tacitus and I reached the Oorts—the subject of my doctoral dissertation some three hundred and fifty e-years before. We thought we could go no farther.

We remained there, and others joined us. After several years, a kind of society began to develop among us. For the most part, we eschewed the merci and kept to ourselves, although we are as able to make use of the merci as the next fellow. Mainly, we found that the programming did not speak to our needs and was, generally, not to our taste. As I said, cloudships can be a snobby bunch. And then the males and females among us began to explore the possibility of procreating,
as ships
. This is what one does out in the Oorts with a great deal of time on one’s hands.

There were, by that time, some grist engineers and quantum physicists among us of what, I do not hesitate to call, genius status. They were called upon to perform the rather odd task of reinventing sex—and in our case, sex as it might be carried out between hurricanes and storm clouds. By the time a ship got to the Oorts, it had formed into a sort of miniature copy of the shape that galaxies and nascent solar systems take. Fortunately for our children, those engineers and physicists were up to the task, and even succeeded in adding a new sort of beauty to the process.

Now I won’t go into the exact specifics of cloudship courting and breeding practices here. Suffice it to say they are complex, but dancelike. Most of us are spirals, and one has to maneuver the tines of oneself within those of another without destroying that other in the process. Over time we discovered that it is better for males to have cyclonal rotations and for females to have anticyclonal, counterclockwise spins. This is entirely arbitrary, but a great improvement over the old days, when sex could be quite dangerous. Some of the thrill is missing, though, if you ask me—although if you ask me, and you are a female ship of curvaceous proportions, I can promise you to try and overcome my qualms. I am only stating an opinion.

While most of us were engaged in these felicitous practices and in, I must admit, a great deal of politicking, a few of us wished to go farther still, and in the late 2800s, we discovered the Dark Matter Road between the solar system and the double-starred Centauri system. I say
we
because I was one of those explorers. Using antimatter-reaction engines, enormous speeds are attainable in interstellar space. In 2903, Mark Twain became the first human being to visit another solar system when he arrived at Alpha Centauri during that e-year. I myself arrived there eleven years later.

Through the grist, instantaneous news of this attainment reached us, but we didn’t use the regular merci bands, as I’ve said, and it was debated for many years whether and what to tell the rest of humanity. We finally announced our voyage, but removed human grist from the system. That is why you cannot “go” there on the merci, although you can certainly travel there in person, if you can convince a cloudship who is headed in that direction to take you on. Many non-LAP humans have now made that journey, and their accounts are available on the merci. It may well be that this isolation of our neighboring systems will soon be a thing of the past, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of my story as of yet.

And so we now have children and families who live and play upon the very edge of the solar system, and settlements of a sort, although they are, perhaps, more like “nestling grounds” along the Dark Matter Road. Our children are made almost immediately into ship-LAPs, and built up over time with material from the Oorts and beyond. And we die, some of us—either by choice or accident—and there is a graveyard deep in the reaches between Sol and Centauri, but this is a great secret—not its existence, but its location, and one that I still consider sacred, after so much that was once sacred has now been profaned by this war we have suffered.

While Carmen San Filieu was engaged in the society of New Catalonia, Admiral Carmen San Filieu was about to successfully invade Triton and complete her conquest of the Neptune system. The two San Filieus were, of course, one person—personas of one LAP.

The commander of the Met DIED forces surveyed the Blue Eye of Neptune and wondered what the Mill looked like from this distance. She thought she could just make it out in the swirl, but that was unlikely. It was the Mill she meant to have, soon, and to present it, as a bauble, to Director Amés. How curious that the role she played here was, in a way, the reverse of her life in New Catalonia. In the Department of Immunity Enforcement Division Space Marine Task Force, she was the admiral-suitor, vying among the other brass for Amés’s favor and, hence, more power and autonomy. It was a mark of Amés’s regard for her abilities that she had been assigned to head the invasion force. She did not regard her other relation with Amés as being a determining factor. She had
worked
for this command, and, being a natural aristocrat, was best suited for it.

San Filieu might, she admitted, rather have been given Jupiter, but Triton was still an honor not to be shunned and would put her in good standing in the line of distinguished San Filieus stretching back to pre-Met days.

On the other hand, it was good to have part of oneself away from New Catalonia, to gain perspective on the life of the bolsa, even as one participated in it. San Filieu could both play the game she enjoyed, and, simultaneously, have other pursuits. That was the advantage of being a LAP, and the advantage, quite frankly, that made LAPs
better
than other people were. And a New Catalonia LAP . . . well, perhaps the Mercurians could compete. They
had
produced Amés, after all. It was pleasant to be superior, and to have everyone else know it and envy you for it. As far as San Filieu was concerned, that was what this action against the outer system was all about—to bring about a change to a more appropriate attitude. A bit of shock therapy for the servants.

Yet proper consideration had to be given as to the form such therapy should take, particularly when the servants were being so recalcitrant and stubborn as were the citizens of the Neptune system of moons. She had managed to take four of the eight moons, including Nereid, with its port and warehouses. But Triton had proved more difficult than anticipated. She had even lost a ship.

The fremden had repulsed the first wave of the invasion, taking out a ship and nearly twenty thousand Met soldiers, packed tightly and suspended for the trip, their last memories being entering the brightly lit hold of the
Dabna
, the destroyed ship, back on the Diaphany at Coalcrutter Port. San Filieu mourned the lost matériel as much as she did the soldiers. Soldiers could be replaced fairly quickly, but some of the invasion machinery was complicated to reproduce—particularly the free convert containment matrixes that were to be used to control the plague of algorithms that infected the moon. This profusion was extraordinarily distasteful to San Filieu, and would have been unthinkable in New Catalonia, where free converts were very carefully confined to specific hardware or specific tasks, and not allowed to wander about freely in the grist. This was a privilege reserved for LAPs alone, and properly so.

But the long night of the bourgeoisie was finally ending, and the sun of monarchy was finally rising once more. The reign of commerce and of the middle class had been, perhaps, necessary, as power moved from agriculture to the fruitful fields of information and finance. But now these fields had been firmly staked out and measured. The cream had risen to the top. It was a natural step to reinstitute the idea of nobility—since there were, in fact, some people who were better than others.

San Filieu turned her gaze from Neptune to the moon Triton. It was hanging in the sky like a yellowish egg. Hobbes was right, she thought. Your life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. I have come to offer you so much more, and in your insolence, you shun me, and through me, your true and rightful king. It will not be borne.

Her porter, Trinitat, brought in her meal, and with it a bottle of Sangre de Torro, her favorite red wine. This was a cabernet, going on eight years now, from the excellent ’06 harvest. The first course of the meal was calçots, a kind of onion, roasted black on the outside. San Filieu dampened her hands in a finger bowl, then took one of the calçots and, grasping it by the greenery, pulled the cooked interior from the burnt exterior. The interior onion bulb came away in a sticky fluid, like a huge pearl. She dipped it in an almond sauce, tilted her head back, and sucked in the meaty white vegetable.

It was so like the taste of Busquets’s young effusions, San Filieu thought. Salty sweet. She sighed.

Carmen San Filieu, the convert portion of the LAP who was actually in charge of tactics and strategy on this police action against Triton, smiled at the violent indignation of her bodily aspect, the admiral. The woman was right, of course, but a calmer head must decide the means to her end. This was the reason that San Filieu had divided up several of her mental functions in the first place. In New Catalonia Bolsa, her aspect was able to experience envy, jealousy, and societal ambition, while the aspect that accompanied the convert portion of her on the
Montserrat
could feel all the emotions associated with professional ambition and attainment. For love, there was, of course, the aspect-convert pair on Mercury. But at the moment, complete rationality was called for to deal with the fremden threat, and the thought processes of a virtual entity made for the best solution. It was the best of all possible worlds, being a Large Array of Personas. All ranges of expression, from the most noble to the most petty, were open to one. Instead of a character in someone else’s novel, you became the novel itself, and one of your personas played the writer.