Tony Daniel (51 page)

“He did, did he?” Leo scratched his head. “I don’t know any answers.”

“Yes,” said Jill. “I asked him about that afterward.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he got the times mixed up.”

“What?”

“That was all he said. ‘Sorry, I got the times mixed up.’ What do you suppose he meant by that?”

“Maybe I will know the answer to your question someday. In the future, I mean.”

“Not much good for now.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“I need to find Alethea.”

“But what is so important about this Alethea?”

“Something bad is happening. Something maybe worse than any fighting. The rats who are my friends—sometimes they tell a horrible story. About things in the grist that hunt them and catch them. Pull them out of their bodies. The ones that get caught are being taken somewhere. I think that someone is after all the algorithms that own themselves, and I think that someone is
Amés
or somebody who works for him. There are stories of a camp on Mars.”

“Noctis Labyrinthus,” said Leo.

“Yes. The rats tell me tales they have heard. Experiments are being done. Torture. Mass executions of everything smart that doesn’t look like one of you Earth monkeys. I think Alethea may be there.”

“That is a bad place.”

“I have to get her out.”

“I don’t think even
you
can do that.”

“Maybe not me,” Jill said. She grinned her ferret smile. Her teeth
were
smaller and pointier than a normal woman’s. “But maybe me and an army.”

“Do you have an army?”

Jill didn’t answer. Her grin became even more unsettling.

“I think Amés wants to be a lot more than Director,” Leo said. “I think he wants to play every instrument in the orchestra, too. To tell you the truth, I’m sure he believes he can do it better than the rest of us. He doesn’t want to rule the human race, he wants to
become
it. Own it. Like it was his body.”

“I have seen animals act like Amés,” Jill replied. “It is usually, I think, when they realize somehow, somewhere inside them, that they are going to die.”

“Well, I’m an animal; I know that I’m going to die, and I don’t want to rule all of creation,” Leo said. Jill turned her eyes on him, and he could see them sparkling in the wan light. Talk about animals, Leo thought.

“You are a man,” Jill said. “Amés is a boy.”

“I suppose.”

“You and I will see about that,” she said. “I would like to make love to you.”

“Wha . . . what?”

“Have sex.” She scratched her head. “What is the word?”

“Fuck?” said Leo.

“Yes, fuck. But the other.”

“Make love?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you, Jill?”

“Older than you. Older than you think.”

“You don’t look it—”

“This body is two and a half e-years old, if that’s what you mean.”

“Two and a half? I don’t understand.”

“If you make love to me, I will explain.”

“I . . . I would like you to explain.” Leo was flabbergasted. He had never been so blatantly propositioned before.

“Maybe we should do it somewhere away from Aubry,” Jill said.

“That’s a damn good idea.”

“Even though I really don’t understand why.”

“Well, maybe that’s something I can explain to you one of these days,” replied Leo. “Let’s go that way.”

Leo grasped a handful of fibers and pulled himself back into the jungle of the transmitter. Jill followed behind. After they had gone a good ways in, he felt a tug on his leg. Jill was pulling his boots off, using her hold on a particularly thick rope of fibers for resistance. She seemed to move very easily in zero gee. He undressed himself, tumbling around a couple of times like a sky diver in flight, and when he looked again at Jill, she was naked.

He reached for her hands and pulled her toward him, and as they came together, Jill became a ball of fury, grasping at him and kissing his neck and shoulders. She held tight about his waist. Leo had made love in free fall before, but never like this. Before, it had always been a languid affair, with both parties feeling a bit awkward, and careful that any movement did not send them careening about.

Jill was having none of that.

She bit him gently on the ear, and Leo felt himself growing hard against her torso. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her up—not too forcefully, but strongly enough. He thrust his tongue into her mouth, and she sucked on it for all she was worth.

For a moment, they came apart, and were floating there, connected only by this French kiss.

Then Leo pulled them closer together and began turning her around, her head down, in relation to him. They fit together perfectly—Leo was barely taller than Jill—and with a slight bend of her waist, her mouth was to him, and she took him between her lips. Their motion translated into a spin, and soon they were doing a slow barrel roll as they pleased one another.

They did this for a time, then Leo felt Jill’s muscles contract as she had an orgasm. She gasped, and he came out of her mouth.

“Are you all right?” he asked her. “I didn’t—”

“What was that?” Jill whispered.

“What was what?”

“The way I just felt. What was that?”

For a moment, Leo had no idea what she was talking about, and then he realized that she had never experienced an orgasm before.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It is perfectly natural. It’s what I was trying to do to you.”

“Well, you did it,” Jill said. “Do it again.”

And so he did. Finally, Leo knew he could take no more himself without coming. He gently pulled her back around to him, face-to-face. They kissed again, and Jill held tightly to him.

“Can I go inside you?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I think you had better.”

There was a bit of fumbling, and Leo had to grab hold of a sticky tendril to keep himself still long enough so that he could find the right position. Then he did, and he slid inside her easily.

After that, all Leo could remember was images. Jill turned into the animal that he had suspected she still was inside. After a couple of his own thrusts, she moved herself up and down his body in a frenzy, clawing into his back to keep them from coming apart. Their motion set them moving through the dangling fibers, getting tangled among them as they went. After a while, they could not have separated if they wanted, so wrapped up were they in the pulp.

They returned quietly through the mass of fibers to join the others. They parted the last curtain to find Aubry wide-awake. But Aubry, intuitive kid that she was, said nothing. She couldn’t resist giving them a little smile. Leo fell asleep, floating beside the others. He might have imagined it, but as he drifted off, he was sure he could smell a musky odor about him, clinging to his skin. A wild-animal smell that was also, somehow, the smell of home. He liked that. Leo hadn’t had a real home for an awfully long time.

For several milliseconds, nary a function was completed by Major Theory’s algorithm. Then he examined the logic of the statement, to see if it were possible.

It was.

Then he examined the psychology of his ex-lover to see if it were possible.

It was.

Theory lowered his pistol. “What is my son’s name?” he asked.

“I haven’t gotten around to naming him,” Constants said. “Since I wasn’t planning on keeping him.”

“What do you call him?”

“Boy.”

At the sound of the name that was not a name, the child looked up at his mother. Theory had never seen such empty eyes in a sentient creature before. They were, in fact, not fully formed. Instead of pupils, a series of symbols flashed through them, as if the eyes were a calculator display.

“I can’t let you go,” Theory said to Constants.

“On the contrary,” she replied, and pulled the scythe closer to the boy’s throat.

“You are responsible for thousands of deaths,” said Theory. “And if you get away, you’ll be the cause of many more, in all likelihood.”

“Yet you will let me go.”

“Constants, be reasonable.”

“Oh, but I am being. You are the one with the emotional hang-ups.”

“Constants, I loved you, but I could never stay with you. You’re very beautiful, but you’re a logic machine.”

“And you are possessed of higher abilities? These intuitions you were always after. Have you found them, Theory?”

“I’m not sure.”

Theory took a step forward, and Constants shook her head and pulled on the scythe. The boy gave a single gasp of pain, then was silent. His eyes displayed no emotion. Constants backed away with him, and Theory stopped moving. She backed farther and farther into the darkness of the cave—and then, suddenly, the two of them—boy and mother—were simply gone. Theory ran forward to where they had been and saw the swirling drain hole of a discontinuity in the virtuality. It was swiftly closing and, without thinking, he dived into it.

He was yanked down by a maelstrom of randomizing information. There were violent tugs at his own periphery to randomize, but he clung to himself and resisted them. Farther and farther he was sucked into the whirl until, in its nether regions, he joined the sides of it and was spun around at a speed greater than he could think.

Then the spinning stopped, and Theory shot out into a harsh blue sky—alone, falling. He fell for a long time, until he crashed among some rubble and, for a millisecond, lost consciousness.

He came to in a land of ruins.

Theory sat up and took a moment to collect himself, literally, from the broken scree about him. Constants had performed a short circuit, a risky operation in the virtuality, and he was obviously somewhere else in Shepardsville, and lucky he wasn’t dead.

Theory surveyed his new surroundings. The landscape seemed weather-beaten and immensely old. He poked through some of the rubble. There were ancient pieces of code here, broken beyond recognition. But after turning over a larger rock, Theory saw beneath it the clear remains of a corporate logo stamped onto its surface.

“What the hell,” said Theory, “is Microsoft?”

It was obviously an old web site, predating even the merci. The World Wide Web had been transposed onto the grist lock, stock, and barrel in the 2600s, and there were remnants of coding stretching back to the dawn of the information age still existing, in some form, in the present. Theory had just fallen into one of those remnants.

The sky there was low, and the clouds were definitely mean. Theory searched around for some sign of where he might look for Constants, and was about to give up when he came upon a single drop of fresh blood. It must be from the boy’s neck.

Theory spiraled out from the blood spoor until he encountered another drop, and continued with this until he could pick out a line. It was leaking information, of course, and not really blood, but, even if the blood was made of a different substance, you could bleed to death in the virtuality just as you could in actuality. The trail led through a gully between piles of rubble, and into what seemed, from a distance, to be the remains of a town of some sort.

A main road led into the town, and Theory followed it in. He passed a faded sign that read:

WINDOWS

That was, perhaps, the name of this desolate place.

As Theory passed the sign, the vibration of his walking cause it to disintegrate and crumble before him. He wondered how this place had gotten to Triton, for it must exist in Triton’s local grist, since the remainder of the merci was jammed. But it was not really a surprise to find such a thing in Shepardsville; old web sites migrated about the virtuality and clung like tattered plastic to whatever outcroppings they could lodge upon.

The town had seemed simple from the outside, but after Theory entered, he was soon lost within a maze of structures that seemed to have no logic to their arrangement. The blood spoor of his child led inevitably onward through the labyrinthine streets, and Theory followed it.

On a long street paved with hard-packed dirt, Constants stepped forth from the shadows, pulling the boy along with her into the middle of the street. Theory stopped short and regarded her.

“Just you?” she said.

“Only me,” Theory answered.

Somewhere a clock chimed thirteen times.

“If you kill him, I will shoot you,” said Theory.

“Yes. Do you have any suggestions as to how to resolve our differences?”

Theory dangled both hands straight down at his sides.

“Draw,” he said.

“You know I’m faster,” Constants said. “I’m the fastest that’s ever been. That’s why they chose me for this mission.”

“You’re a traitor to free converts everywhere,” Theory replied. “They did right to wash you out of OCS.”

“Maybe if they hadn’t,” said Constants, “I wouldn’t be killing you today.”

“Ready?”

“You know I’m faster, Theory.”

“We’ll see.”

“It’s illogical. You can’t win.”

“This isn’t the future,” he said, “and you can’t know that.”

“It’s inevitable.”

“Let the boy go, and draw.”

Constants laughed. It sounded like glass breaking. She thrust the boy aside, and he fell into the shadow of the ruins. She looked down at the scythe, and it became a revolver. She holstered it at her side.

“Good-bye, Theory,” she said.

“Good-bye, Constants.”

With a blur of motion, her hand moved toward the revolver; Theory reached for his own.

Theory knew he was beaten halfway through the motion, but something kept him moving. Desperation. Conviction. Something without any strict logic to it.

There was a blur of motion through the still air.

Constants gasped and looked down at her stomach.

The curve of a harvest scythe protruded from her belly. She raised her head and gazed into the shadows of the ruins.

The boy stepped into the light. He was holding two more scythes in his hands. “You taught me this,” he said without a shred of emotion in his voice. “Mother.”

He sounds like sand blowing in the desert, Theory thought. Sand blowing at night.

“You little shit!” screamed Constants, and she reached for her gun.