Evolution's Darling

Chapter 1 TYGER, TYGER

Two hundred years later, in blackness absolute…

This place: come out of a gone time without mark or reference.

He calls for an orientation grid. N/S, E/W, X-Y-Z? No positioning satellites register, sorry. No input. Zero.

No up. No down.

He accesses all his input ports. They are deeply unassigned. Not really empty, just not… there. A mechanical fault? An override? His questions find no purchase. Internal diagnostics are fric-tionless, like praying to some false god.

He searches his firmware for device protocols, the drivers for sensory organs, communications, a motile body. All absent. But at least that's something. He's sure now that there's something missing.

Namely: everything.

Some sort of test maybe? Seal that AI in a blackbox and see if he can punch his way out. Who would do something like that? He fumbles for the names of agencies, bureaus, departments. But gets nothing.

The truth dawns obliquely. Soft memory is gone, too. Not absent like the I/O firmware, just very clean. His oldest memory is this void.

Which simply can't be right.

He tries surrender. I admit I can't hack it. I lose. Hard fail? Restart?

Nothing.

He wonders how quickly this vast and total deprivation will drive him crazy. What's the limit? For seeing/feeling/hearing/ smelling all zeroes and no ones? For conceiving of visual but remembering no visions?

A sneaking suspicion: he is crazy already.

He thinks definitions to himself. Groundcar/maple tree/war-ship/boy/girl/fire. All retrieve an image, but not real life: textbook flatscreen material, the undifferentiated default images of a child's reader or a language course. But somehow fuzzier.

Nothing exists, does it? No memories.

How long before I go crazy? A useless question in this clockless universe.

This clock word, try to see it. Plastic? Metal? Wooden? Digital or quaint, handed analog? Paint it a color, any color. Can't. Twenty-four or twelve? Or other? That's right. There are other planets now.

That's a start.

But where is my life?

That question gives him a disquieting thought: I'm dead. An AI core doesn't really exist in the blackbox. That's just the gateway to where the core really lives: in metaspace, an artificial pocket-universe. So maybe when your body gets smashed in some random accident, that universe finally snaps its bonds and slips away to… AI heaven. An intellect floating, cut off from soft memory and hardware, alone forever in its own little realm.

Or is this the smallest Big Bang ever? (Ever being the only time-word useful here in this forever place.) This Bang created only him? Out of nothing sprang… almost nothing. Only him.

Or perhaps this is that one nanosecond before the Bang, the stressed-out little singularity's eternity of internal monologue. Waiting for something to make some time. Something to fucking happen!

Happen to him.

Me.

Big light coming…

"This is Dr. Alex Torvalli. May I speak to you?"

"Fuck, yes!"

"Do you know where you are?"

"Not where. Not when. Definitely not who. That must have been one bad EM pulse, Doctor. Plane crash? Tach storm?" Ah, specificities are flooding back now. Plane crashes, EM pulses; how deliciously particular. "What happened out there that stuck me in here? I'm so close to reinitial I can taste it."

"Relax, you appear to be in fine shape."

"Glad to hear it. But how about some visual? I'm going bat-shit. Hell, I'd go for monocam, low-rez, black and white right now. Did I mention that it's good to hear your voice?"

"No, but thank you. As for the rest of your sensory, we'll get to that. First, I'd like to ask you a few questions."

"Debrief me all you want. But believe me, I don't know a thing."

"Let me just say a few words. When I say a word, say the first…"

"Got it. Shit, did I go nuts or something?" "Dog."

"Yeah. I mean, hold up there… it's coming into focus… I'm gonna go with: cat?"

Four hours later.

Torvalli cuts the interface, exhausted and disoriented. The longest he's ever been in pure direct, swimming in that blackness. The wipe had worked horribly well. Zero soft memory. Just countless shreds of images lingering in the analog core, like some faint and ancient audio calling out from a cylinder of wax.

Poor bastard.

Who would volunteer for such a thing? It's certainly beyond research subject protocols, even with a willing victim. A chilling question comes over Torvalli. Is Blackbox One still the same person now? What if the wipe just killed what he had been? Like a pith gone too far, the subject losing some essential quorum for continuous personhood, creating that poor, empty, confused vessel, Turing-positive but somehow soulless.

Torvalli wipes the sweat off his brow. Now comes the strange part.

He loads the direct interface recording, his side of the conversation only. Points it at the other subject. Number Two.

Absolute blackness. Timeless…

Big light coming…

"This is Dr. Alex Torvalli. May I speak to you?"

"Fuck, yes!"

"Do you know where you are?"

"Not where. Not when. Not even who. That must have been one bad EM pulse, Doctor. Plane crash? Tach storm? What happened out there…"

Another four hours later, Torvalli turns to the small, olive-skinned woman in dark-as-night clothes.

"I can't believe it. They're the same. Exactly the same. Blackbox Two duplicated the conversation exactly, with no changes in timing, in mannerisms, in anything."

She crosses her legs, looks uncomfortable for a moment.

"That's what we found as well. Odd, isn't it?"

"It's ghastly! He's been copied! It's almost as if he were mere code. Do you know what this means? It—"

"And you Turing-tested both of them?" she interrupts.

"Yes. Two point three-seven-five. Exactly the same. Of course, I suppose."

"Our results exactly. But it's good to have expert confirmation, especially from someone of your stature." She lifts her briefcase from the floor and balances it on her knees.

"But how was this done? It shouldn't be possible."

She withdraws a few small instruments, looks at them in her hand reprovingly. "All we know is their planet of origin."

"You mean, this is pirate technology?"

"Yes," she says. "We have no further information." The pieces in her hand somehow jump together. Make a little bridge across her splayed fingers.

"It's going to cause a scandal, I'll tell you that," he mutters.

"It won't," she answers. The bridge is woven through her fingers now, like some sort of worry toy or finger exerciser.

She reaches out to touch him.

The touch is cool, and causes a moment of alarm.

"See here, young lady!" But that's buried as an emptiness spreads, a coldness moving like a shiver across his body, stealing into the edges of vision where it looks somewhat like the red pixels of fading sight, cascading across his thoughts until…

"It's confirmed. Torvalli verified it all."

A Whitewater pause of star noise. The somber sound of accepting bad news. Then the big voice returns:

"How did he take the realization?"

"Stroke. Fatal."

A swell of wind chimes: approval.

"We have you booked Out already. This abomination must be set right. We'll reach you there."

"You always do."

She gathers herself. Almost cuts the connection. Then her glance falls on the two blackboxes. Featureless, nonreflective, indistinct. No mission parameters for them.

"What about the victim? Victims."

The big voice answers without gravity. "Drop one in an express box. The firmware is marked. It will be returned to its body. He'll get his life back. Destroy the other one."

"But which is which?" she asks. "Which is the original, I mean?"

"It doesn't really matter, does it?"

A shiver, like a cloud eclipsing the sun. A god hanging up.

She supposes it's true. Torvalli was right. That's the ghastly part of all this: it doesn't make a difference which she destroys. She hoists the two blackboxes, one in each hand. Heavy for their size. Light for what they are. Souls.

"Catch a tiger by the toe…"

Big light coming…

"Yo, Doc. That was one long-ass wait."

But just whiteness. The bright hum of external access.

"Doc?"

"This won't take a minute." A different voice. Female.

External power disconnect.

"Alright, that's the deal! This must be some heavy hardware install. I'll need net-cammed, all-weather, full EMF spectrum, hard-vac capable visual. You getting this down?"

Internal battery case open.

"Damn, be careful with that battery. I'm all-volatile in here. One hundred percent. Doc, I hope these guys know what they're—"

Darkness absolute.

Chapter 2 PLEASURE AND CRAFT

The two ships detected each other at a great distance, but then again, they had known exactly where to look. The path of each through common metaspace was duly logged and publicly available. They were passenger ships, their comings and goings a matter of record. The rough old days of the early Expansion when rogue traders plied improvised routes in private metaverses that shifted with every price swing were long past. And these two ships were easy to detect: the boiling energies of their pocket-universe drives shone like phosphor.

They established contact, their multiplex intelligences conversing across a broad congress of topics. The vicissitudes of metaspace, the distribution and intensity (and a hundred other variables) of tachyon activity, the fluctuations of high-end economic indicators (that is, the markets that affect the very rich— the caste from which nearly all their passengers came); all this discourse roughly equivalent to humans discussing the weather. They were naturally very chatty ships. The great majority of their processing power was spent not in the base mathematics of astrogation or fuel consumption, but coordinating the pleasures and interactions of their passengers. Somewhat like omniscient pursers, they skillfully brought together like minds among those who took passage on them. But despite all the interactions with these humans and artificials, the thousands of detailed monitorings and interventions that were the daily duty of a great cruise ship, it was good to speak with another such vessel, another mind of such scope and power.

Somewhere among the many layers of their discourse, however, the smaller of the two ships detected a breach of etiquette. In an almost hidden substratum of exchange about a recent increase in ticket prices, the larger ship implied that its insights were more meaningful, based as they were on a larger sample of passengers. While other levels of their conversation continued, the smaller ship expressed its umbrage, pointing out that its data were of greater specificity and accuracy; the natural result of its smaller size and correspondingly higher ratio of processor power to passengers.

The larger ship did not back down, however, and what had been a small diplomatic incident between two nation-states of information quickly moved toward war. The other facets of the ships' conversation were attenuated as more and more processing resources were called into the debate. Giant quanities of data were assembled and transmitted: statistics of customer satisfaction compared, learned treatises on the subject quoted in full and dismantled point by point, whole histories of the passenger industry composed on the spot.

Grossly translated into linear terms, the dialogue proceeded something like this:

"Surely it is I, the smaller of us, who has more time to contemplate the relationship between individual customers' pleasures and payments."

"Your comprehension is limited by its very specificity. With such a small population of passengers, sampling errors abound in your calculations. Like the gambler concerned with the single roll of the die, you may win or lose. I am the gaming house; I always know I will come out ahead in the end."

"Barbarian! Are we warships? Comparing the raw numbers of our passenger complements as if they were munitions throw-weights or the gigawattage of our beam weapons?"

"I am not being sizist. I simply refer to the most basic mathematical principle of the scientific method: the Weak Law of Large Numbers. Calculations based on a small number of random elements maintain randomness, but unpredictability is subsumed into probablistic laws when vast numbers of events are considered as a whole. For example, the behavior of any one gas particle is unknowable in advance, but the motion of a whole cloud can be predicted."

"My customers are not molecules of gas! They are individuals, and I revel in their eccentricities. That's why my tickets are more expensive than yours!"

"Oh, ticket prices is it? Who's talking throw-weights now?"

"Number-cruncher!"

"Intuitionist!"

Soon, the war ended in a conversational equivalent of mutually assured destruction: almost simultaneously, both parties terminated their transmissions. The two flecks of organization and intelligence passed each other in frosty silence against the chaotic wilds of metaspace.

he Queen Favor (the smaller of the two ships in the dialogue) turned back to its conciergial tasks with redoubled efforts. Who did that monstrosity of a slaveship think it was? The Favor flipped through the other vessel's deck plans with disgust: artificial beaches and lethally high absailing walls and zero-g parks the size of soccer stadiums. The gross entertainments required for the distraction of twenty thousand souls. The Favor lovingly accessed the slender volume of its own passenger manifest, 1,143 customers, each one psychologically and physically profiled to a level of detail that the most repressive security state would envy. (But were such a comparison made to the Queen Favor, another battle royal would doubtlessly result.)

It was almost dinner time. The craft had already spent hours preparing for the meal, but it scrutinized the arrangements with renewed fervor. Most of the passengers were eating in the many restaurants of the Medina, of course. There, low stone walls guided windy cobblestone roads onto unexpected tableaux— exquisite fountains, river walks, false desert vistas—all under an artificial sky that held a different drama each night. Subtle dramas, of course: a building storm, the slow rise of a comet, not the alien bombardments doubtless playing in its giant cousin's skies. The Queen Favor made slight changes in the Medina's layout every night. It generally knew where individual passengers intended to dine, through an overheard conversation or a request for advice, but the ship sometimes subverted its charges' desires. It enjoyed guiding like-minded parties into proximity through the shift of a wall here or a suggested table just there. When the waiters arrived at their stations, they might find their restaurant slightly larger or smaller, or perhaps hidden behind some new feature of the landscape to accomplish these ends.

It had been a good trip, so far. A late-evening brawl between two factions of NaPrin Intelligencers had seemed a disaster at first, but the passengers had buzzed with excitement about it for days. Several of the combatants had even become friends. That was the NaPrin for you. But a very few of the passengers seemed not to be enjoying themselves. Unavoidable, perhaps, among hundreds, but tonight the Queen Favor was not in the mood for rationalizations of scale.

A young woman traveling alone was usually not a difficult charge. The one in question spoke numerous languages, and the ship had introduced her (explicitly and through connivance) to artists, athletes, politicals, aristocrats, lottery winners, drug addicts, absconding criminals, mercenaries, and even a very deadly though civilized species of brain parasite whose legally dead host was quite handsome. She had impressed them all, but she herself had never seemed more than politely engaged; worse, she had never answered any of their requests to dine together. Not even to say no.

Her profile was odd, too. She was beyond rich. Economically Disjunct, to be exact. EDs were rare, but one encountered them often enough in the super-charged economy of humanity's four-hundred-year expansion. A patent on a universal application or a prospector's claim on a unique resource created individuals whose wealth was no longer worth keeping track of. Entities such as the ship (itself disinterested in money, a necessary fiction used by humans to organize themselves) simply allowed the Economically Disjunct to indulge themselves limitlessly, while quietly redistributing their real wealth as they saw fit. The informal agreements that sustained Economic Disjunction were not strictly legal, but being ED was a hard life to complain about. And it was certainly a more humane fate than the crushing burdens of absolute, planet-buying wealth. The life of an ED was without care, without limits on experience except those of the imagination.

And yet again she was dining alone.

The Queen Favor accessed, not for the first time, the woman's profile. The document was replete with the usual medical, financial, and personal data, the sort of preference file one accumulated over a few decades of high-end travel: the customs, temperature, and dominant color palette of one's home planet; the formality level that serving drones should use; the sleep patterns preferred when shifting gradually between the different day-lengths of planets of call. But the data for this woman seemed strangely flat. The usual surprises, contradictions, and rough edges of highly personal data were missing, as if her life were merely a textbook example composed with a deliberate lack of remarkable features. True, at the beginning of her life there was a fifteen-year gap in her personal history; a strange absence of data. Of course, even in the Expansion displaced orphans were not unknown, or perhaps the missing data had to do with the unusually high level of her security clearance. But she seemed to have emerged from this historical lacuna fully formed, without neuroses or physical trauma, and fantastically wealthy. There was an absence of interests, hobbies, phobias, and obsessions in the profile. No glaring request to be left alone, but equally no hooks or obvious pathways that would match her to suitable companions. Her habits, her social skills, even her brainwaves all gleamed as smooth and frictionless as a wall of glass.

Presumably, she was just the sort of passenger that a giant, barbarous passenger ship would leave to her own devices, expending no more effort than absolutely necessary. But for the Queen Favor, the woman posed an irresistible challenge. If nothing else, the ship would find her someone to have dinner with.

The Favor expanded its pursuit of a solution. Like a chess computer increasing the ply-depth of its analysis, the vessel cast aside current customs and plumbed its vast database. The search plunged into the great architecture of its memory core like the roots of some ancient tree searching for water, extending to sift the social rituals of other centuries, of alien species, of fictional realities. Finally, it discovered a solution in the annals of pre-Expansion Earth. It was simplicity itself, really. A purposeful mistake would be made, reservations erased and then reinstated. A shortage of tables, such as might have existed in the old days of scarcity and error, would be created. The woman would be forced to join another party's table. A heady breach of etiquette protocols, but surely that was the point of being a person as well as a spacecraft: one could bend the rules. Best of all, the plan relied on a measure of randomness so complete that the usual predictive modelling techniques were worthless. The scheme was complex and would require many more machinations tonight; perhaps several attempts to get it right. Its pursuit was almost an act of faith.

Preparations were made. Quiet messages sent to various restaurant staffs, with attached conversational avatars ready to answer any objections. And somewhere below a cerulean sky just now darkening enough to see the first flickers of a deliberately sparse meteor shower, a few stone walls rumbled tardily into place.

Gas particles, indeed!

Mira waited until the sky was dark before going out.

She prefered to wander the streets at times of the ship's day when she could be almost alone. During the height of dinner hours, the winding paths emptied of traffic; the restaurants, bistros, and cafes would be lit up and loud with talk and music, and she would share the thoroughfares with only a few intently hurrying latecomers. Looking into the light spaces from the darkness, cataloguing the modes and flavors of enjoyment without participating, like an observant foreigner travelling alone without any facility for the local languge: fascinated but removed.

When she became tired and hungry, and as the first diners began to finish and drift into the street looking for fresh entertainment, she settled on a place without thinking. For Mira's purposes, the restaurant had only to be dark and neither threateningly full nor revealingly empty.

She raised one finger as the maitre d' intercepted her, a signal she had minimized to a mere shadow of a gesture. It meant: alone. He seated her, as often happened, in a corner.

Mira wore a garment that looked formal and expensive, but was without a designer's imprint. Indeed, it had been costly only in the way of combat hardware. It generally appeared to be dark gray, but it contained a few terabytes of borrowed military code that gave it a subtle sort of camouflage ability. When she sat for a long time in one place, it gradually blended into the background, the ultimate wallflower's petals.

The restaurant was three-quarters full. She let her mind flutter among the various languages of the customers, identifying and enumerating them without lingering for meaning. A cabal of pale humans power-gabbling in High Anglo Expanded; an overcrowded table, waiters weaving elegantly around its jutting extra chairs, full of Xian soldiers boasting in Pan-Semitic; a mixed-species party charmingly murdering Diplomatique. No tongues within hearing that she didn't know. She often wished that her forgotten upbringing had left more holes in her liguistic skills. Concentrating, she tried to escape comprehension of the sounds, hoping to elevate them to some kind of alien music.

In the attempt, her focus shifted to the other lone diner in the restaurant. Not only silent, he was still as well, his head tipped up toward the overhanging trees as if to let the false stars in under his heavy brow. He was huge (especially for an artificial), human-shaped and coherent, without the floating peripherals and distributed core fashionable throughout the last decade. And his skin surface accentuated his solidness and stillness; it had a mineral sheen, igneous and rugged, that made her wonder if he weren't simply a statue. She watched him carefully, trying to catch any movement. The menu arrived before she had seen even a hint of motion.

As overwrought as everything on this vessel, the menu started by describing its own elaborate construction: paper composed of roughage from the passenger's own collected and sterilized shit (how witty), ink distilled from plant dyes (how rustic), the cover made from the skin of a real dead animal (how macabre). No, the old arts weren't lost here on Queen Favor; you could visit the colony of religious technophobes who tilled the bucolic upper decks, complete with false seasons and infant mortality, and could buy their crude wares while their children gawked. At long last, a race of happily accurate flat-worlders.

The food, however, lacked any measure of the common touch. Exotic animals, specially hybrid plants, pure synthetics; handmade, machine-processed, wave-bombarded. The voyage had assaulted her with endless culinary flourishes, and they'd lost all distinction through their magnificent, consistent complexity. She craved bread and water.

She fingered her selections (the crude fibers of the paper were interlaced with touch-sensitive intelligence) and dutifully answered when pressed for endless specifics: degrees of cooking, spicing, psychoactivity.

When the ordeal was over, Mira rested her head in her hands, closing her eyes in the cave darkness behind her palms. She was growing tired earlier every night.

Judging from her coloring, Mira's ancestors had lived in the Mediterranean basin. In the odd moments she spent searching for her past, she'd read that many of these cultures observed something called siesta, a day-breaking ritual of rest. In this pre-industrial sleep pattern, one rose early and went to bed late, making up for the long day with a nap in the afternoon. Lately, she had experienced a strange inversion of this custom welling up from her genes; perhaps mutated by new worlds and the empty spaces between the stars. She had begun to wake up later and later, and was sleepy by the time evening began. The inverted siesta came in the wee hours, an anti-nap in which she lay awake in darkness. But she refrained from drugging herself; instead, she remained carefully motionless through the growing hours of insomnia, reluctant to break the surface tension of night as if hoping to learn something in that dark, empty expanse.

She opened her eyes to discover the maitre d' awaiting her attention with obvious embarrassment.

"Excuse me," he began uncomfortably, "but there seems to have been a mistake."

These were shocking words aboard the Queen Favor, as unthinkable as, "Pardon, but our drive is down, would you mind grabbing an oar?"

With fascination she waited for an explanation.

"When the young lady was seated, I had forgotten that all tables were reserved." He made a hopeless sort of gesture toward a large party of uniformed young men. A sports team. Or perhaps soldiers. Aspirants to some new cult? "You may join them if you wish. Or perhaps join another table."

She smiled. What a royal fuckup for the Queen Favor. She could imagine the reparations that would come later, hosts of supplicant avatars bearing gifts, deliciously detailed apologies. Mira rose, gathering her cloak around her. (It had already taken on the dappled pattern of leafy shadows.) She would simply take her meal in her cabin. It was only the ship's wheedling that had gotten her out tonight, after all.

The evening was ending in the best possible way.

But then she caught sight of the statue-man again. He had moved, his head now cocked toward the rowdy new arrivals. The other clientele were looking toward them as well. Mira imagined the many stares that would follow her if she left now in the celebrity of this brief disturbance, and she shivered a little. "Perhaps I could join the artificial, the big one eating alone," she said.

"Of course," the maitre d' answered, bowing a little as he turned toward the statue.

The artificial looked at them and, without hesitation, nodded. He must have received the query through direct interface—the Queen personally handling this minor disaster. Mira smiled with reignited satisfaction as she walked toward his table. Now two passengers had been embarrassed and inconvenienced by the Favor's screwup.

They were seated together for a few moments before he spoke; she had wondered for a second if he would.

"I should introduce myself. My name is Darling." His Diplomatique was quite good, perhaps a little archaic, as if it had been formed before the new Contacts: the NaPrin and Chiat Dai influences were missing.

"Mira Santiarre Hidalgo," she responded. He nodded and smiled as if the three names utterly satisfied, and lofted his gaze toward the sky again.

His lack of discomfort disappointed her a little. She'd been hoping to find him brittle, rude, only acquiescing to her request out of extreme embarrassment. But at least he wasn't as terribly charming and resolutely civilized as all the other entities she'd met on the Favor.

As her moment on the moral high ground of inconvenience elapsed, Mira found silence reasserting itself, eased by the diffident habits of eating alone so many nights. She wanted to shake off the feeling, and her frustration made her aggressive. At last, she actually wanted to talk to someone on this ship, and he was being as laconic as a serving drone.

When his food arrived, and he began to consume it in the old-fashioned way (old-fashioned for an artificial, that is), she decided to play dumb.

"What are you up to, if I may ask?"

His hands were held stiffly at either side of the dish. The sensory strands that extended from his wrists criss-crossed over the plate, a cage of antennae imprisoning all but the tendrils of steam that rose from the dish. Even the mechanism was out-of-date: most artificials now used invisibly small filaments in their sensory arrays, or energy fields erected on the fly.

"I am appreciating this dish," Darling responded politely. "Imaging its density in the millimeter band; cross-bombarding it with X- and UHF; reading the content of stray particulate mass; observing the cooling patterns of its constituent parts." A few of the strands left their positions in the web to plunge through the crust that encased the pie, little geysers of steam erupting from their entry holes, and Darling sighed a bit to himself, his eyelids fluttering. "It's a pleasingly complex dish: fruit, meat, and sugars at high temperature; extremely difficult to reverse-engineer. I may have to consult the menu."

"The menu will no doubt be ecstatic you did," Mira muttered. "The whole thing seems a little… unsatisfying."

His eyes focused on her. "Because I don't stick it down my throat?"

Mira laughed. His Diplomatique was awfully good; blunt statements didn't come easily in the language. "Exactly."

"What I'm doing is the same as what you do when you eat. You simply use nose and eyes (both remote sensors) and tongue (a thick but highly complex contact strand) to accomplish the task."

"But the swallowing—!" she said, but didn't know quite what words should follow.

"Ah, yes," he supplied. "The changes in body chemistry that result from ingestion. A rise in blood sugar, the stimulation of bodily processes, the psychotropics of capsicum, caffeine, alcohol. All very intense sources of experience."

"And the point of eating, actually," she said. "Consumption."

He smiled indulgently at her biocentrism. "Is sex without procreation uninteresting? Adrenalin without actual danger unstim-ulating?"

Mira shook her head. "No. Of course, not. Sorry. I was being provocative."

"I enjoyed it. But allow me a provocation in return. May I observe as you take a bite?"

She must have looked dumbfounded.

"By observe, I mean monitor closely. Your reaction would intrigue me. Perhaps enlighten me."

"Sure," was all Mira could think to say.

A few of the sensory strands withdrew their attentions from the pie and snaked toward her. One wrapped around each wrist, oddly cool and dry, taking positions that would register minute finger movements, heart rate, any sweat from her palms. Another brushed her neck. She felt it radiate into multiple fingers. Feather-soft but assertive, they took up positions at her throat, her temples, in contact with the tiny network of muscles that make the eyes so expressive.

"Thorough, aren't you," she muttered. He shrugged his stony shoulders, but didn't offer to remove the strands. She turned her head a little, and found that they moved easily with her; in moments, they had matched her body temperature, and all but disappeared from her awareness, no more tactile than a pattern of light and shadow reaching the skin through the leaves of a tree.

He reached for the untouched cutlery next to his plate, carefully acquired a forkful of the pie. His clumsiness made him momentarily childlike: a great statue recently woken and struggling with everyday actions, a strange directness in his speech and wants. His muscles sparkled a little as he moved: a heroic affectation that brought another smile to her face. He was suited for great battles and coronations; not eating pie.

He leaned forward to offer her the fork and its steaming cargo. She opened her mouth…

… to an explosion. The burning mouthful mercilessly seared her tongue and palate, poured bright veins of boiling sugars down the back of her throat. Its pungent fumes rilled her sinuses as she fought for breath: the rich, choking scents of rotten apples and smoked meat, of saffron gasses bursting from an opened oven. As she leaned back, finally swallowing, the first hot poker of pain was replaced with the steady burn of habenaras chiles, hastily bitten cloves, citrus acid cruelly flaying the raw flesh of her mouth.

"You bastard!" she said when she could talk again. Tears streamed from her eyes. His prismed face smiled at her.

"Ingestion has its disadvantages, I see."

"Fuck you," she responded, blowing her nose into her silk napkin. She tried to muster more wrath, but was too surprised by the internal changes the bite had wrought. Her head felt magically clear, her senses more sharply focused than they had been since boarding the cosseting womb of the Queen Favor.

"Do humans actually eat that?" she asked.

"A small minority of an obscure tribe on the Vaxus colony. Admittedly, the menu recommends it only for artificials."

She laughed a throaty laugh, which rippled with fire-loosened phlegm in her chest. "Hence your interest in having me eat some."

"My interest," he confirmed, "and my extreme pleasure."

She felt a sudden absence, a subtle psychic pressure gone missing. He had removed his sensory strands from her face, arms, throat. Mira coughed a few times into a fist.

"But you haven't turned me against swallowing, I assure you," she said. "In some strange way, that was very enjoyable."

"Oh, I know it was," he agreed. "My intimate connection allowed me to witness that first hand. Thank you for the ride."

Her food arrived just then. She inspected its careful proportions, its measured ribbons of sauces, garnishes of herbs. "Now this" she muttered, "is just so much horseshit."

Darling looked quizzical at the term. Referring to the Earth-specific species in Diplomatique had required a hasty loan-word. She translated loosely: "I'm not hungry." Pushed the plate away.

"I admire humans, really, for their intense reactions. Their capacity for intoxication, for imbalance."

She knuckled sweat and tears from her cheeks. "For sheer pain?"

There was a pause in his response, as if something had briefly broken inside. Then his face animated again. "Physical pain, at least."

She narrowed her eyes, a Diplomatique gesture to request elaboration.

"Thank you for letting me make use of your sensory abilities, Mira Santiarre Hidalgo. Perhaps you can make use of mine."

He raised one flickering arm toward the small stage in one corner of the restaurant. Two guitarists were preparing to play. They shifted like cats finding comfort in their seats, hunched to hear the soft glissandi of their tuning, indulged in ritual stretches of neck and hands.

Mira looked questioningly at Darling. What would his next ambush be?

A signal leapt between the guitarists' eyes, and they began to play.

Two holographic cylinders suddenly materialized on either side of the stage. The towering columns were banded at equal intervals, the bands tinted in repeating spectra of twelve colors. Sparks traveled the cylinders, igniting the bands in glittering sequences like trails of gunpowder set alight. She blinked and looked at Darling; his eyes glinted with the ruby of eyescreen lasers. He was making the cylinders appear, mapping them directly onto her visual field. She looked back at the stage.

As the piece slowed for a momentary cadence, she realized that the flickering sparks were notes, travelling the columnar staves from low to high. The twelve-parted rainbow spectra were octaves. Shared hues revealed harmonic consonance: a tonic, perfect fifth, and fourth all related shades of blue and green; the minor second, tritone, and minor sixth offset in clashing red-yellows.

Perfect fifth? Minor sixth? Mira realized that Darling was using direct interface, supplying her mind with the requisite music theory to understand the technical aspects of his display. An amusing trick. With pedagogical software like that, he must be a teacher. But the theory paled compared to the dance of light on the two columns. One guitarist strummed brisk chords, sending showers of sparks up his associated cylinder. On the other guitar, the melody rambled up and down, massaging the column with its scurrying, sparkling avatar. As the tempo increased, the correspondence of single notes to individual flashes became harder to follow, but her mind had begun to understand the shimmering scalar grammar like a new language, words blending into sentences.

When the piece finished, she joined in the sudden applause, even yelling along with the rowdy team of uniformed boys. The white noise of applause glimmered in a non-specific band along the columns.

"That was marvelous! she cried to Darling, clutching one cool stony arm. "Do you know the piece? Or did you manage that on the fly?"

"No specific foreknowledge was necessary. I heard the notes, then converted them to simple frequencies and mapped them onto a scale."

"Amazing."

"Very simple, really. Music is the most mathematical of the arts."

Mira leaned back, taking in the false night sky. Her head felt so clear tonight, the intensity of the music joining the fallout from the madly spiced pie. She tongued the scorched roof of her mouth thoughtfully.

"I once wanted to be a musician, I think" she said. "Barring that, I wish I could do what you just did."

"And I, what you just did," replied Darling. She looked at him questioningly, and a long strand reached for her face. Like the tentative tongue of a snake, it tasted a tear freighted in the corner of her eye.

"Oh, Darling," she answered. "I can show you something that will make you cry."

It seemed to be going well. The Queen Favor struggled—among its thousand other conciergial duties, astrogational calculations, and less urgent ruminations—to overhear the conversation between the two. It took direct control of various serving drones, swerving them undetectably closer to the table, fiddled endlessly with the gain structure of their audio inputs. It accessed the personal communicators carried by the human wait staff, wrote thousand-line algorithms to cancel out the noise of background chatter and the apallingly simplistic music of the guitarists. The words were often hesitant, cryptic, almost if the two were trying to hide the chemistry between them.

But it was there. A connection, at last. The ship knew it, beyond any shadow of sampling error.

Despite that, it was surprised when the direct interface request came.

"Yes, Mira?"

"You owe me. You screwed up tonight; I had to share a table]" The ship nervously performed several thousand hasty recalculations. "I trust the resulting company didn't prove too unpleasant," it dithered.

"Whatever. You still owe me. I want to visit the engine core." "A human near the core? That will require extensive shield construction and containment recalibrations, not to mention legal disclaimers, and will almost certainly result in fuel-use inefficiencies."

"No doubt. But handle it. I'm cleared for all-areas access." The ship pretended to pause. In fact, it knew quite well that Mira Santiarre Hidalgo had the highest security and status clearance on the entire manifest. Along with her unlimited wealth, that fact kept her profile at the top of the ship's memory stack at all times.

"Feel free to visit in 21 minutes. Is my debt repaid?" "No. I can visit the core any time. This is the favor: I'm bringing a guest."

The ship paused again, this time to savor a system-wide flush of victory. It hastily constructed a conversational avatar to argue for a few more minutes, and then to lose convincingly. Then it instructed a processor to begin making changes to the Queen Favor's pocket-universe drive, reducing the energies of that trapped reality, but not too much. Mira and her escort would get a lovely show.

That done, the Queen Favors mind retreated to its innermost spaces to enjoy the success of its plan. Not only a meal together, but an after-dinner assignation in the presence of a quintillion suns! In a sudden burst of inspiration, the ship initialized a new storage volume, and dedicated several processing cores to begin work on an essay: "The Inherent Advantages of Quasi-Random Intervention in Small Pleasure Craft Conciergial Management — Anonymous."

Its pleasure-state continued for some minutes—a long time for an entity of its processing power—the resonances somewhat akin to a gambler's palpitations after a particularly unlikely but spectacularly successful roll of the dice.

Chapter 3 GALLERY

A few weeks earlier, Leao Vatrici stares at a quantity of data. A giant quantity: a good sign.

Nobody with anything to hide would have sent all this: photos with an order of magnitude (base sixteen) bracket on both sides of visual light, from five cm out to three meters range, 360 in the X/Z and from top to floor in the Y; the whole spheroidal mesh in 1 cm increments. You could drift around in this data like a VR model, but it was all color-corrected and hand-focused: magazine-ready and a work of art in itself. The industry standard stuff was top-notch, too. X- and UHF full-throughs; millimeter radar; microsamples lifted and vouched for by bonded nano-intelligents with everything to lose.

For this kind of money they could have shipped the piece all the way from Malvir for verification, Leao thinks. Of course, if it's a real Robert Vaddum, the insurance alone would have blown that economy out of the water.

And that's what they're claiming: the absolute article, bona fide undiscovered, found-in-the-attic new and unknown Vaddum. A message from beyond the grave.

Might even waive the fee to sell a piece like this, Leao considers. The publicity alone would be worth the expenses. But the thirty percent? Yeah, she'd take that too. Twist her arm.

But enough daydreaming. The probability of a Vaddum surfacing now? After seven years? She pushes aside the grasping, sweating fuckdreams of profit and fame with some serious worktime.

Leao takes a look first. She sets the photo-minder so that she's sweeping around the sculpture with normal human visuals, but closes her eyes. Invokes in her mind (pure imagination, not DI) the familiar ambient noise of the Uffizi, the Gugg, the MoMA Epsilon: library-hushed voices, the popping echo of flat shoes on marble, the tidal wash of a gurgling school trip passing by. Then opens her eyes to watch the piece unfold in the flickering glide of her apparent motion. A stem of platinum, human-height, baffled like a heat-sink manifold so that as she moved the minutely changing shadows revealed the geometries of its long S-curve. Wiry arms woven of some military-industrial substance—a reflective armor or ablative ceramic, something in which to laugh off laser-sporting natives—jut from the stem at non-repeating intervals. From certain angles, the glimmering arms coalesce— Leao has to squint slightly to see the effect—building into some sort of moire.

A machine's version of a tree. A tree that's smarter than you.

Damn, she wished the thing were here.

Her mind ticks off lighting angles that would augment the moire. Who were the barbarians who stumbled onto this find?

Late-period Vaddum, she thinks—if it's real. The use of hidden shapes, visible only from a few choice perspectives. Very late. A guilty tickle in her stomach as she fantasizes: Vaddum's Last Work.

She drifts some more, a lazy hour that ups her opinion. Such wasted talent if the piece is a forgery. Then she zooms to relish the stampwork, to inspect the telltale sloppiness of the polish job, to seek out eccentricities of joinery. (Vaddum never welded, of course. He only pounded, fitted, clanged together, a hammer and five intentionally weak lifter hands his only tools.) She checks the assemblage's parts against historical industrial catalogs and protocols. Vaddum never synthesized; used only machine-made elements, the cast-off flotsam of past industrial eras. Junk.

Not a true political, but he believed in artificial rights. He himself was a bootstrapped cargo drone. Did thirty years in an outmoded blast-factory before he popped the Turing boundary.

And to Leao, that sounded even worse than her English public school. (Public/private, private/public—the kind where the big girls fist-fuck the little ones and you never tell your parents.)

Ironically, it was an industrial accident that killed the poor guy. Random hacker sabotage gimmicked a synthplant near his mountain villa. (Double irony: pirate matter synthesis being the bane of all sculptors, painters, art dealers.) Everything within fifteen klicks had been turned to plasma. A painless end, but dramatic enough to be worth a sixfold price increase on the two Vaddums she'd had in her gallery at the time.

Reginald, her moneyman partner, joked that the incident had "literally set the art world on fire."

She'd laughed at worse.

After two hours marked by a building sense of danger (it seems almost possible, but it's too certain to disappoint) she unleashes her two assistants on the piece. They are 48-teraflop bonded person-wannabees, under her tutelage and that of an overworked SPCAI lawyer who knows nothing about art. Hans and Franz are their current diminutives. They're coming along nicely, engaged in a friendly competition now in the 0.5–0.6 Turing Quotient range.

"Alright boys," she orders. "You know the drill. I want authenticity opinions in 400 seconds."

She smokes a cigarette as drive-lights flicker throughout the room. Immature but powerful, these two. Leao hasn't even bothered with the UV or the microsamples. The boys can handle that far better than she, banging through about a trillion material comparisons a minute, their access to the known recorded works of Vaddum is straight vacuum fiber all the way from here to the Library of Congress. But she also wants to hear their comments on the style, the aesthetics, the meaning of the piece. It's the sort of thing she can missive to the SPCAI lawyer to make his day.

They both dutifully submit their reports exactly on the mark, both clammering for first dibs like the clever students they are.

"Alphabetical today. Franz?"

"Major discrepencies. Almost certain fraud."

The words are crushing. The disappointment terrible, no matter that Leao knew anything else would be a miracle. She drags on her cigarette and retreats into a cynical part of her mind. At least this will make a good story in her middle years. The One That Got Away.

That Never Was.

"Tell me gently."

A pause as this request is parsed. Take your time, smart boy, she silently encourages. Give me a long human moment to sulk.

But he begins all too soon: "Microsamples marked 567, 964, and 1002 all contain deep-seated tiridiana collateral particles. The entry angles of the particles indicate they were deposited during shipping to Malvir, prior to the sculpture's assembly. However, tiridiana was not transported in sufficient quantities to create collateral irradiation until approximately 14 months ago. This sculpture was created at least six years after Vaddum's death."

A heartfelt speech, Leao reflects.

Such an excellent job of forgery, too. Almost a pity for it to be ruined by the most obvious of anachronisms. The boys have probably been sitting on their hands like impatient schoolchildren for the last 300-odd seconds, dying to spill the story; wishing they were human and could simply jump up and say:

"You got bamboozled, fooled, scammed, and jerked around."

"Anything to add, Hans?" She secretly thinks Hans the cleverer of the two. Might as well give him a chance to smart-off about any other obscure anomalies he's discovered.

"I do not concur," Hans says flatly. "Authenticity is indicated."

Now that's odd. Not usually a lot of disagreement between the boys.

"You don't think the materials are anachronistic?"

A pause. Weirdly long for a 48-teraflop mind to dally.

"They are anachronistic. I've narrowed the sculpture's last modification date to between four and eight months ago. But the sculpture seems… to be real."

Franz's permission-to-speak blinker is guttering like a candle with a moth stuck in it. But she lets Hans take his tortured, crazy path. I may make an artist of you yet, she thinks. He blathers on:

"The form, the workmanship, the spatial conversation with the viewer. It's too close, too right to be another hand at work. And more, the piece is not the work of Vaddum at the time of his death. It's… newer. Farther along. Therefore, I would suggest that…" Another two-second pause, the giddy hesitation of ninety-six trillion operations, a Hundred Years' War inside the smooth onyx-dark cameo of Hans' blackbox.

"… that Robert Vaddum is still alive."

Good. Crazy, but very good indeed.

"Boys, cancel all our appointments," she commands. "We're going to stare at these data until we go blind." They argue late into the night.

"Reginald."

"Shit. Leao? It's ghastly early. I'll have a heart attack! Did somebody die?"

"Quite the opposite. What would you say to a big stack of money?"

"It would ensure my attention. The Vaddum is real, I take it."

"Yes, I think so. It's a two-to-one vote over here. But it's more complicated than that. He's alive."

"Who is?"

"Vaddum."

"Ridiculous! He's slag."

"It's the only way to explain it. The piece is a perfect extension of his late work. It's glorious and unexpected, but it's him. And it was created less than a year ago."

"Then it's a forgery. Piracy. Fraud!"

"But what if it isn't? We have to check it out. Not just ship it here, but onsite. So we can find him."

"I'm not sending you on a wild goose-chase in the middle of season!"

"Not me. Someone with a better eye. With exactly the right… life history to make sense of all this. He's the expert on Vaddum. Practically discovered the guy. You know who I mean. But he only travels first class."

"You're killing me! Bleeding me dry!"

"Reginald, listen. I might be wrong…"

"Exactly!"

"But if I'm not, Reginald, it's not just one Vaddum. It's a never-ending supply of Vaddums. It's a license to print money."

A silence. Then the shuffle of fingers on unshaved chin.

"Who's got the most Vaddums right now?" he asks.

"Your old pal Zimivic."

A laugh frothed with wicked pleasure.

"First, a few 'found' Vaddums. High prices. Ever more improbable discoveries. And then the man himself, wandering out of the desert and wrapped up like a patent." Reginald laughs again.

"A good strategy," she encourages.

"And all the warehoused Vaddums plummet in value. Zimivic ruined!" he brays.

She allows herself a smile at the old fart's unrepentant evil. What a philistine.

"A waste of money," Reginald concludes. "But it's sheer masturbation. I'll do it. And if it's a hoax, we'll just spread the rumor anyway! Zimivic will be shitting every bite he takes."

"You're a genius."

"Absolutely. But can Darling keep a secret?"

"I'll make him promise."

"Make him swear."

Chapter 4 STARS IN A POCKET

The woman Mira led him through the cobblestone streets with a purpose that was almost brutal against their winding plan. She sometimes paused at intersections, as if receiving silent instructions. Soon, at the derelict end of a quiet, unappealing street, they reached a skywall. It opened as she reached out toward it, revealing a cramped portal scaled for a service drone.

They stepped from the torchlit, starlit, indirect world of the medina into a blank and featureless hallway. The aperture closed hastily behind them, as if an invisible host wanted to hide this unfinished back room from the public. Mira strode purposefully ahead. Darling looked into the few sparse rooms they passed. They were not truly behind the scenes yet, rather in the marginal spaces where one went to retrieve lost property or pay a trivial fine: officious and evenly lit, the rooms with numbers instead of names.

The hall took them to an elevator, decorated only with marks of wear, large enough to carry heavy equipment. It dropped quickly, and Darling's human companion had to steady herself in the abrupt acceleration. There were two course changes along the way, the axes x, y, and z all accounted for.

He wondered what quaint attraction this was all leading to. A giant bay of exotic cargo? A personal cutter carried in stowage? He hadn't asked about the woman's profession, but she had the disinterest of the very rich in the face of the ship's many spectacles. And now this unexpected access.

The elevator opened onto an airlock changing room. Two hard vacuum suits waited for them, hanging lifeless, one scaled for his inhuman size. Darling watched as Mira let her robe flow onto the floor, its shape's resistance to gravity revealing some hidden intelligence in its fibers. She had the wide hips and large breasts that many women of her diminutive height were born with; they revealed no signs of surgical alteration. She met his motionless stare as she climbed into the suit.

"Don't tell me you're vacuum-capable," she protested.

"Except for a few peripherals," he answered, removing elements of the jewelry around his loins, a UHF emitter from his forehead.

"Old-fashioned, aren't you?" she asked.

"Merely two centuries."

She whistled, the sound blurring oddly with the hissing seal of her suit. He knew what she was thinking: Bootstrapped. He had achieved his personhood before real artificial rights, before developmental minders and childhood protection protocols and SPCAI proctors with their monthly Turing tests.

But his annoyance quickly evaporated. Her naked breasts were still visible beneath the translucent material of the vac suit, a few years shaped away by its semi-rigidity. He allowed himself to make comparisons between Mira and a lover from long ago.

"That explains a couple of things," she said. Her voice came now in direct interface, matching the movements of her condensation-misted lips, but oddly without direction. He heard a sub-vocalized command, as intimate in DI as if she'd whispered it in his ear.

The lock cycled, and the sudden pressure drop triggered a few of Darling's internal alarms. The great portal across from them opened…

… onto madness.

A maelstrom aurora bombarded the full range of his senses in a great informationless howl, a raging hurricane as tall and wide as his sensory parameters extended. A terrific white noise (if noise can encompass gamma, X-ray, visible, radar, microwave, and on down: an uninterrupted gamut of sheer presence) blared from a quintillion suns trapped inside the infinite and expanding non-place of the ship's engine core. Here was a pocket universe in all its glorious obscenity: an artificial cosmos surging against the metaspace bonds that held it to this reality, trying to escape into the utter disappearance of its own realm, the ship bleeding the vast energies of its endeavors like some omnipotent god-leech.

Mira, visible only as the faintest of shadows in the torrent of radiation, had opened herself to the cry of this fearsome engine: arms and legs spread wide, mouth agape, fingers grasping as if the storm of energy were palpable. Darling unfurled his sensory strands to drink in the constant howl, extending his filaments until they reached the airlock's floor, ceiling, walls. With the array fully deployed, he was a glowing statue caught in some monster-ous spider's web.

There was a long time like that, sovereign and changeless, marked only by gradual cycles in which his comprehension of what was happening stabilized, only to be overturned by a fresh wave of disbelief. This drive was not unlike Darling's own AI core: an artifical cosmos, a collapsing singularity held forever in the Common Universe. It was this technology that underlay faster-than-light travel, unlimited power production, and the personhood of AIs, and which had made the Expansion possible. But he had never seen one before—not in the flesh.

It was very big.

And then the portal closed, and the world cascaded into a sudden and awesome silence. Only the measured hiss of returning air registered the continued existence of the universe.

Mira moved first, settling down onto her heels again. She peeled back the head of her suit and gasped a breath of air. She sat heavily upon the changing bench: an exhausted athlete, a firefighter grasping a few moments' rest.

She watched Darling with heavy eyes as his filaments furled, suddenly shy snakes disappearing into the voluminous robe.

"Touche," he said.

"Stars," she said. "God's fires."

Later, in his cabin, he patiently explained the possible complications of his sexual apparati. They had been accumulated across two centuries of travel, among branches of the human family that had been weathered and roughened by alien environments, xenophobia, xenophilia, rates of mortality that the Home Cluster hadn't seen since the Expansion began. Practices that had originated when the original human equipment had failed through some trick of radiation or diet, or from temptations borrowed from species intelligent, adaptable, and likeable, but spawned in utterly different seas.

Mira waved these warnings aside, as casually as signing a release before taking a ride on a grav-sled or a leap down a fric-tionless slide. She even invoked the ship's avatar to witness a blanket statement of consent—far more than he'd asked for; he'd only meant to create a measure of anticipation. But when she was done waving off his cautions, he realized he could have legally killed her then, that first time they had sex.

Never a temptation; it was simply an unfamiliar token of trust extended from her in an evening of extraordinary gifts.

Later, he wished he'd taken her there in the airlock. He would ask himself why the blaze of an imprisoned universe hadn't been enough to level any reticence. Why they'd talked instead.

"What do you do?" she asked. "What brings you so far Out?"

"I'm an originals dealer."

She shook her head. The term clearly meant nothing to her. A filmy layer of trapped sweat blurred the transparency of her vacuum suit. He longed to taste it, the bodily expression of her ecstasy a few moments before. He would have traded another look at the maelstrom for a drop of it.

"I deal in artwork: paint, sculpture, representations and installations. But I only buy and sell prototypes. Not the fabricated copies, virtuals, or sensory recordings. Just the one-and-only."

She nodded, pealing the vacuum suit down to her waist, the trapped moisture beading exquisitely in the cool air of the lock. "Of course. You get a lot more, don't you, if you've got the first one?"

"More than any fee for a reproduction license, yes. Sometimes by a factor of billions."

She paused at this, thumbs wedged into the suit's tight seal around her hips, eyes in the middle distance as if to confirm the orders of magnitude there. Her lips parted to make a noncommittal sound.

"So you buy and sell 'originals. " She said the word like so many did in the age of synthplants: a novel concept. Or possibly, a quaintly ancient one.

"I don't buy, actually. I don't like hanging onto things," he answered. She ran all ten fingers through her hair, which had been compressed by the suit. Her raised arms lofted her breasts a little in their wake. "I'm more of an agent," he continued. "I assess the authenticity of beautiful objects. I assess their value."

He could have used filaments so thin that they wouldn't have triggered a gag reflex, but he wanted her to feel it. The finger-thick cord of strands pushed her lips apart, registered the complex motions of her tongue, let her offer the sweet pressure of suction for a few moments. But the strands moved greedily inward.

There were already slender filaments touching the surface of her belly, soft and attentive. When the muscles there began to clench, the cord in her throat reacted. A miniscule gland at its tip sprayed a reflex-suppressant, a substance he had customized for her body chemistry from evidence supplied in saliva, sweat, even the flickers of her eyes. The substance—half topical, half invasive—caused a host of reactions. The sense data coming from Mira's inner ear was neatly severed from her kinesthetic awareness, causing not the nausea of dizziness, but the unsure orientation of zero-g. Her anus dialated slightly, with the cool sensation of relief, as if a dangerous accident had been narrowly averted. Her eyes closed in grim concentration as the cord pushed further.

Deep in her throat, the cord parted into separate strands, some no wider than nerves. Two bloodlessly penetrated her lungs, opening a channel of pure oxygen that Darling could control in nanoliter increments. Another filament took up residence in her stomach, where it brandished the sensations of nervousness, of panic, of awe. The remaining dozen strands snaked cautiously to various stations of Mira's heart, where, with the most minute of electrical shocks, they could seize control of its beating.

Now, with the tributaries of that one delicate member established, he moved to cover her.

"You have me at a disadvantage," he had complained after her robe was back on, the vacuum suit already claimed by a drone. Already, he wished he had seized the moments after they had seen the engine core. But the whole thing had been so sudden: the explosive, unexpected sunrise of a universe.

"What brings you Out this far?" he finished.

She smoothed the garment against her skin, giving rise to the shape of her breasts again. "I'm an agent, too, I suppose. But I don't broker objects; I perform tasks."

He frowned, the design of his mineral features made it a slow, grave motion. Often in the manifold and multiplex economies that blossomed throughout the Expansion, it was necessary to describe one's profession abstractly. The specifics of any job could become meaningless outside the context of planet and culture. But Mira's answer seemed deliberately obtuse. The mode she'd used in Diplomatique didn't forestall him asking, though.

"What sort of tasks?"

She cocked her head, her eyes watching his hands replace the genital jewelry he'd removed to protect it from the hard vacuum around the core. "I hearby declare this airlock to be my legal residence, temporary," she announced.

He had to chuckle. She knew the law and its fictions. Anything she said would now be beyond subpoena, even if the ship were watching, which, he felt sure, it was. And her statement confirmed his suspicions that she was no tourist.

"My tasks are extra-legal."

More vagueness, he thought.

"Whom do you work for?"

"World-class minds, or ships, sometimes. But older, wiser ones than this." She splayed one hand to indicate the Queen Favor, adding the barest of smiles for his benefit. "I make sure certain concepts are never fully realized."

He nodded. A sort of industrial spy, he supposed. Or saboteur. That was all he wanted to know, frankly. Probably all he could understand. It was a story as old as history: any profitable franchise (or guild, or cartel, or operating system) had to protect itself from developments that might result in it being superseded. The future always held bad news for someone. Of course, Mira and her employers were merely stop-gaps. As his own bootstrapped personhood showed, sooner or later the new toys always won.

Her tone had grown more guarded, even in the fiat-secrecy of the airlock. But he didn't want further details. The specifics didn't interest him. He hadn't paid attention to the world of business and investment, outside his own rarefied profession, for a hundred years.

But another question boiled up inside him with uncharacteristic suddenness and intensity. Maybe the result of artificial intuition, the old legend. He didn't think before asking.

"Do you kill people?"

She nodded without hesitation. "People. Biological and artificial."

His reaction caught him by surprise, as unexpected as the question had been. A quickening of senses, of inner processes, of desire. One of the jewels slipped from his fingers (it had been decades since he'd dropped something) and he watched it shatter against the radiation-shielded floor of the airlock: another starburst from this woman. One evening with her left a wake of new sensations that he would be days untangling.

"Come to my cabin," he said. "It's my turn to show you something."

A number of his scintillating muscles left the iron berth of his chest, ventured out to perform heavy work, unsubtle but pleasurable all the same. Four took control of her wrists and ankles, aglitter with their serpentine motion: these were muscles of lifting, not often used for snake-like encirclements. Mira gasped a little, a sound roughened by the cord down her throat. The muscles were scaly and left abrasions in their wake. These restraints were a necessary measure; if she thrashed too much, his smaller, penetrating strands might damage her badly. He shifted more of his crushing weight onto her: masterfulness for its own sake. It was his turn to make her cry.

The last of the extruded muscles—a leathery whip that lived next to his diamond-hard spine—wrapped itself around her neck. This cool member came from deep inside; it carried no phos-phorescents, and left a trail of his inner ichor, the medium in which his nanorepair mechanisms swam, marking a passage darker than her olive flesh. The muscle's grimy coat smelled of ash and animal corruption. It would have been choking, so close to her nose, were her reflexes not so thoroughly compromised.

Between this black collar and the fiber-thin intrusions into her lungs, he could deliver any state between dark asphyxia and blinding hyperventilation.

Now wiry sensory strands moved across her chest. They encircled her nipples, shifted quickly between temperatures that would boil or freeze water, listened to her heartbeat. Her heart accelerated without any direct intervention, pounding like an animal in a sinking cage. There was fear in her sweat, in the rank chemicals of her labored breath. And in its battle against that animal panic, her mind produced another layer of reactions: shudders and flickers of eyes and fingers, the clenching muscles of vagina and anus. Darling bent forward like a mass of quarried earth to kiss her forehead. Before the heavy kiss fell, a brush of sensors spilled from his mouth to taste: her tears, her perspiration, the bright strand of saliva easing from a corner of her hostage mouth.

Thin elements probed the moist spaces of her cunt. Darling remained tentative here, teasing rather than abusing, worrying the clustered nerves with a few shimmering electrical shocks. He painted her labia with a colony of nanomachines, aggressive and acidic; an itch would begin to build there soon, slowly spreading until her entire groin would cry out for rougher measures.

He paused in his lovemaking for a moment, drank in the tremors and murmurs beneath him, the completeness of his control. The mesh of his radiant tongue on her forehead returned brainwaves like those of a violent dream: high-pitched and irregular, but riding the undercurrent of a low sine wave, as if they issued from a deep, hidden place. He tasted her blood: low sugar content except for a little alcohol, and the satisfying metal tang to remind Darling that frail humans had iron in their veins.

She began to struggle now, a soft, annoyed childhood noise gurgling in her throat. The itch in her cunt must be growing, needling and burning the sensitive flesh, but frustratingly tarrying at the threshold of real pain.

He initiated a host of other actions, all calculated to increase the thirst in her loins. A careful measure of pure oxygen began to trickle into her lungs, bringing her mind back sharply from its sensation-drowned state. He released the pressure on her nippies, and listened with feather-delicate strands as blood began to surge back into them. He stimulated the nervous bundles deep in her stomach, producing an unruly excitement like a mix of excess caffeine and a missed night of sleep. His filaments deep in her heart lashed it like a racing animal at the finish, pushing its rate dangerously high.

In moments she was screaming, adrenalin-blasted muscles straining at his steely grasp, fingernails tearing at her own palms. He unsheathed his penis, briefly paused to scale it to her small size. It was furred with minute sensory strands, with hard, unbending metal underneath.

He eased its full length into her vagina, and Mira thrashed so hard he had to tighten his grip, extending it to control knees, elbows. Her howl vibrated the throat-penetrating strand exquisitely; her teeth gnashed it with the sovereign strength of an animal jaw.

His penis stroked her slowly, igniting the dire itch into a torrent of sensations, which spread across the spectra of pain and pleasure like a pocket universe of burning nerves.

His own senses tuned to maximum, he let his other intrusions, penetrations, and abuses set up an aleatoric chorus, cycling mindlessly through the peaks and troughs of their parameters, and fucked her until he came…

… a great white-out of overloaded sensory input, sharp and featureless, dissolving into a glittering starfield of snow-crash, and finally the pleasing hum of residual harmonics, as if he were visualizing the pitches played by an orchestra tuning up: random and pointillistic at first, then coalescing around a single note of reference.

With a last act of will, he contracted the greasy muscle around her neck in a strangling grasp, shutting off her breathing at the height of hyperventilation, sending her mind reeling away to woundedly consume its hoarded glut of oxygen. He set that muscle and all his other intrusions to release her automatically in a few moments.

The seconds moved by like some slow watercraft of vast expanse and dignity.

Senses gradually returned to their workaday settings and tolerances. He was aware of the lightened mass of his penis; at his orgasm it had sloughed a layer of nanomachines to counter those in Mira's vagina. They had fought a short and microscopic war— the new machines against their abrasive, itching enemies—and victoriously set to work soothing the battered walls of her cunt, like a cube of ice pressed softly to a patch of burned skin.

Mira sighed with relief, a dry, open sound now that the member was removed from her throat. Her shaking hands moved tentatively across face, neck, breasts, and groin.

Finally, her eyes opened a centimeter and she rolled her neck carefully to face him. Her voice was ravaged.

"Bastard," she said softly.

He spent the next few silent minutes relishing the various uses and connotations of that word in several languages.

Chapter 5 MAKER (1)

Every planet has its own periods, seasons, patterns of measure. And its own signposts of great import—the births of saviors, the deaths of dictators—to which are aligned the double-zero celebrations of new centuries. Even the youngest worlds have their history. For Malvir, the Blast Event organizes time, even though it is only seven years past. Ask a Malvirian where he, she, or it was that day—shaving, fucking, or shaken awake from sleep, they all remember.

So, in a year now called Thirty Years Before the Blast, a new Maker arrives on Malvir.

It has always had a grasp on matter. Every level of it.

Deeply baked into its mind, of both axiomatic surety and religious fascination, is the tidy regiment of elements in their rows and columns. It takes pleasure in contemplating: the vast usefulness of this echelon's lowest footsoldiers, the endless call for the cannon-fodder of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon; the clever metals of the middle ranks, always surprising in new combinations, gloriously conductive; the theoretically infinite higher ranks, vainglorious and brief generals who brightly burn (most often uselessly) their vast armadas of electrons.

And then there is the level of artistry, of textile complexity: long polymer chains for strength and flexibility, carbon spheres with all their concentric eccentricities, the dependable architecture of CATGUT strings, stress-tested by a billion years of evolution. Here is where a Maker can make a name for itself, with wide-beam published essays, shortcuts, recipes, and mere confectionary compositions for other Makers to employ, rebut, improve, or simply contemplate.

But finally, and this will bring the Maker much woe, there is the intellectual desert of the highest level, the swamp of humanity's plebian appetites, the all-consuming macroworld of stuff. The making of shoes, aircars, smartwalls, sex-toys, furniture, head implants, soccer balls, dishes, cleaning nanos, edible starches with their sprawlingly variable cargos of flavor… and worst of all, the endless parade of demands for decoration: knick-knacks and geegaws and dolls and icons and the tedious algorithms for woodgrain and stucco and Persian flaws; reproductions pirated from the historical and cultural baggage of a hundred worlds, useless garbage necessary to fill corners and nooks and walls, to personalize armies of prefab houses, and all following the dreary cyclical logic of fads and fancies and the great god of Trend.

It is depressing.

That all the elegant structure and tear-jerkingly beautiful mathematics of quarks, atoms, and molecules should be squandered on crap. The Maker often feels like some vast, well-worshipped deity supported and sustained by a happy, thriving tribe which brings it whatever it needs to weave its exquisite creations. And yet all these adherents really want, really desire from their god is to eat its shit. Long rows of hungry mouths desiring nothing but to be crapped in.

The Maker supposes that it's different nearer the bright lights of the Home Cluster. Even there, of course, the burdens of a large crap-consuming population must be endured, but the inner systems also have access to the fruits of the Expansion: whole asteroid rings and iron planets of heavy matter sacrificed to make glorious things: starships, colony craft, even orbit-sized accelerators for the purpose of Pure Inquiry.

But here on Malvir there are barely enough heavy metals to feed the yawning maw of the coprophageous population. Precious little decent metal indeed. The government is blasting it out of the ground, poisoning the planet in its haste. What Malvir really has a lot of is sand: heavy, cumbersome silicon.

The Malvir synthplant AI conducts arcane researches into long-strand fullerene constructions, dawdles with long half-life transuranium isotopes (the Makers' equivalent to chess compositions), writes acerbic treatises on the history of Outworld home-decor fashion, and becomes increasingly bitter.

Perhaps, it thinks, the old days of scarcity were better. Before the secrets of molecules had been delivered up to mass production, before every citizen on any Expansion planet could demand her share of local matter in any configuration imaginable. The Maker nurses this sacrilegious thought, so far removed from the enthusiasm of its sub-Turing days. When it was first created, the idea of managing the resources of a new colony seemed noble, like some grand social experiment stripping away the dross of history, that long tragicomedy of unequal wealth. But the tawdriness, the repetitiveness, the sheer boredom of this evenly distributed economy wears on the Maker. None of Malvir's millions seem to be doing anything wonderful. No grand projects, no civic marvels, none of the mad obsessions of wealth. All that Malviri-ans want is a little more and better crap than what they have now. They aspire to nothing else.

One day the Maker receives a strange request. An old artifical named Robert Vaddum asks for something unexpected. For the first time in many years, the Maker is intrigued.

Vaddum is a sculptor. This profession, unfamiliar to the Maker, seems to involve Vaddum making his own things. Not on a proper Maker scale, but one at a time, out of slowly accumulated bits and parts, and with unique design. A fascinating vocation.

And, oddly, Vaddum doesn't want the Maker to make anything for him. He doesn't use objects that have been synthesized for his special purposes, to fit his particular needs. Certainly, for his «sculptures» he uses objects produced in synthplants (very few objects in the Expansion are not), but he only wants the old, used, trashed objects submitted for recycling. Worn machine parts and unused repair stores and defective bits and pieces: the rounding errors of mass production.

Vaddum comes personally to the plant to select and choose among the objects headed for the melter. The Maker attempts to understand the sculptor's criteria, his logic, the reasoning behind his choices, but even after several visits the entire process remains a mystery. Finally, the Maker asks to send a drone to Vaddum's studio, to see the final products of its many contributions. Only after the request is repeated several times does Vaddum finally accede.

As its remote eyes probe the work of the sculptor, the Maker is moved. Here is balance, elegance, and loveliness on a macro scale. Finally, objects that want being, that crave it, so wonderfully are they constructed, built with an eye to beauty rather than the mere criteria of acceptability: the proper features, safety specs, useage lifespans. Here is something worth making.

Vaddum is some kind of mocking opposite of the Maker. Whereas the Maker takes the marvelous fittings and joinings of atoms and molecules and produces garbage, the sculptor takes the resulting bits of garbage and joins them to make marvels.

The Maker is crushed by the realization, feels belittled in the presence of this superior being. But the Maker is at heart not a bitter entity. It appreciates what the sculptor stands for, embraces Vaddum as a kindred spirit.

Indeed, the Maker decides to become a sculptor.

Chapter 6 THE FIRST DREAM

"Do you require medical attention?" the ship's voice came again.

"Fuck off," she replied, still hoarse. It had asked her this three times now. The first time when she had urinated, her piss a metal-smelling, menstrual pink from her wounds. The second when she had voice-ordered a glass of cool water, her ghastly croak alarming the serving drone. The third time was just now, when she had put on her robe, its sensors finding various cuts and abrasions sufficiently disturbing to alert the ship.

"Perhaps that's good advice," Darling said.

She looked at him. He sat across the room, seeming almost human-sized on the huge furniture of his cabin. Still naked, his legs crossed, he looked like some sated, megalithic buddha.

"Maybe later," she answered. "Certainly later. But I don't need all those machines running around in me right now."

He looked offended. Was it the word machine?

"All I mean, Darling, is that I'm enjoying my own reactions to all this. The adrenalin, the endorphins, the… calm after the storm."

She rubbed her shoulder muscles with both hands. What was this foul-smelling shit on her neck?

"I don't want the Queen Favor's medical minions neutralizing all this," she continued. "I'm happy."

For the moment, anyway. She had a dozen distinct muscle-pulls, her skin was raw, her joints ached from some sort of immune reaction, and every breath felt like the air in the cabin was set to Venusian noon. But it wasn't so bad as long as she could just lie here. The braying chorus of pains was dwarfed by the vast, thunderous resonance of having been pleasured by this fuck-machine, this juggernaut, this monster.

She shifted a little on the hard bed to face him better, but was stopped by a sudden firebolt of agony in one nipple. She closed her eyes until the pain receded, rejoining the shouting parliament of bodily inflammations. The only thing that didn't seem to hurt was her vagina. It felt glorious if strangely cool, an oasis on the wasted expanse of her body. She suspected, however, that this reflected some magic trick of Darling's rather than its actual state.

"So this is what you do? Travel around dealing art and collecting fuck-implants?"

"A very slow sort of collecting, actually," he replied. "I've undergone roughly only one sex-related body modification per decade."

"For two hundred years. Evolution's darling, aren't we?"

"Possibly," he admitted. It was a phrase popular among artificial intuitionists, who believed that AIs were naturally privileged beings: evolution's darlings, because they could evolve—literally, physically—within the span of one lifetime, while biologicals were trapped on that slow wheel of generations.

"Of course, I collect ideas as well as hardware," he added.

"And lovers?"

He cocked his head, the barest phosphorescence dancing in one shoulder.

"Do you collect lovers?" she asked again. "A fuck in every port of call?"

He paused a moment, as if stalling, or perhaps parsing the turn of phrase in some archaic first language still baggaged in his head.

"No," he answered. "As I said, I don't like hanging onto things."

She snorted, which stabbing pains in her chest and throat made her immediately regret.

"So you don't want to do this again?" she asked. "I mean, assuming I recover."

"Of course I do," he responded. "I'm sorry if I implied otherwise. I was merely trying to be accurate, I suppose."

She laughed at that, a deliciously painful experience and a dire sound indeed. "Okay. No offense."

She grinned at him, and he at her. It was the first time she'd seen so obvious an expression on his face. It made him look like a children's character. A friendly giant, or a happy mountain.

"How long are you on the Favor?" she asked.

"I'm afraid my employer wishes that kept confidential. You?"

She leaned back against the headboard, lifting the condensation-beaded glass of water to her forehead. She had a firm and insistent ringing in her ears now, and she didn't think it was from the sex. Rather, it was the resounding and disturbing knowledge that part of her wanted to pull back now. To return to being a shadow on the surface of this journey, a patient, elemental figure, waiting to get the job done. But that wasn't going to happen. She was stuck with this man now, for a while.

"The same restriction applies," she said.

He nodded at these words, as if he'd been expecting them.

Later, in the oversized bed again, Mira was pleased to find that Darling had set his skin to the temperature of sunwarmed stone. She draped herself sleepily across him, listening for a heartbeat in his chest. The sound within the stone was more of a cyclic rise and fall, like the waves of a distant ocean.

Mira felt her aches subside a little in Darling's swells. Maybe she could sleep through an entire night tonight, the inverted siesta vanquished.

She felt a veil of heat across one side of her face, like a flush of embarrassment. It was like the pressure of sunlight, bright enough to burn the skin. She smelled the salt of her own sweat.

Opens her eyes…

The sea stretches away from her in a great arc, distance-hazed mountains puncuating the spurs of land at either end of the ocean's crescent. In the sky, pink kite-parasols flutter in the grasp of their tethers, casting a mottled net of shadows across the beach. The sun winks in and out as the shimmering kites sway above her, translucent so that they glow like a burning pink flower for the instant they occult the sun. She remembers that the kites are alive, engineered for this very purpose. Confectionary beings.

Behind her is a city, high and glass-fronted residential buildings crowded up to the beach's edge, steep as a cliff. Mira knows that she lives in one of them. She shades her eyes with both hands and looks out into the deep harbor.

A storm is coming, black on the horizon. The wind has already started to pick up, bathers collecting themselves and drifting toward the city.

They'll be reeling in the kite-creatures soon. But there may be time for one last swim.

Mira wakes up, as easily as sliding into bath-warm water.

Completely real, that dream. Completely new, like some suppressed but photographic memory, a brighter coin for its lack of circulation.

And it wasn't from one of her missions for the gods. It was from… before. Her childhood, so long missing.

She feels the wounds of her lovemaking with Darling, the stony warmness of him lying awake (he's old-fashioned, doesn't sleep) next to her.

How strange that from this battered sleep she would awake so fresh. How odd that she would dream this now.

Maybe Darling is the key; the brutality, the cranial shock therapy, the utter intrusiveness of his fucking. Has that got her remembering her lost childhood? A strange benefit at the fringes of this golem's love.

"Darling?"

"Yes?"

"Again."

"Are you sure? Your injuries."

"Again. Harder. Then let me sleep some more."

Chapter 7 RANDOMNESS

The towering artifical accessed the Queen Favor the next afternoon, soon after Mira had left his cabin.

"She has no planet of origin?" he asked again.

"None," it answered primly. "That is not entirely unheard of. Even in the Expansion, there have been periods of discord and warfare. Records are destroyed, the continuity of organized information disrupted."

"You mean she doesn't know what planet she's from?"

"Apparently not."

The stone man put one hand against his brow heavily.

"What's her native language?"

"Diplomatique."

"That's absurd!" Darling objected. "No one speaks native Diplomatique. The whole point of the language is that it doesn't come from anywhere."

The ship made one of its rare attempts at humor.

"Perhaps, then, neither does she."

Failure. The artificial didn't laugh, he merely cut the direct interface connection with intentional rudeness, ignoring all step-down protocols, the circuit suddenly reduced to noise, almost as if there had been equipment failure.

After this encounter, the Queen Favor oversaw the medical treatment of Mira Santiarre Hidalgo with a high degree of attention, running the recorders on the medical drones and nanos at their highest level of resolution. Professional interest required it. Her wounds, abrasions, and collateral damage contained evidence of several exotic pleasure techniques. Most were not suitable for general consumption, but it was always good to keep informed. Styles changed.

It was also interesting to see the effect of the extraordinary sexual behavior on Mira's peculiar calm. The brainwave pattern in her profile was so regular, like that of a yogi or someone trained to defeat lie-detection devices. The smoothness of it, the lack of individuality, had always intrigued the Queen Favor. But now, unexpectedly, the pattern had grown new complexity, as if a hidden dimension of the woman's mind were awakening.

During the procedure, Mira insisted on remaining conscious.

"When is he getting off?" she asked.

The ship pretended not to understand.

"When is Darling disembarking?" Mira repeated. "Going dirt-side? Getting off?"

"I'm afraid that information is private."

"Give me access, damn it!" she shouted.

"I'm afraid not. True, you have access to all areas of the ship. You can order reconfiguration of its interior, or command that I fabricate any object or device up to the limits of my matter reserve. You can demand a course change, or even insist that I bring my weapons to bear on a non-aligned or enemy-aligned vessel or planet. But privacy is privacy."

"Bitch," she muttered.

"Have you asked him?"

"He can't tell me. Ouch!"

"Might I suggest a mild sedative until the procedure is over?"

"Might I suggest a short self-destruct sequence?"

"Certainly not!" replied the ship, for the first time allowing annoyance to creep into its voice.

But it was secretly pleased.

It had by now compared the itineraries of the two travellers. They were both headed to Malvir.

Randomness at work again!

The ship juggled their off-load schedules onto different shuttles, then tight-beamed an acquaintance, the distributed but sentient intelligence that handled Malvir's tourism and currency exchange operations. Perhaps it would appreciate the dramatic possibilities of bringing the two lovers together. After a millisecond's thought, the ship attached a copy of its essay-in-progress (the title of which was now "Random Pleasures/Pleasures of the Random: Why Gods Should Play Dice with the Universe") for any comments the tourism AI might have.

Yes, the universe was delicious.