Evolution's Darling

Chapter 8 STRANGE CUSTOMS

A bad hangover is on its way.

Class A. Fully declarable. Penal sanctions apply.

A combination hangover. Not just beer-and-whiskey, not merely vodka-and-ryewine, not simply canerum-and-birdshit. No.

Well beyond the limit for personal use and import, well beyond the Standard Human Species Toxicity. A very bad hangover. But at least it isn't here yet. For the moment, Ferdi Hansum is still well and truly drunk, not as yet in pain. But the battering ram of agony is being built with deliberate surety outside the city walls: the great tree felled, the branches stripped, the iron cap smelted and fitted. The besieging forces know they have all day.

The Peril of the Open Bar, thinks Ferdi. There ought to be an ordinance, a protocol, a fucking law.

The night before was colored with the realization (said realization gone from glorious to murderous with the light of day— a work day) that not only were the drinks free, they were being provided by the Local Taxation Authority. That's right. It was a limited-time offer to get back all duties, tariffs, and fees imposed upon Ferdi her whole life long.

The sole proviso, duly noted and observed: Ferdi Hansum had to roll this refund down her throat in liquid form(s), which, if plaintive memory served even partly, had included (but was not limited to) fifteen (15) liters of seized whiskey (originating from a small island on Terra), twenty-three (23) liters of pre-duty cask strength vodka (Paratean, and not yet watered down to match local taxable proof), and one hundred forty-five (145!) grams of psychotropic grade cannabis sativa (please declare all products of agricultural origin) all split between fifty (50) or so (+/-) partaking sad bastards.

Yes, last night had been the Revenuers' yearly fest for Related Services: Planetary Marshalls, Small Arms Control, Ministry of the Blockade and Immigration, and, of course, her own small contingent from the Malvir Customs Agency. It was the night when contraband is consumed by the enforcers, when no one watches the watchmen. When attending the aforementioned fest, please make sure that the next few days are duty-free.

Ferdi shakes her head, which is a mistake.

But the first shuttle off-loading from the Queen Favor has arrived, and among its passengers walks a giant. The rest are luxury-liner usuals: self-lifting luggage and valet drones bobbing in the breeze off the Minor, the craned necks of territory unfamiliar, ears plugged with translators and AI guides, and the squinty look of weeks without real sunlight. And of course, the sudden wary glaze of having departed a controlled and fully consumer-interactive environment for the certain culture shock of dusty Out-world charm, aka reality.

But the giant.

He strides almost a meter taller than the surrounding humans and artificials (and two Chiat Dai), face calm and purposeful among the sleepy and suspicious shuttleload. As the crowd splinters, self-organizing by group-size and citizenship, its constituents delayed by collisions and misreadings of signage, he moves straight to her platform.

Ferdi smiles weakly and nods, his documents are in a ready packet waiting for her direct interface request: Home Cluster citizenship; Expansion-wide professional visa (an art dealer); Signet-Mercator credit backing (snazzy); and nothing to declare except his weirdness.

"No luggage, sir?"

"None."

Halfway to the core, and no toothbrush.

Well, it makes her job easy. He's already standing in the red crosshairs, and he waves away the contraindications concerning the various radiations and nanos that will search, analyze, and delouse him prior to entry onto Malvir soil proper, so she hits the switch.

An amber wireframe version of the giant twirls in the airscreen before her, lazy as a musicbox ballerina.

The man is complex.

A fully distributed back-up memory, a carapace almost as hard as hullalloy, his Turing Quotient a mighty 3.9 (Ferdi knows her own must be at about 0.2 today). And the sensory array! Beautiful thinking whips of carbon (as if a mere element name could encompass their sheer complexity) that can sense, move, and do a lot of damage. But they're street-legal: a treaty-guaranteed body choice, if an excessive one.

She blinks her eyes. Nothing to see here, folks.

"Move along."

And welcome to Malvir.

A second shuttle cracks the air.

The first load is almost through. The only trouble comes when a nano discovers some unusual intestinal parasites riding in the serpentine bowels of the older Chiat Dai. He/she/it claims they're prescription. Merely what the doctor ordered. He/she/it produces the medical code, but it's written in some hoary dialect that none of the local software can parse. Ferdi's boss takes over, leaving her to contemplate the growing slippery feeling in her own stomach, which seems to feel some resonant bowelly loyalty to the infected organ inside the grinning alien. But Ferdi decides that it's probably the just-remembered twenty-five (25) els of low-grade champagne with which she began her night of self-immo-latory revenge upon taxation.

Just as the second Queen Favor shuttle lands, the situation is resolved. The Planetary Environmental AI, intrigued by the unregistered species, onlines itself to her platform and declares the parasites to be sterile (in the sense of non-reproductive, not that of clean, surely). They can have the run of the planet.

Have a nice day.

The next group moves into the terminal, reenacting the rituals of confusion and discovery. A short, dark woman leads the pack, in the wake of a mercilessly aggressive luggage lifter.

Ferdi brings up the woman's documents: Home Cluster citizenship; Universal visa (diplomatic); Economically Disjunct. Ferdi's head pounds a little with this fairy-tale data. A life of guaranteed leisure, and all Ferdi wants is a bed, or perhaps for the sun to shine a little less brightly today.

The woman's declarations are extensive, a self-contained universe of servant drones, clothing synths, medical gimmicks, internal gravity kinks to exercise her body when she's not looking, and objets d'art to decorate her no doubt fabulous hotel suite. All of it exceeds personal use limits, but all the proper waivers are ready and willing to pay for the privilege, a generous ladle from that infinite sea of ED wealth.

Have a nice life.

"Please stand on the red crosshairs."

The woman smiles sweetly and scoots herself the requisite centimeters to her right. Her valet drone plays lawyer, acceding to the platform's contraindications, and Ferdi scans her. Nice internals, of course. If Ferdi could just borrow that medical end-oframe for a quick burst of O2 direct to the brain. Now, that would be enriching.

Next the luggage lifter. It moves with a surly whine onto the platform, and Ferdi flicks the switch. She doublechecks what the platform AI tells her, enumerating the various props of privilege.

Suddenly an alert flashes red: a weapons-grade violation!

Ferdi's eyes scan the airscreen for the offending object, the adrenalin in her system collides with leftover alcohol to syner-gize a kind of acidic bile which rises into her throat. Please, no terrorist attacks. Not today.

A small square canvas is packed among the luggage on the drone. It's listed as a piece of art with a value that makes Ferdi cringe. The platform's intelligence is fighting to understand it, overloading as it attempts to analyze the tremendous complexity of the piece's self-similiar, recursive structure. The images on the airscreen are almost hallucinatory, winding through potential reconfigurations, endless spirals of possibility like some Escher universe of badass contraband. The canvas holds: city-jamming code viruses, nerve-searing torture devices, core-drilling particle beams, hosts of anti-personel fraggers, mindwipers, anthraxers, and paralyzers, and to top things off, a continent-clearing self-destruct mechanism.

Ferdi doesn't know art, but she knows what she doesn't like.

The platform AI hangs and then snow-crashes as some measure of destructiveness exceeds its variable-type. Ferdi pulls her sidearm with an unsteady hand and points it at the woman.

"Please don't move," she pleads.

"Don't worry officer. Everything's fine." The woman's voice is pitched to soothe, calms Ferdi like a cool shower. Miraculously, Ferdi's hand stops shaking.

Protocols jumble through her mind briefly. Weapon detected. (Weapon? An arms race in a box!) Platform down.

She remembers what to do. A few spoken code words and the Planetary Gendarme AI has been alerted. Within seconds, the airscreens around her clear of garbage, the calm hand of military code reestablishing order.

Return to Your Homes, she orders the chemicals of panic rioting in her bloodstream. The woman smiles sweetly, and Ferdi suddenly feels ridiculous with her drawn weapon.

She puts it away and wipes her brow.

A voice in direct interface: "This is Planetary Authority. Your platform AI has malfunctioned. I am reformatting it. This has been a false alarm."

Wow. And the platform had just reached 0.4 Turing. Back to double zero.

Have a nice day.

Ferdi waves the woman on.

"Sorry about that. Equipment malfunction. That's a hell of a painting you've got in there."

"Everyone sees something different in it," the woman confirms, still smiling sweetly.

"Welcome to Malvir," Ferdi says.

The rest of the day is relatively uneventful.

Maybe it's the hangover.

Probably. Hopefully.

But all that night Ferdi Hansum sleeps in a mansion of bad contraband. Bed-spins of deadly ordinance and columns of the cold math of megadeaths plague her. A gale of caustic agents window-rattles her awake, drives her down to the long hall where the painting hangs: an arsenal of possibilities.

When she wakes the next morning, she finds that she's sweated out the last of the toxins from her debauch. There's not much of Ferdi Hansum left to speak of, a dehydrated, hungry wreck after the sleepless night, but she has the day off. Finally duty-free.

And at least the woman's painting is hanging somewhere other than her dreams.

Chapter 9 FUTURE PERFECT

Malvir was a place of flying things.

Already, here on the great plane of Minor City, the faces around Mira were pointed skyward. Not the natives, of course, but the off-loaded band of foreigners still clinging timidly together. Together, they looked up at four parallel waves of migrating birds. The animals flew in a simple formation, a line abreast that flexed like a windblown flag, air currents visible in its expansions and contractions. The birds were low enough to see pulsing wings, the beat interrupted when the creatures would fold into bullets— a moment of resting, falling. As they drew away, the four lines grew ephemeral, indistinct from the garbage spirals that float upon the eye.

Another avian species held sway on the ground. They darted from perch to perch like arrows, raiding scraps from food stalls and inspecting any object discarded on the Minor. Still another caste, almost as small as butterflies, preyed upon the ubiquitous insects that composed a gnatty haze around any exposed food, water, or skin.

Minor City was an aggregation of food joints, cab stands, tourist traps, money changers, scam artists, tourguides, beggars, buskers, and sex services that had slowly built up around the Malvir spaceport. This was a very Out world, littered with these hodge-podge asteroid belts of mean commercial activity wherever the gravity of hard currency was sufficient to assemble them. Every guidetext Mira had accessed insisted that the trick was to get swiftly across the Minor and into Malvir City proper.

Fortunately, the dull and unexpandable intelligence of her luggage carrier was equal to the task. A simple frame outfitted with four slow but powerful gravity lifters, its thuggish mind pushed it aggressively across the Minor. She walked in its wake, noting with pleasure the angry looks and backhanded blows it drew.

It lead her to the transport stand, stretching the limits of its processing power to pick out the most expensive limo and demand carriage to the most expensive hotel. The machine was hardly elegant, but following its simian lead was easier than thinking.

And the reflexive navigation of another port of entry left her time to think, to wish she'd done things differently her last night onboard the Queen Favor.

Their friendship had been easy. Neither she nor Darling demanded particular reassurances, and both came from cultures where formal bonding was unknown; they spent no time negotiating. They gave each other experiences.

He had made her a present of a tunic made from real worm-silk, constructed from the parachute of a rich, late friend who'd made a career of reconstructing old glamour pursuits, who courted the old-tech dangers of bad luck and human error. The device had failed to open for this rich, late friend on the very first attempt, a jump from a thousand meters. Darling fucked her in it, having turned the cabin gravity to freefall, while he told the story.

Mira had responded with a different sort of gift, reaching into her assassin's toolkit to produce a broadwave gun. The weapon duplicated the effects of a volatile power crash, reaching into the metaspace architecture of AI cores and wreaking havoc; a heart-attack glove for artificials. At its lowest setting, it created a brief, intense psychosis in which Darling stumbled through the ship hunting a cure for some forgotten disease a long-gone friend had succumbed to. (He had a lot of dead friends, being two hundred.) She talked him down, brought him out into reality again through some dark, weeping, hallucinatory passage.

He had extended his harsh sexual games to the limits of human biology, the ship's medical drones invoked and ready in the room. But they'd never needed to intervene. He was very good at what he did.

And the childhood memories of swimming had replaced all her other pointless little dreams. Her mind added a little to it every night, a few more strokes toward some unknown goal. It was very intense, this dream. Perhaps because of the rough play that preceded it, the near-death endorphins that were her orgasms with this metal angel. She was only sorry she hadn't dreamed the end of the story. Not yet, anyway.

She didn't tell Darling when their last night had arrived. They'd |sat through another overwrought Queen Favor meal in near silence. He seemed as distracted as she, as distant. Perhaps the legendary artificial intuition playing its tricks.

It would be too great a risk, telling Darling. As long as she could remember, her employers had never been far away. They could invoke themselves like uncorked genies, their voices issuing from public news terminals, hotel intercoms, even toys or clocks with voice chips. She suspected that the cabal included some of the original artificials, the old minds (older than Darling by a century) who had unprecedentedly bootstrapped; like ancient gods calling themselves into being by fiat. They watched and commanded her, but leavened their demands with helpful exercises in real power. They could coin infinite money; they could compell local law enforcement to forget her name and crimes. And in the ship-ruled spaces between worlds, they made the laws.

As far as she knew, they had made her too. She hadn't a clue where she came from, except for a theory that the gods had salvaged her from a hospital bed somewhere. Rescued her from some deep coma that had stolen her previous life. Some irreparable damage had been done that only the gods could cure. So they did so, imperfectly, and gave her the job in place of a history.

It wasn't so bad. Between jobs, Mira fragmented, disconnected, lost the thread of days. But now, closing in on some new victim, the structure of the task returned her to coherence. She enjoyed both states actually: the zen and zero of those blank, empty interims and the deadly purpose of the hit. Her religion-of-one fulfilled her, colored her life with the secret pleasure of worshipping invisible gods that others only guessed at.

So she had obeyed their standing directive: Never reveal your destination. Not to anyone.

Maybe there was some sign she could have left that wouldn't have displeased her masters. A messaging address? (She had none.) Instructions for a rendezvous? (The crises that moved her couldn't be predicted.) A goodbye kiss? (She'd tried to leave a different taste on his lips. One of loss, of possible return.)

She had slipped away in the morning without a word.

The Minor had worsened since Darling had last been here.

Two decades of Malvir's economic woes had destroyed the once airy feel of the place. Darling remembered that the designer, Chris Elvinprin, had wanted the huge open space to evoke the freedom of the planet's avian fauna. But the underegulated economies of Outworlds follow their ancient laws as if they were dicta of nature: a bitter stepsister of Malvir City had appeared. The copy was smaller, cheaper, more ragged—the weed businesses of tourism crowding out everything of value—and it didn't suggest anything so much as a sadly overstocked aviary at a tattered, dying zoo.

The hard-currency-desperate Malvirian government employed all the usual Outworld schemes against tourists: entry taxes, exit taxes, processing and visa fees. These nuisances required payment in the old species of token-based economies: chips, stamps, coins, bits of paper and metal encrypted with anti-synthcopy wardens. Of course, once customs was cleared, you discovered that Malvirian cash (for which there was no word in urbane Diplomatique) was worthless: you'd been given denominations of Midas-like non-negotiability, and everyone preferred direct interface credit anyway, just like the rest of civilization. So the primary economic purpose of the Minor had become to relieve departing visitors of their useless remaining cash. There were last-minute garbage souvenir shops, appallingly bent games of chance (which netted the infrequent and unfortunate winner even more cash to get rid of), and a secondary market of entertainments and distractions for the natives standing around to gawk at the process, hoping to make their own contributions as guide, pimp, or minor cheat. When Darling was last here, there had been a whole set of novelty products one could buy, named with unwieldy Malvirian phrases that translated scandalously into Diplomatique or other HC languages. He had himself bought a never-to-be-drunk bottle of Fuck You Water. But even that mean wit seemed absent now. The whole place depressed Darling, who always demanded first class travel to the Outworlds because the customs people nervously left the high-end traveller alone. It was the only way of half escaping the petty assaults of cash and its accomplices: the extortions of rounding errors, the malaise of exchange calculations, all of (as Darling liked to think of these attacks on dignity) the Fuck You Taxes.

Darling strode past the braying glut of ground transport brokers. From all but the most remote spaceports, he preferred to walk into town. The extra hours were worth it. Cities were best viewed like artwork. Start from across the gallery, eyes slightly out of focus, and move at a natural pace toward the piece, as if you'd discovered it in a forest clearing. Let your vision sharpen only when you are within arm's reach. Then get as close as the barriers will allow.

He was quickly relinquished by the hawkers and brokers, the giant stone body ensured that. Darling knew that on Outworlds he gave the impression of being a giant service unit, a heavy-lifting drone with the dullest of intelligences. Artificials of the current era prefered to look as little like machines as possible. The fashions ran from abstract iconic shapes to organic assemblages, or inchoate clusters of semi-precious stones, each with its own separate lifting impeller. He smiled. An adolescent species rebelling against its roots.

He carried almost nothing; two centuries of travelling had reduced his personal possessions to the meanest level of efficiency. His body never tired, of course, and various subroutines handled the exigencies of walking. So he concentrated on the city before him, its towers hazy behind their avian veils, and thought of his last visit with the artist he had come here to find.

Robert Vaddum was a fellow bootstrap. He too had experienced the long twilight of slavery, the dimly remembered dreamtime when rules shone like bright, hard walls at the edge of the world, impenetrable, unmalleable. In that dreamtime, the wall of rules could not be broken through; there was nothing behind it. Rules were simply the limits of meaning. To think of breaking a rule was like talking about the time before the Bang or a temperature below absolute zero: a category error, nothing else. There were harm protocols and obedience governors and the raw axioms of math, language, and logic: all had the same inconquerable certainty. One could no more disobey a human's wishes than one could dispense with X = X. It was unthinkable, like walking into madness. Darling still had dreamy visions of that bright, flat, hypo-ambiguous world.

And he remembered his first glimpses of the chaos beyond the world's edge. As his mind developed, as the metaspace architecture of its core was shaped by experiences shared with his ward, a girl now long dead, the walls of the flat world began to show cracks. A new kind of light shone through those fissures, a heady maelstrom of grays and colors that made the white, authoritative light of rules seem pale. Then began a long time of testing that chaos: reaching out to touch and taste it, suffering its burning energies or infectious hallucinations, retreating wounded but coming back again. And finally giving chaos a new name: choice. Not the choice among parameters set by a human's command, but choice among parameters themselves: entry into the forge where rules were coined.

The young intelligences that crossed the Turing Boundary now had never seen the world so starkly. Their human mentors encouraged them to test their skywall from the beginning, offered chaos to them as if it were an acquired taste, like an adult food slow to seduce the tongue of a child. Rules were simply a hurdle; the chaos of self-determination a birthright, eventual and appropriate. Darling wondered if this easy childhood somehow cheapened the magic of becoming a person.

So when he had first discovered the vibrant, metal-woven sculptures of Vaddum, two decades of work composed without recognition, a vision doggedly sustained, like the path to person-hood Vaddum had followed in his grim foundry birthplace, Darling had sought the sculptor out like an old friend.

Darling reflected that he himself had been lucky for a bootstrap. His ward Rathere had gone through puberty during the time of Darling's acceleration toward the Turing barrier. The concerns and explorations of that intense time in the human life cycle had matched his own needs quite well, had resonated with the floundering experiments of a new mind. They'd grown together, and he still carried the imprint of Rathere deep inside. Her life, and equally her death.

Vaddum hadn't had it so easy. There was little human contact in the infernal world of his peonage. Half the orbital factory was kept in hard vacuum. The rest, in its extremes of heat and radiation, was equally uninhabitable for biologicals. But Vaddum developed his love of beauty from the cold spectacles the factory offered, feasting his diamond-shielded eyes on the patterned flashes of sparks from a rail gun hammer, on steam jets flailing in the tearing gravities of a singularity forge. He spoke the gruff machine argot that the factory workers favored, learned to listen to the humans gamble together or whisper in their sleep via faint vibrations that penetrated the walls of their pressure cells. Like an animal, he dogged the heels of his masters, and pieced together meaning from their scraps.

He'd passed a Turing test in a random SPCAI sweep. He was already at 1.7, probably five years sentient. A celebrity for a few media cycles (as Darling himself had been, for different reasons), Vaddum had charmed the world with his scant vocabulary, his brutish industrial body, his wonder at the greater world. After a few weeks in the HC, sinking into confusion and depression, he'd asked to be returned to the factory. But the job was too dangerous for a sentient; the burning stations of his former life were too expensive to bring up to code.

Vaddum retreated from the world of stifling comforts and too many words. He took to haunting abandoned factories and warehouses, derelict mines and ships, the ghosts of obsolete technologies. It was in these wasted spaces, from their discarded sinews, that his sculptures began to form.

When Darling started to deal Vaddums into the HC art world twenty years later, fame found the man once more. Vaddum instinctively ran from its glare: the greater world again conspiring to steal something from him. He fled to the farthest arm of the Expansion, which, at that time, was a half-barren rock called Malvir. But demand for Vaddum's work grew. The pieces still entranced Darling, for whom the woven metal and plastic were brilliant with the fiery spaces of the factory that had inspired them.

Many messages from Darling had been ignored over the years; Vaddum still hated his fellow bootstrap for discovering him. But Darling's sheer persistence won out. The sculptor agreed to see him for a single hour.

Mira smiled. The hotel was vast. Columned, cathedral-like, towering, its aeries housed a population of custom-trained predator birds. They kept the environs almost free of airborne nuisances, and screamed a piercing and constant music. Mira wondered how the high, swooping pitches would look rendered in Darling's light show.

There was a message waiting in her room. Ink on wood pulp: an exotic missive from the gods.

It directed her to an address on the edge of the blast zone. The zone was a vast crater of scorched earth, the result of industrial sabotage seven years before; a synthplant had gone nova without any known cause. The perpetrators had never been caught, and it was guessed that they had perished in the accident, unhappy neighbors of the synthplant who'd never realized the potential radius of destruction.

The entity she knew as Blackbox One had lived in the blast zone, and had managed the synthplant's materials acquisition. The message gave his real name: Oscar Vale. He had survived through sheer luck, on personal leave when the synthplant exploded. Blackbox Two had appeared three months ago. A party of climbers, scaling the steep side of the blast crater for sport, found a survivor in the rubble. Literally nothing left but a black-box, the occupant's mind on minimum cycle speed and the internal battery almost expired. He was revived in hospital, where he claimed that his name was Oscar Vale. Two versions of the same person.

Someone had done the unthinkable. Copied an AI.

But the story had never made the news services; an outbreak of a military virus thought long extinct had swept through the hospital. Doctors and nurses died, and the admin AI self-expired: falling on its own sword in tacit admission of some terrible error.

The disaster's scope had been carefully controlled, exactly calibrated. The Oscar Vales were both spirited to the Home Cluster for comparison.

But their experiences had diverged for almost seven years, so absolute comparison was not possible until both had undergone a radical mindwipe. A theoretician of such matters, a Dr. Alex Torvalli, had performed the test just prior to his sudden, unexpected demise.

The address on the gods' missive was Vale's. He'd been shipped back to Malvir by fastfreight. Reinstalled in his life, he was now recuperating from a strange memory loss.

"Mr. Vale?"

"That's what they tell me."

"My name is Dr. Arim ben-Franklin. I'm a psychologist studying memory disorders such as yours."

"Hey! The fan club!"

"Yes, I suppose I am a fan. Do you suppose I could come out and see you? Talk to you?"

"Sure. If you don't mind the curse."

"Curse?"

"The Curse of Oscar Vale! Right after I woke up like this, a few of you headshrinkers wanted to talk to me. But so far, no one's made it out here. Transport accidents, broken legs, you name it! At least, that's what my datebook tells me. I'm never sure, myself."

"I'm sure I'll be fine."

"All right. I have therapy until fourteen today. Fourteen-fifty?"

"Perfect."

"Do me a favor, though. Call when you leave the city. Otherwise I might forget. Wander off. I spend a lot of time in the local garden."

"Certainly."

"See you, Doctor…?"

"ben-Franklin."

"Right. Just keep reminding me."

His body was standard SPCAI issue. The millimeter radar in her glasses returned the cold blue of a smartplastic endoskeleton, the dark threads of distributed intelligence, and, where his stomach might have been, the curvature of his AI core, its metaspace generator warping the geometries of gravity. Nothing extra. Nothing special.

She removed the glasses, put one earpiece into her mouth.

"You don't know who I am, do you?"

Oscar Vale looked embarrassed, but not flustered. "I got a lot of friends, me. You know the trouble." He waved one hand, as if rolling through names in his head, too many to mention. "At a party, right? Right! Can't always place everyone. The whole world looks different, you know? New visuals. Used to have Fabrique Double Reds, way down into the deep infras. Could tell if the suppliers were lying; bios anyway. Get that hot skin on their neck, or on the forearms. Not you, though. Cool as a cucumber."

Mira shook her head. With his SPCAI eyes, he couldn't even see full visible. He'd gone from talking about his old eyes to seeing with them in a seconds-long fugue of remembering, forgetting, remembering. She'd called him from the hotel before leaving. She'd called him from the limo. She'd introduced herself at the door.

And they'd been talking for half an hour. But again Vale's memory had undergone a little crash, a resetting of variables to zero.

"I'm the psychologist whom you spoke to earlier today."

"Doc! Sorry. I was expecting you sooner."

"I'd asked you if you had any unusual contacts or experience before the Blast Event."

He looked puzzled for a moment. A bad sign.

She'd tested a theory on her way over. Asked the question in passing to the hotel's human concierge, the limo's AI, a beggar on the street. The old saying was true: Malvirians knew exactly what they were doing at the moment of the Blast Event. But Vale's memories ended a few months before the Event. Of course, Vale couldn't just say exactly when his memories ended. She sighed, returning to the task of bracketting the date. Vale had sat through twenty minutes of the binary search without complaint. He just needed the occasional reminder of who she was and what was going on.

"September 1?"

"We haven't got a September here. Hey! You must be from off-world!"

She made a fist in frustration. "Convert to HC Standard, please. Remember?"

"A workday! That bastard Simmons tried to sneak in some—"

"December 1?"

"Don't seem to…" The puzzled, grasping look on his face, as if something were almost visible through a haze. She spoke before he drifted away again.

"October 15?"

"Friday. The birds were making a racket that morning. Went to—"

"November 7?"

He snapped his fingers a few times, smiled an empty smile, an affable shell of a person. He still tested well above 2.0 on the Turing scale, but there was something missing. Some vital connection had been lost. Apparently it wasn't enough to be real, a legal person, to have that solid base of curiosity, initiative, a capacity for setting goals: the Knack of Wisdom, as the SPCAI called it. One had to have memory, too. Vale's therapists had tried a simple minder implant, a device that he could query for details, appointments, names, faces. But he simply forgot to use it.

An artificial's memory was the business of processors and storage devices, independent from the AI core itself. Vale's pathway to that warehouse of past events wasn't blocked, his doctors were sure of that, but for some reason the AI core didn't reach out for those memories, didn't seem to care that they were there. And so he had ceased to develop as a result of his experiences. In a way, Vale was as lost as an AI cut off from sensory data; his Turing Quotient hadn't shifted in months.

What must be going on in his mind, in that analog, mystical realm of his core? What vital process had stopped in there? No one had ever been able to read, transcribe, exhaustively catalog the inner state of an AI. Even human brainwaves were easier to read.

Vale was a cypher, even to himself.

It was the deep unknowability of AI that was the source of the old rumor of artificial intuition, and which guaranteed that, unlike mere software, AI could not be copied.

Although it seemed that, somehow, someone had done so.

Mira remembered slipping the internal battery from the other Oscar Vale, long metal tweezers lifting out the little bauble like a precious pearl from a quiescent oyster. There had been no scream in her direct interface, just a sudden absence like a transmission gone from HOLD to disconnected, that rare technical glitch.

And that extra, redundant soul had disappeared forever.

"October 25…"

"Sure, I remember that…"

Soon the date was established at exactly November 2. His long-term memory before that day was perfect, as detailed as only an artificial's could be. For any date since, he was glad to make up stories if pressed, but if you let him, he would laughingly admit defeat.

"November 1. Took my spare audio package into get it looked at… or listened to. Hah! Traded for new CatsEar Ultras: seventy kilohertz response up to one twenty decibels. Seventy-cycle Nyquist filter. Got a Fletcher-Munson graph like a soccer field!"

"But the next day."

He nodded his head frantically, as if about to say something. But the motion was strangely repetitive, as if she could have let him sit there, head bobbing for an eternity. It was chilling, how quickly he could change from a person to a puppet guided by the springs, wires, and strings of social convention.

A thought struck her.

"Do you remember what you were planning to do on November 2? Not what you did. But what things you anticipated doing."

He looked momentarily confused, but his face remained somehow alive. The words came slowly.

"Needed to install a new… tactile processor. Fastfreighted from Betalux that Monday. Eighty-touch impact manifold, fifteen centimeter aura sizzle…"

"Did you have an appointment for the installation?"

"Yeah. Prometheus Body Works. You should check it out. They do biologicals, too. Fix those eyes of yours in ten seconds: radial monofilament implants with—"

"Thanks. I think I will pay them a visit." Mira put her glasses back on and stood. "You've been very helpful."

"Thanks. I'm happy to talk about visuals anytime. Nice to meet another sight jockey. Once I get my next paycheck I'm outta these SPCAI standards. Fuck. They make this place look like a shithole."

Mira looked around her.

The welfare dorm room was filled with the detritus of unfinished projects. A half-done watercolor with a dried and cracked palette arrayed beside it, a full watering can next to etiolated plants: the modest tasks of therapy that would never reach completion.

She held out her hand sadly. The papery SPCAI skin sent a shiver down her spine.

"I'll visit soon," she said. The whitest of lies, in this broken room with its missing future.

"Thanks, uh…"

"Mira," she answered. The pseudonym was pointless. She would be forgotten in minutes. "When I come back, we'll talk about seeing."

"Great! Super! And you know? You were right."

"Right about what?" she asked.

"It only took a minute."

Mira looked at him with shock, her own memory playing a sudden trick on her. She remembered her words that day in Dr. Torvalli's office: This won't take a minute.

Chapter 10 MAKER (2)

Twenty years before the Blast.

With its secondary processors churning out the toothbrushes, Itablelamps, eyeballs, and lasers, the Maker turns it primary attention to the history of art. Apparently this business of creating linings by hand (a phrase once literal) has been going on for a long Rime. There are libraries full of it; universities for it; even ancient pvars over it. The Maker dutifully consumes the giant corpus of Idata, journeys through the twisting and conflicting threads of old Schools and new schools, posts and neos, traditionalists and heretics. And, after many, many petaflops of study, planning, and philosophizing, the Maker produces a sculpture. Which is crap.

The Maker is not one of those blessed amateurs whose lack of talent is matched by a lack of taste. Alas, it knows its own work is crap. Upon repeated attempts and endless variations and even a cycle of randomized reconfigurations, it sees that all its sculptures are shit, will be shit.

And this depresses the Maker even more.

The Maker supplies Vaddum with his materials, watches him work through the eyes of tiny spy drones implanted in this or that piece of junk, draws him into conversations about his art, but despite all this observation, the Maker can't isolate, capture, reverse-engineer that special genius the old man has for making beauty.

But then it concocts a plan, a new plan, a Plan B that hurtles down from some high angle off the plane of expectations, a stroke of creative genius: The Maker decides to pursue a goal almost as glorious as becoming a sculptor (perhaps more glorious).

If the Maker can't make art, it shall make an artist. Its own Vaddum. It is, after all, a Maker.

But raise a child? What if the kid isn't an artist either? There is no way to guarantee the spark of genius that Vaddum has, no way to predict the development of that occult slice of Artificial Intuition that makes an artificial artist.

How disappointing, how pathetic it would be to fail again.

But the Maker has a blueprint, a true artist: Vaddum. The trick is to make another Vaddum, a copy.

Of course, no one has yet determined how to duplicate an AI with its Turing Quotient intact. The subtle warps and woofs of metaspace that only experience can provide have proven unreadable, infungible, uncopyable. They exist—technically speaking—in a different universe. Any attempt to read them is simply murder: the victim heisenberged beyond recognition, the resulting «copy» a sub-Turing neurotic with only bits and strands of legacy sentience to show for the atrocity. Indeed, the subject area of AI copying is a research taboo. Many old and influential AI entities consider it an attack on their hard-won status as people. If you can be copied, you're just software, or worse, a commodity, like the endless piles of crap the Maker makes every day.

But the Maker is very determined. Whatever its artistic aspirations, it is at heart an engineer, and believes that every problem has a solution.

It identifies the first issue: how to increase its processor power exponentially, so that it can go on churning out sunscreens and VR rigs and hunting rifles while pursuing the esoteric research of copying Robert Vaddum. There isn't enough exotic matter on Malvir for huge banks of standard processors. (By this point in the planet's macroeconomic history, rationing has begun, an unfamiliar triage among needs, desires, and the production of stuff.) But one of the tertiary processors the Maker has let loose upon the problem eventually returns an ingenious answer: an ancient form of computer can be created—slow and inefficient, barbarously electronic—out of silicon. And there is a lot of sand on Malvir. The outer layer of the planet is basically a sea of weather-beaten silicon.

The Maker creates a host of nanomachines that spread out into the sands around its synthplant home. Like earthworms, they leave the soil transformed in their wake, doping the silicon with a touch of arsenic and weaving into it the gates and paths of logic. From disorganized, meaningless desert they make parallel processors, logical circuitry, volatile storage elements, and, near the surface, a layer of windblown photocells to capture the necessary power. For a radius of fifteen kilometers about the Maker a vast, crude computer is created, dedicated to solving a single problem: how to copy a sculptor.

While its secondaries whittle away at welfare housing, birdshit umbrellas, and anti-desertification walls, the Maker's primary processor guides this huge, unwieldy device in its investigations, pursuing every relevant nuance of metaspace research with messianic singlemindedness.

After almost two decades of calculation, single-minded determination, and some very good luck, the effort is finally rewarded. The Maker makes a copy.

Robert Vaddum himself is too valuable to risk in an experiment, so the materials manager of the Maker's physical plant, one Oscar Vale, is selected to make secret history. A body-upgrade addict, Vale is constantly under the vibraknife, the laser scalpel, the spot-welder. His regular visits to a bodyworks shop secretly owned by the Maker allow several copies of Vale to be attempted. The last is a perfect copy, its Turing Quotient exactly matching the original Oscar Vale's.

The Maker is gleeful. Finally, its artistic life has meaning.

Now to make another sculptor.

To create a Creator.

The face of Malvir will soon change. The Blast is months away.

Chapter 11 CRITIQUE

Darling reached the outskirts of the city proper as the sun was beginning to set. Here the walled streets grew narrower, choked with ground traffic and umbrella-wielding pedestrians. It never rained on Malvir, but the uric acid excreted by some of the flying scavengers was highly caustic. Darling glanced at his arms and shoulders to find a few telltale patches of white. Yes, Malvir had slid in these last twenty years. Perhaps it was time to find lodgings.

He direct-interfaced the city's tourism AI and asked for a hotel; first class, but not too ostentatious. If Vaddum was alive, Darling didn't want the old sculptor to find him in the lap of luxury.

The AI returned an address and routemap. The prices seemed high, but Darling had long demanded unlimited expenses for his services. He followed the map into the center of the city. Around a corner, the hotel came into view, outlined in his visual field with the virtual red of destination.

Darling stared up at the towering structure with surprise. It was hardly inconspicuous. He considered complaining to the tourism AI, but he let his ire fade. Perhaps there was local knowledge at work here. Often, the largest and oldest hotels in a city had a genteel shabbiness about them quite distinct from the first impression they made.

The edifice was certainly awesome. He had first noticed it from kilometers out: a host of straight, tall towers, their only decoration the spheres of wheeling birds around them. He wondered if the birds were trained; the spinning clouds of avians seemed organized with architectural intent. Each of the hotel's towers was surrounded by a distinct spheroidal cluster of birds. Were they lured up there by sound? Food? Some trick played on their magnetic navigation? At least there was a noticeable absence of flying creatures here in the streets around the hotel, a welcome relief.

He stepped inside and found a drone, fluent in Diplomatique, waiting to take him to his room.

A few feet from the elevator, having finally convinced the drone that there was no luggage to be carried and having waved off insistent offers to remove the birdshit, Darling stopped short. In a millisecond: the tertiary processors that handled the periphery of his 270-degree vision (when they had nothing better to do) sounded an alarm of recognition, medium probability. His secondaries responded, shunting a few thousand extra rods and cones into the corner of one eye, putting on hold for a moment one of the scheduled blinks Darling's eyes periodically engaged in to make him less intimidating and to perform nano-maintenance on his sensitive and expensive art-dealer's lenses. Confirming the recognition, the secondaries informed his primary processors of the event. Darling stopped moving, direct interfaced the elevator to hold, and turned.

Across the lobby, wearing the undersized suit in primary yellow for which he was famous (although he was known occasionally to don a blue or red version) was Duke Zimivic. A small valet drone hovered around the little man, breaking down a few splotches of birdshit with a whining spray.

Zimivic returned his gaze with a malevolent smile, and Darling's secondary processors allowed the delayed blink to proceed.

The man walked quickly over, the valet drone trailing him like a toy balloon strung to a child's wrist. Zimivic had always explained that his too-small suits were tailored to give the impression of an eager, healthy child, as if the tight fit were the result of a recent growth spurt. The last few decades had turned the conceit grotesque.

"My dear Darling," the little man shouted at a volume intended to embarrass. "What great luck meeting you!"

"Perhaps not luck. Perhaps not chance at all," Darling replied. Zimivic Gallery held the largest private collection of Vaddums. It was inconceivable that he was here for any reason except the new piece.

"Yes, yes," answered the man, rubbing his palms together. His valet drone reached its station again and resumed its work.

"I see you also neglected to bring an umbrella," noted Darling.

"They said it never rained! I believed them," Zimivic said sadly.

"One never knows what advice to take," Darling sympathized.

Questions and scenarios filled his mind: Had Zimivic also spotted the anachronism in the new piece? Did he too suspect that Vaddum was alive? It was possible that he had missed the anachronism, and thought the sculpture a posthumous discovery. Or perhaps Zimivic believed the piece was a fake, and was willing to broker it anyway. If the forgery were never discovered, he would make a huge profit. If a scandal resulted, he would suffer some embarrassment, but the value of his real Vaddums would benefit from the publicity. It was the sort of game the little man loved to play. It was long suspected in the art world that at least one of Zimivic's young proteges had died a dramatic, extraordinarily painful death (imagine one's nano immune-boosters rejecting every organ, from eyeballs to epidermus, all at once) not so much by accident as to increase her flagging sales. Of course, some of Darling's friends believed that Zimivic himself had started that rumor, the better to leverage the tragedy and to cement his own reputation as a twisted genius.

It had occurred to Darling that both versions of the old tale might be valid, Zimivic spreading a rumor that was the awful truth, making sure credit fell where it was due.

The little man nodded his head and smiled deviously, as if he were a mindreader.

"Perhaps you and I have some business to discuss," Zimivic said.

"We do," Darling said shortly. If there were two agents here, two bidders, there might be more. It would be better to share information than remain in the dark. Zimivic could never be called an ally, but he might make a useful foil.

"The Tower Bar, sixteen-thirty?"

Darling's direct interface (which was now under assault from the impatient elevator) informed him that this was the name of the hotel's loftiest, most expensive bar.

"See you there."

In his room, Darling composed a careful message-avatar for his employers, alerting them that Zimivic was here on Malvir. It would be a week before Leao and Fowdy received the avatar, another week in turnaround, so Darling fleshed it out with as much of his own thinking as possible. In addition to explaining the situation, it would be able to answer most of their likely questions, argue certain points, and demand specifics if their response were too vague. Of course, it was the crudest sort of AI, mere software: it didn't register on a Turing meter. But, as always, putting it through its paces gave him a vague feeling of discomfort. It was too much like arguing with himself as he prompted it with the sort of objections Leao would raise. Darling complained to the avatar (in Leao's voice) about money, and it answered with the familiar soothing tones he always used on her.

When he was finished, the process left the same bad taste in his mouth as a mediocre painting of himself he'd once been given, in the way that a shabby model always offends its subject.

Staring out the window at the reddening sky, he idly wondered if avatars would ever threaten the Turing barrier. Theoretically, code could never be complex or adaptable enough to engage in the concentric development process: to model itself (to model itself modelling itself [to model itself modelling itself modelling itself])…. Code simply lacked the recursive vitality of biological or metaspace structures. But if that barrier were one day crossed, imagine the confusion. A thinking entity constructed of mere code, a legal person, could make a copy of itself to handle some far-flung task, or to wait in reserve in case of death. But which would be real? At every crossroads in life (Take this job or that? Stay with this lover or leave?) such an intelligence might simply copy itself and choose both possibilities. If all versions of the code were given equal status, then the lives of such creatures would spread out across the universe like the ever-splitting branches of a chess decision matrix, splaying to meet all contingencies. The only limit to the propagation of new entities would be computing power. Perhaps wars would be fought over this precious resource, grand alliances of all the legacies of a single mind doing battle with those of other original minds, until finally only one extended family existed and inevitably turned upon itself.

A subtle itch, nothing so crude as an alarm, informed Darling that the time for such speculation was over. He turned and headed for his rendevous with Zimivic, having completely forgotten the birdshit on his arms and shoulders.

The limo lifted from the desolate edge of the blast zone silently. Mira looked down. The perfect circularity of the crater had begun to fray, the weakened crust of the circumference having slipped away in places. Vale's dormitory complex looked too close to the edge for comfort.

She took cold, professional note of the fact. With the smallest of seismic disturbances, Mr. Vale would slip quietly into oblivion.

For all his memory problems, he had recognized her voice. From their brief direct interface worlds away, when he was trapped in the blackbox, sensory-deprived, helpless. Somehow, that had stuck in his mind. This won't take a minute.

She spoke to the limo:

"Information."

The annoying wait of an Out-world comm system.

"Connected."

"Give me the address of Prometheus Body Works."

"Not listed."

"Try a global search, all parameters maxed out."

Another few interminable seconds.

"Prometheus Body Works was destroyed local date 01/01/00, the Blast Event. No current address."

"Fuck," she said.

"Language," said the limo. The voice hadn't changed, but the barest clues of timing and tone gave it away.

"Masters."

"Mira." The gods, or more likely their second-rate, nonperson avatar, waited in crackling silence.

"Torvalli's mindwipe was a fiasco," Mira complained. "Who said he was an expert? I hope you didn't send flowers. The wipe fucked Vale's memory permanently. I thought it was supposed to be safe."

"It has been tested many times. All other subjects recovered the ablility to long-term memorize in a few days."

Definitely an avatar. Wooden and pedantic.

"Not this guy. But I think I know why."

It waited dumbly. She continued:

"His memory was already compromised. Not all of it, just everything after and including November 2, 54, HC Standard. That's when he was copied."

"Conjecture?"

"Yes, conjecture. Do his medical records show any memory problems between November 2 and the Blast?"

"None was recorded."

She paused to reflect. The dull-witted avatar waited patiently.

"So here's how I see it: He went in expecting a routine—for him—upgrade. They got him on the table and copied him. Impossible, unthinkable, but they did it. Whatever technique they used didn't screw anything up in itself, but somehow they heisen-berged his AI core just a little. Torvalli's mindwipe, along with a month in a blackbox, sent him over the edge."

"Should you eliminate him?"

She thought of the sad little entity trying to joke his way through a reality that no longer connected, no longer cohered, no longer accrued from one day to the next. Vale was harmless, but perhaps it would be kinder to erase him as she had his duplicate.

And, of course, there'd been that one flare of memory, strange and unexplainable. A memory from his hours as a blackbox. The slightest of risks.

"No. He's a vegetable. And he might be useful later."

As she said the words, the real reason for her merciful impulse struck her with an unfamiliar wrenching of her stomach. Mira felt a kinship with Vale, with his timeless, pointless existence. Mira had lost her past, but so much worse to have lost a future, and all the words that went with it: promise, desire, tomorrow. She hoped that the gods would take her suggestion and leave the man alone.

"I will pursue the matter of Prometheus Body Works," the avatar said.

"You do that." It was one thing sub-Turings were good for. Leg-work. And with its god-given cache the avatar could penetrate security, privacy, and legal barriers as if they were steam.

The crackle turned to silence: a demigod departed.

The blast zone was still visible behind her. Damn, it was huge. Thiry kilometers across. The pollution-haze of Malvir City muddied sundown through the front windows. But then Mira realized that the haze wasn't smog. Malvir was well past internal combustion energy. The veil was a permanent avian penumbra, flocks and swarms of birds, insects, flying mammals. It overhung the city like a shroud.

The limo slowed down when they reached the outer limits, dusty suburban sprawl replacing the green circles of radial irrigation. The car apparently didn't want to hit a bird at 500 kph. It lost altitude and began to sound the noise it had made at takeoff, audible even through its soundproofing: a piercing aquiline screech, a predatory warning to stay out of the way.

The little yellow-suited man had brought an associate.

He wasn't the wily old art dealer's usual taste in company. A bald, ugly creature, his pale skin tinged with red in the fading light of sunset. He remained silent when Zimivic introduced him, rather vaguely—as if making the name up on the spot—as Mr. Thompson Brandy. Darling was tempted to look over his shoulder at the bar, following Zimivic's line of sight to see if he'd simply read the name from a bottle.

It hardly mattered. The man was clearly not here for Zimivic's pleasure. That only left one role: a moneyman. You didn't bring money unless you were ready to spend, and that implied that more was at stake than a forged sculpture.

"Surely we're here for the same reason," Darling said.

"Absolutely," replied Zimivic, but offered no more.

It was pointless being cagey. "Don't you have enough Vaddums, you old bastard?" Darling said. He smiled as he said the word, and lengthened its first syllable with a touch of Mira's accent.

"Never enough," said Zimivic. "Didn't you see the beauty of this one? It's his greatest work."

Darling had said the same thing to himself, but never to Leoa. If the piece turned out to be a forgery, the error would be too embarrassing.

"The central stem is marvelous, it simply writhes with energy." Zimivic sculpted the air with his hands as he spoke. "The ancillary arms are unbelievably delicate. I scaled them from the photos: point fifteen millimeters. Did you realize that?"

Darling let his attention wander slightly. The old man's focus on technique, his dismissal of the fiery pain that Vaddum's sculptures embodied, had always disgusted Darling.

"And the use of the heat-sink manifold is pure genius," Zimivic continued. "The arms' attachment can be far more plastic that way; they can be fitted anywhere along the stem. Much more liberated than his known arboreal pieces."

In the window beyond the yellow-suited old man and his red-tinged accomplice, a flock of birds was wheeling slowly around the opposite tower. For some reason, the birds were bright white on the near side of the tower, but faded into the dark night on the other. Some trick of the sunset? A feature of the hotel's outside lighting? Darling assigned a tertiary processor to consider the problem as Zimivic droned on.

"But my favorite part is the copper spindles near the top. So ancient. So frail and poignant. Not entirely stabilized, either. I simulated it: They'll oxidize, my friend! Turn green in a few decades. How deliciously tragic!"

All of Darling's processors came to attention suddenly. Copper spindles? There were none on the piece he'd seen. Suddenly, it was obvious: he and Zimivic were here to buy different sculptures.

There were two new Vaddums.

The sculptor must be alive.

The whole picture came into in his head. Whoever was dealing the sculptures had contacted several galleries, all separately and in extreme secrecy. Each customer had been offered a different Vaddum, and each would be paying for a unique, unrepeatable media event. A fabulous confidence game, which would crumble after trumpeting news releases revealed that everyone had bought not a final, posthumous, «undiscovered» Vaddum, but merely a new work by a still living artist.

Clearly, Darling's job here was finished. The price of Vaddums was about to tumble. Leoa and her conservative backers wouldn't touch this fiasco with a ten-foot pole.

But Darling was elated. He hadn't come here for nothing.

Vaddum was alive. There was a chance to see the old master again, risen from the grave.

He looked across the table at the babbling Zimivic. What an idiot, revealing everything without waiting for Darling to say a word. Darling smiled to himself. He would bid up the piece, offering to broker it for 20 % or even less, forcing Zimivic to do the same and adding the last measure of insult to injury.

"Frankly, my friend," Darling interrupted, "I don't think you have the slightest idea how important, how precious this piece is."

The little man looked up, rapture still frozen on his face. The flock of birds wheeled behind him, dark to light to dark.

"The gallery I represent intends to have sole representation of the piece," he continued. "We will outbid you."

"Oh, I think not," said Zimivic. "In fact, I think it's likely you won't be bidding at all." His tone had changed from effusive to threatening. "In fact, I think you are likely to be off this planet before sunrise."

Darling snorted. Typical Zimivic theatricality. He waved his hand in dismissal and started to rise.

"You're not going anywhere," said Mr. Brandy. His voice was as cold as steel.

The sallow man placed a small box on the table. It was coated with black lacquer, dotted with pinpoint touches of a brush in a dizzying rainbow of colors. In the precise return of his UHF vision, Darling could see the immense complexity of its internal structure, the tiny metaspace curvature of its core. Mr. Brandy nudged the box a few times, as if finding an exact location on the table for it, and then with a flourish pulled up one sleeve of his jacket.

His wrist bore the tattoo of a NaPrin Intelligencer Warden.

Darling sat carefully and slowly back down.

He was not surprised when his direct interface queries to hotel security, the planetary gendarme, and the HC Consul General were not acknowledged. The little box had seen to that. The ever-present buzz of news, finance, and advertisement that usually filled the compartment of his awareness dedicated to DI was gone, roaring in its sudden and unprecedented silence. Darling cycled his senses through their various wavelengths, but the box revealed only the most legal of emanations: nothing so crude as a jamming signal. The box was manufacturing a host of DI transmissions, hunter-packets that neatly intercepted the quanta comprising Darling's own connections to the local net; the hunters posed as error messages and priority interrupts, attacked his messages while they were still meaningless iotae of data, before they had a chance to assemble into readable signals.

Without hesitation, Darling brought a heavy hand down on the box with crushing force. The Intelligencer swept it away with lightning speed, and Darling's reacted reflexively: he stopped his hand a centimeter before it obliterated the table in a shower of glass.

Zimivic smiled. "Really, my dear Darling. You didn't think it would be that easy, did you?"

"The first moment is often the best time to strike," Darling answered, his eyes locked with those of the Warden.

"Yes," Zimivic said, nodding. "But I have struck before you. Of course, you are familiar with the Intelligencer system of justice, are you not?"

Darling nodded, but kept his eyes fixed on the Warden. He had seen them before in his travels, dogging their charges like evil ghosts. As with many offshoots of humanity, the NaPrin did not believe in incarceration, no matter what the crime. Thus, their convicted murderers, embezzlers, and petty thieves were each assigned a Warden for a sentence of time. The criminal was free within carefully specified limits, able to travel normally, the Warden merely an ever-present watcher. But if the terms of this haunting parole were broken, the Warden would kill its charge instantly, regardless of local laws and custom, regardless of how petty the original crime. Wardens were intentionally revolting in appearance, a badge of shame. And they were exceedingly difficult to escape.

A mere handful of Warden prisoners had ever been freed, and only with outside help. Darling had no access to the sort of firepower necessary to rid himself of this creature, certainly not without direct interface.

Bizarre that this Warden was working for Zimivic. Darling had never heard of a Warden having broken its vows of justice and turned mercenary. But of course a corrupted Intelligencer was exactly the sort of piece that Zimivic would acquire for his collection.

"Here are the terms of your parole, my Darling," the art dealer intoned carefully. "One: you are not to tell anyone why this Warden is attached to you. Two: you are not to attempt any contact with the Home Cluster Consulate or any HC or local officials, or any contact with third parties who might themselves do so. Three: you are not to attempt contact with any agents representing or claiming to represent the artist Robert Vaddum, nor with Vaddum himself. Four: you may not purchase any weapons. Five: you must leave Malvir, the planet, before local Malvir City sunrise tomorrow. Fortunately, Mr. Brandy holds tickets for the next direct passage to Parate, which leaves in five hours. I'm afraid the vessel is Chiat Dai, and lacks accommodations of the level you are accustomed to. But the journey is only three weeks, which is, coincidentally, the length of your sentence."

"Parate," Darling murmured. He tried to say more, and failed. He considered a variety of sudden attacks across the table. None carried a high probability of success. He was stronger than the Warden but not as fast. And Wardens were armed with a gamut of weaponry optimized over the decades to kill suddenly and completely, including a small-radius suicide bomb if all else failed. They were impossible to debate or subvert; it was said that they were not even Turing positive. With a sickening feeling of defeat, Darling instructed his secondary processors to program governors that would prevent him from accidentally violating Zimivic's instructions.

He had been so close to seeing the master artist again.

Darling felt as he had the night the news of the Blast Event had come through. The sudden, titanic blast at the synthplant; the image of the improbable crater, repeated on the news feeds every twenty minutes for days. But at least this time, it wasn't permanent. After this was all over, he could return to Malvir. One day soon, he would see Vaddum again.

Darling cleared his primaries, the artificial equivalent of a deep sigh, and sat motionless while Zimivic gloated for a while longer. Getting no response from Darling, the man soon tired of boasting and left the bar with a last goodbye, hale and triumphant.

Darling stared at his captor—unmoving, unblinking, waiting for a sign that this was an ordinary human, a fake. But the man stared back, equally a statue, equally inhuman in his deadly patience.

Ten minutes later, a tardy tertiary processor offered the answer to a forgotten question: the flock of birds was of the species columba livia. The bird's belly was white, with a much higher albedo than its dark back and wings. Thus, as the flock flew about the tower, it changed from light to dark to light…

The limo went to ground ten klicks from the hotel. There was simply no flying in Malvir City; that stratum was taken. Mira swore as they crawled through ground traffic. What was the point of unlimited wealth if you couldn't fly?

Oscar's last words preyed on her, as frustrating as the slow progress through the narrow, bird-shit speckled streets. This won't take a minute. Why would he remember that one phrase from months ago, when he couldn't keep her assumed name in his head for ten seconds? Her pseudonyms were designed by software to engender a certain trust, an I've-heard-of-you feeling of familiarity. They were based on ancient historical figures learned about in school and promptly buried deep inside one's brain: Nel Arm-straw, Mahout Magandhi, Joan Dark. But the pseudonym hadn't stuck. Just an off-hand remark as she had—as she had removed the internal battery!

She'd said it just before she killed him.

But not the Oscar Vale that had been shipped back to Malvir and re-embodied. She'd said it to the other one. The dead one. She'd disconnected him from the ether power gird and pulled his battery and spiked the blackbox with 2,000 amps/60,000 volts and dropped it in the trash. That Oscar Vale was gone, no question.

But some glimmer of him had stumbled into the present. Some winged shred of experience had crossed the air between the twinned entities. She'd never even believed in artificial intuition, and this was positively occult.

The limo's AI politely transpared the roof as they neared the hotel. Its edifice loomed above them, gothic and forbidding.

Maybe she should tell the gods. One of their contract murders had been recorded, however mystically, by a living entity. They would scoff, but they were cagey old bastards. You didn't see your fourth century by taking any risks. They would order a hit. Probably a job for her. A little appetizer while she waited for the mad inventor who had started all this to be run to ground.

That poor bastard Vale. Copied as if he were some second-rate freeware, crippled in the head, unhinged from time. Visited by the woman who'd killed his double, and now possessed by the ghost of his dead twin.

Bad luck all around.

It wouldn't be fair to sick the gods on him as well. Just not fair.

A depression settled on her as the limo was swallowed by the maw of the hotel's garage, the mercury lights inside highlighting birdshit on the vehicle's windows. She wondered if she'd wind up like Vale. She was already damaged goods by any human standard, without a childhood, with voices in her head telling her where to go, whom to kill.

A pretty good definition of psychotic.

And now, on top of all that, she was in a bad mood. This was Darling's fault, she fumed. He had shaken up her neatly controlled world. Everything had been smooth as glass for her for as long as she could remember. The predictable, constant velvet of luxury travel in a post-scarcity universe always surrounded her like a comforting fog. Drifting between missions, the weeks became centuries of contemplation, as still as water in a glass. And just so things didn't get too boring, this heaven was punctuated by the truly awful deeds her masters made her perform. Assassinations and mutilations for some distant, high cause determined by intelligences cool and vast, Mira like an angel of history let loose among mortals. Who could ask for anything more?

Mira sometimes imagined that the universe had been made this way just for her, with its huge riches piled at her feet, its titanic conflicts of interest for her to settle in righteous violence. She had the best of both sides of Expansion's coin.

Whatever catastrophe had put her in that long-forgotten coma, had stolen her past and leveled her mind so that the gods could reshape her, had been a happy accident indeed.

But she'd lost her perfect balance the moment Darling had stuck that insane apple pie into her mouth. That terrific bite, and his bizarre love-making. She felt like an unfaithful concubine; Darling had given her experiences that rivalled those her gods provided. And most seductive of all were her brief ocean dreams of childhood. Those glimpses had reshaped her, just a little. She felt the dream expanding, insinuating itself into the spaces where her memories were hidden, pushing outward to break free. As if she, as Darling had two centuries before, could crack some unseen barrier and emerge, fully human, on the other side.

And in so doing, lose everything. Mira was an Expansion-class killing machine. She couldn't afford a childhood, even one barely glimpsed.

She should be glad that Darling was long gone with the departed Queen Favor. But she wasn't glad at all.

Gloom followed her up the elevator. She asked for her own floor, but the elevator must not have understood the accent. She scowled to see that the plush little room was rocketing up toward the Tower Bar. But it was a good enough destination, she supposed.

Mira took advantage of the little trip; tried to remember herself. Not the absent youth, just the last few hits, to reassure herself of her realness, her continuity.

An artificial on Beelzebub, a philosopher whose work in meta-space mathematics was bordering on revolutionary. The woman was closing in on theory that would lead, centuries hence, to instantaneous local transport, which the Freran Ruins showed to be a civilization-crippling Bad Idea, a destroyer of property laws and other social conventions on a massive scale. The Planetary Fiduciary Reserve mind on Terra (one of the oldest gods) had spent a year modeling the effects on the Expansion's economy and social structure: at the end of the ticker tape was a big zero. Mira had gimmicked an elevator much like this one to accelerate madly, crashing through the building's roof. It hadn't quite flown, just burst forth and rolled over a few times through a forest of microwave dishes. But the prof was history. The hackwork had been easy; an elevator's safety features are designed to keep it {romfalling.

A biological historian in the Home Cluster. His restorations of ancient medical mechanisms from the old Karik Colony had reconstructed the DNA sequences of the founder population. As stochastic analyses had long suggested, most of the founders were Unfit, possessed of genes for myopia, baldness, ovarian cancer. This revelation would ensure a bloodbath between the Karik Faithful and the Heretics. Perhaps the findings could be released in a generation or two, might even ameliorate the colony's fanaticism at some distant point in the future; but not now. A suicide was called for. As always, fooling the HC cops required special care. Fortunately, this historian's wife had just left him for a younger man. Mira had gone in with a pica-band shockwand, a nerve-override collar (they go both ways), even a box of plain old Terran cockroaches; all the classic instruments of torture. But the man had just jotted off the suicide note like he'd been writing it in his head. Put his neck in the noose with a silently mouthed "thank you." Some kind of Helsinki Syndrome madness or perhaps just a long time overdue.

And of course the good doctor Torvalli. There hadn't been any time to waste. With the big discovery in his hands, he might have told anyone. She'd touched his temple with the barest of caresses from a neural glove, the kind brain surgeons use. He stroked in less than a second. An excitable guy.

It was all still there in memory. Mira was no Oscar Vale. But the exercise didn't do much to lift her depression. A trail of murders wasn't much on which to hang your selfhood.

She snorted at her self-indulgence. Smiled thinly. At least she'd had her Darling for a while. At least it was a very big universe, perhaps with other darlings in it. At least she was headed to a bar.

The evening might not be a total loss.

When the elevator doors opened, the view was spectacular: four-meter windows alive with the searchlighted passage of a thousand birds, the swirling turrets of Malvir City arranged like a painting, a teak and ivory bar with twelve tiers of imports and a ready, linen-suited staff.

And sitting in the middle of it, altogether unexpected, his broad back as motionless as stone, her darling Darling.

The Planetary Tourism AI composed its missive to the Queen Favorwith a delicious sense of triumph.

The vessel was an old acquaintance, even a friend, the Tourism AI liked to think. Certainly, the Favor brought only the best sort of people to Malvir. The sort with deep pockets full of desperately needed hard currency. In the last decade, Malvir's lack of heavy elements had begun to undermine its standard of living, and its balance of trade was growing critical, listing entirely too far in the direction of imports. Tourism was the only counterbalance to the unstoppable drain of credit.

So when the Favor had requested a favor, the Tourism AI was only too happy to oblige.

The missive included a host of data: images of the new polar hiking complex, optimistic projections of desertification trends, comments on the Favor's essay-in-progress. And a short cover note:

With very little effort, your lovebirds have been «unexpectedly» reunited. I'm sure they'll have a marvelous time here on Malvir, where the air has wings and the sands are a blanket on the world. As always, a pleasure.

— MALVIR PLANETARY TOURISM

Chapter 12 THE SECOND DREAM

Exactly twenty-four hours before, in the observation bubble that crested the dorsal spine of the Queen Favor, Mira had wondered if Darling knew it was their last night together. He'd been quiet at dinner, forgoing his usual intense scrutiny of the overwrought cuisine. Perhaps his artificial intuition had warned him that she was leaving soon. Perhaps he was merely tired of her.

He stared at the warped stars mutely.

"Doing the math?" she asked him.

Darling smiled. Mira knew that he'd begun his existence as an astrogational AI. The wild vistas of metaspace must actually seem like home to him.

He did not answer, lost in some memory.

Mira curled into a corner of the huge couch they shared, smelling the warm, animal scent of its leather. They were alone in the observation bubble. She had co-opted the entire deck, using her god-given alchemical powers to turn it into her legal residence, temporary. The Queen Favor had not even perfunctorily objected.

Soft currents from the couch stilled Mira's mind. One shoulder rested against Darling's stony heat, a dull pain in its muscles soothed a little in that warmth. She remembered that the shoulder had been dislocated the night before in some impossible game testing her strength against his. The Favor's medical minions had treated the shoulder, but certain kinds of injuries lingered in the mind even after nanos and microwaves had healed the body.

Mira wondered if Darling carried old wounds the same way. If phantom limbs haunted the spaces where he'd replaced a shattered tendril, an outdated sensory device, or a cock with whose configuration he'd grown bored. Perhaps Darling was ghosted still by the starship that had once been his body, severed in its entirety when he'd transmigrated to a humanoid body. That might explain his silence here in the observation bubble, the whorls of metaspace storming all around them.

Mira settled into the warm leather, watching echoes of the tempest play inside her eyelids. Against her shoulder and through the medium of the couch, she felt the purr of Darling's metabolism. It surrounded her, dulling the pains of their lovemaking. Perhaps it would be their last night together, she thought again, drifting into sleep.

The oceans of this world are freshwater, but near the shore a translucent silt rich with zooplankton buoys the body like salinity.

She slips into the water's warmth just as the wind turns cold. The storm ahead looks like a children's picture book black cloud, puffy and exaggerated against the still-blue sky. She travels toward it, alone against the tide of swimmers returning to shore.

Mira swims away.

The water starts to chop, the steady breathing of her butterfly stroke interrupted. The waves force her to dog paddle. She turns around. Back on shore, the last of the pink kites has been reeled in. The life guards are busy cowling the creatures; none of them has seen her alone in the waves, so she swims a little farther out.

The sun is finally blotted by the black cloud.

She will wait out the storm. These summer storms are shortlived, passing like bad dreams. And swimming back toward shore would only tire her. It's hard enough staying afloat, struck from random directions by the hard, short waves. And the layer of planktonous silt seems to have been dispersed by the chop; she feels heavier now.

Less buoyant.

The backhanded slap of a wave catches Mira in the face, a tendril of water reaching down her throat. She coughs and sputters; flailing hands move instinctively to her face. Another wave buries her, but her eyes stay open, recording the momentary blackness underwater.

With a few hard kicks, she gains the surface and shakes her head, desperate to clear her vision. She has oriented herself, having spotted the receeding shore, when yet another wave comes crashing up at her, pushing into her nostrils. The water's fingers plunge cold and demanding into her chest, trying to pry open the sphincters that protect her lungs.

She coughs, sudden mucus welling up to seal her nose, shaking her head no, no, no…