The Lowest Heaven

A MAP OF MERCURY ^{ALASTAIR REYNOLDS}

When at last his ship had escaped Mercury’s gravitational pull and aligned itself for the long cruise back to Jupiter space, Oleg unstrapped from his launch couch and floated through the cabin until he reached the aft stowage rack where he had slotted the artwork. It had been a fight against temptation, not opening the box until now, but he had promised himself that he would not do so until he had reached space. Perhaps it was unwise to open it at all, and certainly before he surrended it to his Jovian masters. But he had been given no special instructions in the matter.

The box was light, almost too light, as if it contained no more than air or packing. Was it a last trick on the world, he wondered? An empty container? A box full of high-grade vacuum?

He would have to open it to know.

The container was an unprepossessing object. It was a plain white in colour. Its upper third was hinged and secured by a simple metal clasp. It was the kind of thing, he reflected, in which one might recieve a hat or perhaps a new space helmet.

The clasp released easily under his fingers. He hinged open the top of the box. Immediately beneath the lid lay, as anticipated, a wadding of packaging. He plucked the cottony material away, until a harder form began to reveal itself. It was the upper part of a rough-textured sphere. It was beautifully shaded and coloured◦– a warm grey, relieved by blue and gold mottling and the circles and sprays of fine white cratering. The polar region glittered with tiny embedded diamonds, signifying motherlodes of frozen water, locked in shadowed craters for mindless aeons.

Well, of course. It was a globe. The clue had been there in the title all along.

A Map of Mercury.

He had come in with high expectations◦– unrealistically high, perhaps.

The artists kept the place clean. Being cyborgs they could tolerate both the lit and unlit faces of the slow-turning world, but they moved anyway◦– camping and then travelling on, endlessly. Except for their artforms, littering the crust like Ozymandis heads, they left no trace of themselves. On airless Mercury the shadows of these things clawed out to the limit of the world’s curvature.

From orbit he had locked onto their moving caravan. It had only been a little distance ahead of the terminator, the dividing margin between day and night.

“Hello,” he declared cheerfully. “I have come from Jupiter. I would like permission to land and speak with Rhawn.”

“This is the Cyborg Artistic Collective,” came back the reply. “Thank you for your interest, but your request to speak with Rhawn is declined.”

Oleg smiled, for this was nothing more or less than he had anticipated. “I’d still like to land. Is that possible?”

“Do you have tradeable goods?”

“Yes, and I’d also like to barter for fuel. I can set my ship down a little ahead of your caravan and cross the remaining ground on foot.”

“That is acceptable,” the voice said eventually. “One of us will meet you. Bring your tradeables.”

He lowered on thrust until his little ship pinned itself to the face of Mercury like a brooch. Once down, it flicked a parasol across itself and began to cool down.

Oleg emerged from an airlock in a bulky spacesuit patterned with active mirror facets and fanlike cooling vanes. He went around to the back of the ship and unpacked two scuttling chrome spiders. The robots helped him unload the tradeable goods from the ship’s belly hatch. Then he orientated himself and set off for the caravan, with the spiders following.

Here the Mercurean terrain was as flat as a salt lake. The caravan was a huge, raggedy thing composed of many travelling elements. Some as small as a person◦– some, indeed, were cyborgs jogging next to the procession◦– while others were as big as mansions or beached spacecraft. The larger structures were made up of a bits of scavenged vehicle, fuel tank and pressure module, cut-and-shut into rococo dwellings. Sails, banners and penants whipped high into the airless black. On one platform travelled the huge, lacy outline of a two hundred metre high stallion. Inside the horse’s geodesic chest cavity, tiny figures worked with nova-bright welding torches. Another form, equally tall, was a naked human woman balancing on one leg. She had her arms cantilevered out for balance, one ahead and one behind. Jammed into her torso at odd, disruptive angles were repurposed cargo modules.

One of the cyborgs broke from the pack and jogged out to meet him. Beneath its knees, the cyborg’s legs were springy prosthetics that sent it metres into the sky with each stride.

“Welcome, Oleg,” said a synthetic voice. “We spoke earlier. I am Gris. Have you been to Mercury before?”

“No, this is my first time. Thank you for allowing me to land.”

“That is a very impressive suit,” Gris said. “I imagine it could keep you alive for quite a while?”

“Not as long as yours, I’d wager,” Oleg said.

“Ah, but we don’t think of our suits as suits.” Gris touched a fist to its chest, in a kind of salute. “This is my skin, now and forever. I’m wired into it on a profound sensory level◦– full haptic and proprioceptive integration. I don’t just live in it◦– it’s part of me. I trust that doesn’t unsettle you?”

“If it did, I’d be the wrong person to come to Mercury. And definitely the wrong person to speak to the Cyborg Artistic Collective.”

Gris’s suit◦– or skin, if that was the proper way to think of it◦– was a mechanical integument giving little hint of the organic contents within. The armour was multicoloured and baroquely patterned. Gris’s helmet had become a beak-faced gargoyle, with multiple cameras wedged into its eye-sockets. There was no glass or visor.

“I know you’ve come a long away,” Gris said. “But you mustn’t take Rhawn’s disinterest personally.”

They walked under the Sun. In Oleg’s view it had no business being that big or that bright. The intensity of its illumination, averaged over an orbit, was a hundred times stronger than he was normally used to. That bloated inflamed Sun was an affront to his sensibilities. It would be very good to be on his way from Mercury, back to the civilised polities of Jovian Space.

But not without the thing he had come for.

“Rhawn’s star has risen,” he observed.

“It makes no difference to her. Mercury is her home now. The sooner people accept that, the happier everyone will be. Are those your tradeables?”

“It’s not much, I know. But there are some rare alloys and composites in there, which you may find of value.”

When they were at the caravan cyborgs were waiting to pick through his offerings. A value would be placed on the items, which Oleg was free to accept or decline.

“You can come aboard,” Gris said casually. “We have provision for guests, if you wish to get out of the suit. It will take a little while to give you a value for your goods, so you may as well.”

“Thank you,” Oleg agreed.

Gris brought him to one of the sliding, sledge-like platforms. They vaulted up onto a catwalk, then found an airlock leading into the side of a chequered structure made from an old fuel tank. Oleg satisfied himself by just removing the helmet and gloves, placing them next to him on a kind of combination sofa and padded mattress. Gris, squatting on the other side of a table, had removed no part of its suit except the spring extensions of its legs, presently racked by the door. Now it busied itself pouring herbal infusions into little alloy cups.

“Were you an artist before you came here?” Oleg asked, to be making conversation.

“Not at all. In fact I came to trade, just like you. My spaceship needed some repairs, so my stay turned from days into weeks. I had no intention of becoming part of the Collective.”

“Were you… like this?”

“Cyborgized, you mean? No, not at all. A few simple implants, but they don’t really count.” The goggled face was inscrutable, even as it decanted tea into a little receptacle on the end of its beaklike mandible. “It was a difficult decision to stay, but one that in hindsight was almost inevitable. There’s nowhere like this anywhere else in the system, Oleg◦– nowhere as simultaneously lawless and civilised. Around Jupiter, you’re bound up in rigid hierarchies of wealth and power. Here we have no money, no legal apparatus, no government.”

“But to become what you are now… that can’t have been something you took lightly.”

“There’s no going back,” Gris admitted. “The crossing◦– that’s what we call it◦– is far too thorough for that. I sold my skin to the flesh banks around Venus! But the benefits are incalculable. On Mars, they’re remaking the world to fit people. Here, we’re doing something much nobler: remaking ourselves to fit Mercury.”

“And was Rhawn already here, when you were transformed?”

“Ah,” Gris said, with a miff of disappointment. “Back to that now, are we?”

“I’ve been sent to make contact. My masters will be very disappointed in me if I fail.”

“Masters,” Gris dismissed. “Why would you ever work for someone, if you had a choice?”

“I had no choice.”

“Then I am afraid you had best prepare to disappoint your masters.”

Oleg smiled and sipped at his tea. It was quite sweet, although not as warm as he would have liked. He presumed that Gris still had enough of a digestive tract to process fluids. “Rhawn’s early work, what she did before she came here, was just too original and unsettling to fit into anyone’s existing critical framework. They wanted her to be something she was not◦– more like the artists they already valued. In time, of course, they began to realise her worth. Her stock began to rise. But by then Rhawn had joined your Collective.”

“None of this is disputed, Oleg. But Rhawn has had her crossing◦– become one of us. She has no interest in your world of investors and speculators, of critics and reputations.”

“Nonetheless, my masters have a final offer. I would be remiss if I did not try everything in my power to bring it to Rhawn’s attention.”

“Forget dangling money before her.”

“It isn’t money.” Oleg, knowing he had the momentary advantage, continued to sip his tea. “They know that wouldn’t work. What they are offering, what they have secured, is something money almost couldn’t buy◦– not without all the right connections, anyway. A private moon, a place of her own◦– the space to work unobstructed, with limitless resources. More than that, she’ll have the attentions of the system’s best surgeons. Their retro-transformative capabilities are easily sufficient to undo her crossing, if that’s what she desires.”

“I assure you it would not be.”

“When she completed the crossing,” Oleg said patiently, “she would have surrendered to the total impossibility of ever undoing that work. But the landscape has changed! The economics of her reputation now allow what was forbidden. She must be informed of this.”

“She’ll say no.”

“Then let her! All I request◦– all my masters ask of me◦– is that Rhawn gives me her answer in person. Will you allow me that, Gris? Will you let me meet with Rhawn, just the once?”

Gris took its time answering. Oleg speculated that some dialogue might be taking place beyond his immediate ken, Gris communing with its fellow artists, perhaps even Rhawn herself. Perhaps they were working out the best way to give him a brush-off. The Collective needed to trade with outsiders, so they would not want to be too brusque. Equally, they were obviously very protective of their most feted member.

But at length Gris said: “There is a difficulty.”

Oleg stirred on his mattress. The suit was starting to chafe◦– it was not built for lounging around in. “What sort? I’m here, aren’t I? Why can’t I have a moment with Rhawn? Is she unwell?”

“No,” Gris answered carefully. “Rhawn is perfectly well. But she is not here.”

“I don’t understand. She can’t have left Mercury◦– no one would have missed that. And the Collective is all there is. Has she gone off on her own?”

“Not exactly. But you are wrong in one matter. The Collective is not all that there is. Or at least, it isn’t any more. There has been …” And now Oleg had the sense that Gris was choosing its words with particular care, and not a small measure of distaste, as if it found the whole business painful. “A division within our ranks. The formation of a second caravan. A breakaway movement, springing from within the Collective.”

Oleg listened intently. His masters either knew nothing of this, or they had failed to brief him adequately. “When, what, how?”

“It would probably be easier if I showed you,” Gris said.

Soon the caravan had fallen behind them, receding over the horizon until even the stallion and the balancing woman were lost. Their shadows, Oleg noticed, were slowly lengthening, stretching ahead of the fast little surface vehicle Gris had commandeered. Mercury was a small world and they were covering ground very rapidly, pushing the Sun toward the horizon. Beyond, but closer by the moment, was the transition zone of the terminator and the extreme cold of the unlit face. He thought of his delicate little ship, how far he was from it now, how totally at the mercy of his cyborg host.

“Tell me about Rhawn.”

“There’s not much to say. She was always restless◦– in her art and her soul. It’s what brought her to Mercury. She found contentment with us, for a while. But always there was that need to push against her own limits, to break out of existing formalisms. It was only a matter of time before she attached herself to the Totalists.”

“The breakaway movement?”

“Of course.”

“You said they’d formed a second caravan. Do they move around Mercury, the same way you do?”

“Most of the time. They’re camped now.”

“What’s so special about them, that Rhawn had to leave the rest of you? Aren’t you radical enough?”

“They are purists. Extremists, if you will. We have accepted extensive physiological alteration to adapt to life on the Playa. It enables us to work almost without restriction, to submit ourselves to the act of artistic creation. But even we have limits.”

“Really?”

“Our bodies and minds are still hampered by the design compromises of biology. In the Totalists’ view, that makes us inefficient and in need of radical improvement.”

“What could be more efficient than you?” Oleg asked.

“Robots,” Gris said.

At length they traversed the terminator and entered the starlit nightside of Mercury. In his suit Oleg felt nothing of the precipitous temperature drop, seven hundred awesome kelvins of it, but the faceplate markers recorded the transition from appalling heat to appalling cold clearly enough, and now the suit was having to work just as competently to keep him from freezing to death. He supposed that Gris’s life-support mechanisms were coping with a similar shift in demands.

“They keep away from us, mostly,” Gris said. “We aren’t enemies, as such. We are obliged to conduct a certain amount of business, and of course the Totalists have no contact with the outside world at all. On the rare occasions when they need something, they have to rely on our cooperation. But I would not say our relationship is an easy one. There have been … acts of artistic sabotage. Denied, of course. But it’s no secret that the Totalists view our work as decadent, corrupted, mired in a state of creative exhaustion.”

“I suppose it was inevitable,” Oleg said. “There can’t have been an artistic movement in history that hasn’t eventually fractured into two or more creative poles. If it’s any consolation, they’ll have their own splitters sooner or later!”

“No,” Gris said. “It’s no consolation at all. We made something beautiful here, Oleg. There’s no reason in the world it had to break up like this.”

As they approached the Totalists’ encampment Oleg was struck by how profoundly the scene resembled an exact negative image of the dayside caravan. The sky was a nearly faultless black, its perfection only marred (or improved upon, perhaps) by a sprinkling of stars and planets, the great glittery arch of the Milky Way and the faint dust haze of the solar system’s zodiacal light.

Whereas the caravan had moved under the full blaze of day, here the only lights were those provided by the Totalists themselves. The encampment was smaller than the caravan, but the essentials were similar: it was a cluster of things which could be dragged or self-propelled across Mercury, when the time came to move. They also had sails and pennants, except that these were picked out in edges of colourful neon: reds and yellows, blues and greens, purples and oranges. The figures moving around the camp’s periphery were also outlined in bright hues. Oleg had been expecting something austere, but the proliferation of colours and shapes elevated his spirits.

“It’s marvellous!” he said.

Rising from the illuminated camp was what Oleg took to be a piece of large-scale art in the same spirit as the stallion and the balancing woman. It was a cluster of spires, or perhaps a single main spire attended by a large number of smaller ones, linked by a connecting tissue of arches and flying buttresses. The pale structure had a knobby, rough-cast haphazardness about it. It might almost have been glued together from millions of sea-shells, or fossils.

“The Bone Cathedral,” Gris said, with a hint of dismissiveness.

“Do they move that around with them? It looks much too fragile.”

“No, it stays fixed to this spot. They’ve been building it for several years now. The day and night cycles don’t seem to do it any harm. When it is time for a new Totalist to complete their crossing, the caravan circles the Bone Cathedral.” Gris applied the brakes and brought the vehicle to a halt. They were still a decent kilometre from the Totalist encampment. “You’d best go the rest of the way yourself.”

“What do I do?”

“You need do nothing. They will either talk to you or ignore you. They already know that you are here.”

He disembarked from the vehicle. He looked up at the goggle-faced creature that had become his companion, fully aware that if Gris abandoned him here◦– and the Totalists disdained to help◦– he would be in a great deal of trouble. They had come much too far for the range of his suit.

“I would not be too long about it,” Gris warned.

So Oleg wandered across the black Playa. His suit projected a terrain overlay. It was still functioning properly. He kept looking back, making sure the vehicle and the cyborg still waited. But Gris remained. And as the Totalist camp loomed larger, so one of the neon forms broke away from the blaze of colour and came loping over to meet him.

The thing had arms and legs, a body and a head in roughly the right proportions, but there was no possibility that it was anything but a robot. There was no room in it for anything human. The thing’s chassis was an open exoskeleton, offering an easy view of its internal mechanisms. Oleg saw lots of machinery in there, much of it lit up and flashing in pretty colours, but there was nothing that looked biological. Its head was a cage that he could see all the way through, only loosely stuffed with instruments and modules.

“I’d like to speak to Rhawn,” Oleg said confidently.

“Who are you, and why have you come?” The robot’s voice, picked up by his helmet, was lighter in tone than that of Gris.

“I am Oleg. I’ve come from Jupiter to offer Rhawn a moon of her own and the chance at reverse cyborgisation◦– to become fully human again.”

The robot emitted a noise like fading static. It took Oleg a moment to realise he was being laughed at.

“Go home, meat boy. Be on your merry way.”

“I realise that my offer’s likely to be rejected. But my masters won’t be satisfied until I have the answer from Rhawn herself. She’s here, isn’t she? I won’t take more than a few minutes of her time.”

“Your timing,” the robot said, “is either very fortuitious or very poor.”

“My timing is sheer luck,” Oleg said. “Until just now I didn’t even know that Rhawn had joined the Totalists.”

“She hasn’t.”

“I was told …”

“Rhawn has commenced her second crossing. But until it is complete, she will not be one of us. It will happen soon, though. We are confident in the force of her conviction. It is certainly much too late for reversal.”

“Can I at least talk to her?”

Again Oleg had the sense that matters were being discussed. Lights flickered and strobed in the cagelike enclosure of the robot’s head. Oleg risked a glance back, satisfying himself that the vehicle and its driver were still there.

“Rhawn is … receptive,” the robot said. “You will have your audience. But it will be brief. Rhawn has readied herself for the final phase of the crossing. She will not be detained.”

“I only need an answer.”

The robot brought him into the encampment. Up close, he saw that it was not as similar to the caravan as he had first assumed. There were hardly any enclosed spaces◦– just a few sealed modules which may or may not have been airtight. The remainder of the structures◦– most of them wheeled or skid-mounted, even as they were now parked around the Bone Cathedral◦– were for the most part skeletal frames. Their roofs were parasols and solar-collectors, their walls either absent or no more than concertina-hinged magnetic screens which could be drawn across when required. Gathered around and inside these treehouse-like forms were many similar-looking robots, lounging or reclining like overfed monkeys. They were plugged into bits of architecture via their abdomens◦– recharging from stored power, Oleg supposed, or perhaps pushing energy back into the community. There seemed little in the way of artistic creation going on. But perhaps the robots had been furiously preoccupied before his arrival.

“Is Rhawn one of these?”

“They are what Rhawn will become. It will not be long now.”

“You all look the same.”

“You all look like tinned meat.”

Through the thicket of skeletal structures Oleg was at last brought to an upright green block the size of a small house. It was a round-ended cylinder that might once have been a fuel tank or reactor chamber, before being anchored to a moving platform and gristled over with access ladders, catwalks and power conduits. In contrast to its surroundings this dumpy, windowless flask seemed entirely enclosed. Oleg’s robot host spidered up a ladder and looked down as Oleg completed his clumsy ascent. The robot opened a door in the side of the chamber, then stood aside to allow Oleg to pass through first.

It was not an airlock, for the interior of the green flask was still depressurised. Oleg had emerged onto a platform running around the circumference of the interior, with a circular gap in the middle. Supported in the chamber’s middle, with a large part of it beneath the level of the platform, was a hefty piece of biomedical machinery. Many cables and pipes ran into the upright, wasp-shaped assemblage. Three robots, much like his host, were stationed around the machinery at what Oleg took to be control pedestals. They were not moving, but the robots had plugged in to the pedestals via their abdomens. Oleg presumed that they were directing whatever complicated procedure was going on inside the machine.

The wasp-shaped machine culminated in a glass dome. Inside the glass was a beaked and goggled head much like that of Gris, except that it was encased within a bulky surgical clamp. Beneath the head, enclosing the neck, was a tight metal collar separating it from the rest of the machine.

Oleg surveyed the beaked and goggled face with deep dread and apprehension.

“Rhawn will speak to you now,” the robot said.

“Thank you, Rhawn, for agreeing to listen to me,” Oleg said hastily. “I have come from Jupiter, with …”

“I know where you came from, you spineless little shit.”

Oleg bristled. He had listened to enough recordings to recognise the voice as belonging to Rhawn, despite a deliberate machinelike filtering.

“I …” he began.

“Stop cowering. What are you, bacteria? A vegetable? The Totalists horrify you, but you are the puppet, the thing with no free will.”

“I only need an answer.”

“I studied your background, when I knew you were approaching. Oleg the failed artist. Oleg the supine instrument of market forces. Oleg the pliable little turd, shat out by Jupiter. Why do you imagine your insolent little piss-streak of an offer would be of the remotest interest to me? Why should I not have your suit drilled through now?”

“My masters thought …” His throat was as parched as the sunlit Playa itself. “They didn’t know that you’d left the Collective. They thought there might still be a possibility to …”

“To do what? To make me normal again? To bring me back to the condition of meat?”

“To undo what has been done.”

“As if it were a mistake, that I now regretted?”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“But your masters did. Did it never occur to question this mission? To doubt its idiotic purpose? To show the slightest sign of independent thought?”

One of the robots at the control plinths turned its head slowly in his direction.

“Things have changed since you came to Mercury,” Oleg persisted, refusing to waver under the robot’s eyeless regard. “No one knew what to make of your art, when you joined the Collective. It was too different, too hard to assess.”

“If they were idiots then, they are idiots now.”

“But idiots with money and influence. Do you understand the terms of the offer, Rhawn?”

“My understanding is irrelevant. I can no more be ‘undone’ than an egg can be unsmashed, or meat uncooked. Let me demonstrate. Have you a strong stomach?”

“I–”

But Oleg had barely begun to give his answer. The surgical clamp around Rhawn’s cyborg head was reconfiguring itself, pulling away to separate the tight-fitting segments of her armour. Oleg thought back to what he had learned from Gris, of how the cyborg exoskeleton had become its living skin. This was how it must have been for Rhawn, before she exiled herself to the Totalists. There was a human head under her metal plates, but it was a head already skinned back to an anatomical core of muscle and sinew and nervous system. She had been blind, without the cameras. She had no nose or mouth or ears, for she did not need to breathe or speak or hear. Her cyborg senses were wired directly into deep brain structure, bypassing the crude telemetry of ancient nerve channels. Machinery was plumbed directly into her heart and lungs.

“Are you horrified? You should not be. This is the state of being that Mercury demands of us. There is no pain, no discomfort, in being what we are. Far from it. We revel in our new strength, our bold new senses◦– our resilience. To each other, we have become beautiful. We drink in the sustenance of the dayside Sun and glory in the stellar cold of the Mercurean night. But why come this far, and not go all the way?”

“They tell me that your crossing is nearly done.”

“It’s true.” And for the moment her spite seemed to move off him. “There is almost nothing left of my old self now◦– the old vehicle in which I moved. What use are lungs and a heart, on Mercury? What use is a digestive system? What use is meat? These things are simply waiting to go wrong, waiting for their moment to fail us. To undermine us in our absolute, unblinking dedication to art. So we gladly discard that which the Collective fears to surrender. The flesh. Every organic part of ourselves. We donate our bones to the Bone Cathedral! The Playa was made for robots, Oleg◦– not ‘mere mortals’, or their half-way cousins. We are the true heirs of Mercury◦– we the Totalists!”

Something in him snapped in that moment. “You’re committing suicide, in other words. Being taken apart, until there’s nothing left of you. You can’t become a robot, any more than you can become air, or sunlight!”

“What is this◦– a glimmer of contradiction? The faintest signs of a spine? Keep at it◦– there may be hope for you yet.”

“This isn’t about me. This is about you, throwing yourself away◦– wasting what you are.”

“How little you understand of us. What would be the last thing I clung to, do you think? The last, most sacrosanct piece of myself?”

“Your mind,” he stated firmly. “You do not reside in your heart and lungs, but without your brain, there is no Rhawn.”

“What you mean is, without the encoding of my personality implied by my detailed idiosyncratic brain structure, there is no Rhawn. How could there be? But that encoding doesn’t care about the terms of its own embodiment.”

“I would,” Oleg said, with fierce certainty.

“Weeks ago, at the commencement of my second crossing, small volumes of my brain structure were duplicated by artifical connective structures located outside my body. Machine circuits, in other words. When neural signals passed through the interfaces of these brain volumes, my Totalist peers had the freedom to choose whether those signals continued to pass through my existing anatomy, or were instead shunted through the exosomatic structures. The change was made, and then switched back◦– and made again, over and over! The key thing is that I felt no change in my perception of self, regardless of whether my thoughts were running inside my head, or in the exterior circuitry! Electricity doesn’t mind which route it takes, as long as it gets to the same destination! And so, step by step, volumes of my own brain were switched out◦– supplanted and discarded! This continued. Over the weeks, fifty, sixty, seventy percent of my old architecture was supplanted by exosomatic machinery. And now you arrive. I stand now on the cusp of absolute machinehood◦– ready to make the final transition to Totality. Only the last ten percent of my mind is still inside my head. You see now why it is far, far too late to reverse what I have become?”

“There’s still active brain tissue inside you?” he asked. “Still some meat, inside the head I’m looking at?”

“What is left of me, you could squeeze between your fingers, like a handful of wet grey sand.”

“Then where is the rest of you? Executing inside one of these machines? Already in a robot, waiting for you to take control?”

“You misunderstand. Ninety percent of me has already completed the transition. And one hundred percent of me is already in control. My robot body is not ‘waiting’ for me. I am already mostly in it. And we have already met.”

He turned from the globed head, conscious that the robot that had brought him in from outside was still there. He looked with renewed fascination at the symphony of flickering coloured lights.

“I should have guessed. You never did give me your name.”

“And you never asked,” the robot said, nodding. “But here I am. This is me. I am Rhawn. That thing that you have been talking to, that is just the place where I used to live.”

“You could have given me your answer outside.”

“I thought it would help if you understood. I am ready now, you see. But that last ten percent of me◦– I won’t pretend that there has not been hesitation. I could have completed the transition days ago. On the brink, I quailed! Foolishly, I could not quite bring myself to submit to Totality. The meat’s pathetic last twitch! But you have been the spur I needed. For that alone, Oleg, you have my undying gratitude.”

“I’ve done nothing!”

“You have come, and now you may observe. Suffer one useful moment in your miserable existence. Are you prepared?”

“For what?”

“To bear witness. To document my becoming. In a moment, the last traces of my living neural tissue will cease to serve any useful function. And I will have transcended myself.” But when he thought she might be done, Rhawn added: “You may thank your masters, Oleg, for their kind offer. I spit it back at them, all the same. They were much too late, of course, but it would have made no difference if they had sent you years ago. I have been on this path for much too long for that. I have always felt the pull of Totality, even before I knew it in my self. The more I move from the meat, the more the meat repulses me.”

“And one day,” Oleg said, “you’ll feel the need to go beyond this as well. It’s in your nature.”

“What could possibly lie beyond the perfection of robotic embodiment?”

“The greater perfection of non-embodiment. The flawless condition of non-existence.”

“You mean that I would kill myself.”

“I’m sure you will. You can’t ever accept what you are, Rhawn. It’s just not in your nature.”

A new light came on in the robot’s head. It was a pale green, rising and falling in brightness without ever quite dimming completely. Oleg was quite sure it had not been activated earlier on.

“Even now?” she asked.

“Even now.”

“Well, you’re mistaken. But then, you are only human. And now that I have completed my second crossing, I feel my conviction more forcefully than ever before. We shall have to see who is wrong, won’t we? I hope you have a great deal of patience, not to mention a solid medical plan. You are a bag of cells with an expiration date. Parts of you are already starting to rot. It will take me centuries to begin to exhaust the possibilities of Totality.”

“You’ll burn through then quickly enough. And then what?”

“Something beyond this. But not death. There is no art in death, Oleg. Only art’s supreme negation.”

He smiled thinly. “The world will await your next masterpiece with interest, Rhawn. Even if it never leaves Mercury.”

“Well, something shall. Does this surprise you? And you shall be its custodian.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It is… traditional… among the Totalists. At the time of our second crossing, we concieve of a new piece. A celebration of transition, if you will. The work is initiated before the crossing’s start, and not fully completed until the crossing is done. I have … planned such a work. I call it A Map of Mercury. It is a minor piece, in the scheme of things. Almost beneath me. But since you have gone to such pains to find me, I should consider it fitting if it should fall upon you, the great and glorious Oleg, to bring the work to public attention.”

“A new piece by Rhawn?”

“Exactly that,” she said proudly. “A new piece by Rhawn. And, as far as the outside world is concerned, the last. No, I shan’t be abandoning art. But the realms into which I expect to push… these will shortly lie beyond your conceptual horizon. You would not only fail to recognise my art as art, you would fail to recognise that it was anything at all. But this last piece will be my gift to you◦– and your meat cousins. You will find it comprehensible. Take it to your masters. Fight over it like dogs. I will enjoy watching the overheated spasms of your Jovian economy.”

“It’s not what they asked for,” Oleg said.

“But they won’t be displeased with you?”

“No,” he supposed. “I came for you, but never with much expectation that you’d agree to the offer. They’ll hand that moon over to someone else, I suppose. But to return with a new piece by Rhawn … that was never in my plans. They’ll be pleased, I think.”

“And will their pleasure be of benefit to you? Will you also profit from this?”

“I should imagine.”

“Then we are all satisfied. You will return to the Collective? Delay your departure by a couple of days, and the work will be packaged and delivered to you. It really is a trifling little thing.”

She had not been exaggerating, Oleg reflected.

He tugged more of the packaging away. The upper quarter of A Map of Mercury was now visible. But everything below that was concealed by a thin layer of protective material with a circular hole cut into it. He dug his fingers around the layer until it began to come free. He grew incautious. If he damaged the material, he could always say it had been that way when he found it.

Besides, he was starting to suspect that his masters would think very little of this offering no matter the condition in which it had arrived. It wasn’t the sort of thing they had been hoping for at all. Yes, it was a late Rhawn. But a globe? A Map of Mercury?

Something that literal?

The layer came free. He could see more of the globe now. There was in fact something a bit odd about it. Instead of continuing with the shape of the sphere he had been expecting, the object began to bulge in some directions and turn inwards in others. There was more packaging material to be discarded. He tugged it away with increasing urgency. There were two cavities opening up in one side of the no longer very spherical thing. Above the cavities was the fine swell of a brow ridge. Beneath the cavities◦– the eye-sockets◦– was the slitted absence where her nose would have been, and beneath that the toothy crescent of the upper jaw. There was no lower part.

He pulled the whole thing from its box. The colours of the top part, the emulation of the planet’s surface features and texturing, continued across every part of it. There were ochres and tangerines and hues of jade and turquoise. It had a fine metallic lustre, sprinkled with a billion glints of stardust. It was simultaneously lovely and horrible.

A Map of Mercury.

That was exactly what it was. She had not lied. Nor would this piece◦– this piece of her◦– dent Rhawn’s reputation in the slightest. No wonder she had needed a couple of days to make it ready. At the start of their conversation, ten percent of her had still been inside this skull.

Oleg had to smile. It was not exactly what he had come for, and not exactly what his masters had been after either. But what was art without an audience? She had made him her witness, and she had made art of herself, and she was still there, down on Mercury, having crossed twice.

Clever, clever Rhawn.

But then a peculiar and impish impulse overcame Oleg. He thought back to their conversation again. It was true, much of what she had said about him. He had been supine. He had tried and failed at art, and allowed himself to become the servant of powers to whom he was no more than an instrument. He had become spineless. He did what they told him◦– just as he was now executing Rhawn’s wishes.

A tool. An instrument.

A machine made of meat.

A little while later a little door opened in the side of Oleg’s spacecraft. It was a disposal hatch, the kind he used for waste dumps. A small grey nebula coughed out into vacuum. The nebula, for an instant, glittered with hints of reflectivity and colours that were not entirely grey.

Then it dispersed, and the ship continued on its merry way.