Beggars and Choosers (8 page)

I said, stupidly, “It’s alive.”

Jon smiled. “Oh, yes. But not sentient. At least not…” He trailed
off, and I knew he couldn’t find the right words. It should have made a
bond between us. It didn’t. Jon couldn’t find the right words because
any words that he picked would be too easy, too incomplete, for his
ideas—and still too hard for me to follow. Miri had told me that Jon,
more than any of the others except Terry Mwakambe, thought in
mathematics. But it was the same with all of them, even Miri: her
speech was a quarter beat too slow. I had caught myself talking like
that only a month ago. It had been to Kevin Baker’s four-year-old
great-grandson.

Miri tried. “The tissue is a macro-level organic computer, Drew,
with limited organ-simulation programming, including nervous,
cardiovascular, and gastrointestinal systems. We’ve added Strethers
self-monitoring feedback loops and submolecular, self-reproducing,
single-arm assemblers. It can… it can experience programmed biological
processes and report on them minutely. But it has neither sentience nor
volition.”

“Oh,” I said.

The thing moved a little in its tray. I looked away. Miri saw, of
course. She sees everything.

She said quietly, “We’re getting closer. That’s what it means. Ever
since the breakthrough with the bacteriorhodopsin, we’re getting much
closer.”

I made myself look at the thing again. Faint capillaries pulsed
below the surface. The pale, damp shapes in my mind crawled, like
maggots over rock.

Miri said, “If we pour a nutrient mixture into the tray, Drew, it
can select and absorb what it needs and break it down for energy.”

“What kind of nutrient mixture?” I had learned enough on my last
visit to be able to ask this question.

Miri made a face. “Glucose-protein, mostly. There’s still a way to
go.”

“Have you solved the problem of getting nitrogen directly from the
air?” I had memorized this question. It made a tinny, hollow shape in
my mind. But Miri smiled her luminous smile.

“Yes and no. We’ve engineered the microorganisms, but tissue
receptivity is still foundering on the Tollers-Hilbert factor,
especially in the epidermal fibrils. And on the nitrogen
receptor-mediated endocytosis problem—no progress.”

“Oh,” I said.

“We’ll solve it,” Miri said, a quarter beat too slow. “It’s just a
matter of designing the right enzymes.”

Sara said, “We call the thing Galwat.” She and Jon laughed.

Miri said quickly, “For Galatea, you know. And Erin Galway. And John
Gait, that fictional character who wanted to stop the motor of the
world. And, of course, Worthington’s transference equations…”

“Of course,” I said. I had never heard of Galatea or Erin Galway or
John Gait or Worthington.

“Galatea’s from a Greek myth. A sculptor—”

“Let me see my performance stats now,” I said. Sara and Jon glanced
at each other. I smiled and held out my hand to Miri. She grasped it
hard, and I felt hers tremble.

(Quick, fluttery shapes filled my mind, fine as paper. A dozen
molecular levels thick. They settled on a rock, rough and hard and old
as the earth. The fluttering grew faster and faster, the fine light
paper grew red hot, and the rock shattered. At its heart was frozen
milky whiteness, pulsing with faint veins.)

Miri said, “Don’t you want to see Nikos’ and Allen’s latest work on
the Cell Cleaner? It’s coming along much faster than this! And Christy
and Toshio have had a real breakthrough in error-checking
protein-assembler programming—”

I said, “Let me see the performance stats now.”

She nodded once, twice, four times. “The stats look good, Drew. But
there’s a funny jag in the data in the second movement of your concert.
Terry says you need to change direction there. It’s rather complicated.”

“Then you’ll explain it to me,” I said evenly.

Her smile was dazzling. Again Sara and Jon glanced at each other,
and said nothing.

==========

The first time Miri showed me how the Supers communicated with each
other, I couldn’t believe it. It was thirteen years ago, right after
they came down from Sanctuary. She had led me into a room with
twenty-seven holostages on twenty-seven terminal desks. Each had been
programmed to “speak” a different language, based on English but
modified to the thought strings of its owner. Miri, sixteen years old,
had explained one of her own thought strings to me.

“Suppose you say a sentence to me. Any single sentence.”

“You have beautiful breasts.”

She blushed, a maroon mottling of her dark skin. She did have
beautiful breasts, and beautiful hair. They offset a little the big
head, knobby chin, awkward gait. She wasn’t pretty, and she was too
intelligent not to know it. I wanted to make her feel pretty.

She said, “Pick another sentence.”

“No. Use that sentence.”

She did. She spoke it to the computer, and the holostage began to
form a three-dimensional shape of words, images, and symbols linked to
each other by glowing green lines.

“See, it brings out the associations my mind makes, based on its
store of past thought strings and on algorithms for the way I think.
From just a few words it extrapolates, and predicts, and mirrors. The
programming is called ‘mind mirroring,” in fact. It captures about
ninety-seven percent of my thoughts about ninety-two percent of the
time, and then I can add the rest. And the best part is—“

“You think like this for every sentence? Every
single sentence
?”
Some of the associations were obvious: “breasts” linked to a nursing
baby, for instance. But why was the baby linked to something called
“Hubble’s constant,” and why was the Sistine chapel in that string? And
a name I didn’t recognize: Chidiock Tichbourne?

“Yes,” Miri said. “But the best part—”

“You all think this way? All the Supers?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Although Terry and Jon and Ludie think
mostly in mathematics. They’re younger than the rest of us, you
know—they represent the next cycle of IQ reengineering.”

I looked at the complex pattern of Miri’s thoughts and reactions. “
You
have beautiful breasts
.”

I would never know what my words actually meant to her, in all their
layers. Not any of my words. Ever.

“Does this scare you, Drew?”

She looked levelly at me. I could feel her fear, and her resolution.
The moment was important. It grew and grew in my mind, a looming white
wall to which nothing could adhere, until I found the right answer.

“I think in shapes for every sentence.”

Her smile changed her whole face, opening and lighting it. I had
said the right thing. I looked at the glowing green complexity of the
holostage, a slowly turning three-dimensional globe jammed with tiny
images and equations and, most of all, words. So many complicated words.

“We’re the same, then,” Miri said joyfully. And I didn’t correct her.

“The best part,” Miri had burbled on, completely at ease now, “is
that after the extrapolated thought string forms and is adjusted as
necessary, the master program translates it into everybody else’s
thought patterns and it appears that way on their holostage. On all
twenty-seven terminals simultaneously. So we can bypass words and get
the full ideas we’re each thinking across to each other more
efficiently. Well, not the full ideas. There’s always something lost in
translation, especially to Terry and Jon and Ludie. But it’s so much
better than just speech, Drew. The way your concerts are better than
just unassisted daydreaming.”

Daydreaming. The only kind of dreaming SuperSleepless knew anything
about. Until me.

When a Sleepless went into the lucid dreaming trance, the result was
different from when a Liver did. Or even a donkey. Livers and donkeys
can dream at night. They have that connection with their unconscious,
and I direct and intensify it in ways that feel good to them: peaceful
and stimulated both. While lucid dreaming, they feel—sometimes for the
first time in their lives— whole. I take them farther along the road
into their true selves, deeper behind the waking veil. And I direct the
dreams to the sweetest of the many things waiting there.

But Sleepless don’t have night dreams. Their road to the unconscious
has been genetically severed. When Sleepless go into a lucid dreaming
trance, Miri told me, they see “insights” they wouldn’t have seen
before. They climb around their endless jungle of words, and come out
of the trance with intuitive solutions to intellectual problems.
Geniuses have often done that during sleep, Miri said. She gave me
examples of great scientists. I have forgotten the names.

Looking at the complex verbal design on her holostage, I could feel
it in my mind. It made a shape like a featureless pale stone, cool with
regret. Miri would never see this shape in my mind. Worse, she would
never know she didn’t see it. She thought, because we both saw
differently from donkeys, that we were alike.

I had wanted to be part of what was happening at Huevos Verdes.
Already, even then, I could see that the project would change the
world. Anyone not an actor in the project could only be acted on.

“Yes, Miri,” I said, smiling at her, “we’re the same.”

==========

On a worktable in yet another lab, Miri spread out the performance
stats from my concert tour. The hard copy was for me; Supers always
analysed directly from screens or holos. I wondered how much had been
left out or simplified for my benefit. Terry Mwakambe, a small dark man
with long wild hair, perched motionless on the open windowsill. Behind
him the ocean sparkled deep blue in the waning light.

“See, here,” Miri said, “midway during your performance of ‘The
Eagle.” The attention-level measurements rose, and the attitudinal
changes right after the performance were pretty dramatic in the
direction of risk taking. But then the follow-up stats show that by a
week later, the subjects’ attitudinal changes had eroded more than they
did for your other performance pieces. And by a month later, almost all
risk-taking changes have disappeared.“

When I give a concert, they hook volunteer fans to machines that
measure their brain wave changes, breathing, pupil variations—a lot of
things. Before and after the concert the volunteers take
virtual-reality tests to measure attitudes. The volunteers are paid.
They don’t know what the tests are for, or who wants them. Neither do
the people who administer the tests. It’s all done blind, through one
of Kevin Baker’s many software subsidiaries, which form an impenetrable
legal tangle. The results are transmitted to the master computer at
Huevos Verdes. When the stats say so, I change what and how I perform.

I have stopped calling myself an artist.

“ ‘The Eagle’ just isn’t working,” Miri said. “Terry wants to know
if you can compose a different piece that draws on subconscious
risk-taking imagery. He wants it by your broadcast a week from Sunday.”

“Maybe Terry should just write it for me.”

“You know none of us can do that.” Then her eyes sharpened and her
mouth softened. “
You’re
the Lucid Dreamer, Drew. None of us
can do what you do. If we seem to be… directing you too much, it’s only
because the project requires it. The whole thing would be impossible
without you.”

I smiled at her. She looked so concerned, filled with so much
passion for her work. So resolute.
Implacable
, Leisha had
said of her father.
Willing to bend anything that stood in his way
.

She said, “You do believe that we know how important you are, Drew?
Drew?”

I said, “I know, Miri.”

Her face broke into shards of light, like swords in my mind. “Then
you’ll compose the new piece?”

“Risk taking,” I said. “Presented as desirable, attractive, urgent.
Right. By a week from Sunday.”

“It’s really necessary, Drew. We’re still months away from a
prototype in the lab, but the country…” She picked up another set of
hard copy. “Look. Gravtrain breakdowns up eight percent over last
month. Reports to the FCC of communications interruptions—up another
three percent. Bankruptcies up five percent. Food movement—this is
crucial—performing sixteen percent less efficiently. Industrial
indicators falling at the same dismal rate. Voter confidence in the
basement. And the duragem situation—”

For once her voice lost its quarter-beat-behind slowness. “Look at
these graphs, Drew! We can’t even locate the origin of the duragem
breakdowns—there’s no one epicenter. And when you run the data through
the Lawson conversion formulas—”

“Yes,” I said, to escape the Lawson conversion formulas. “I believe
you. It’s bad out there and getting worse.”

“Not just worse—apocalyptical.”

My mind fills with crimson fire and navy thunder, surrounding a
crystal rose behind an impenetrable shield. Miri grew up on Sanctuary.
Necessities and comforts were a given. All the time, for everybody,
without question or thought. Unlike me, Miranda never saw a baby die of
neglect, a wife beaten by a despairing and drunk husband, a family
existing on unflavored soysynth, a toilet that didn’t work for days.
She didn’t know these things were survivable. How would she recognize
an apocalypse?

I don’t say this aloud.

Terry Mwakambe jumped down from the windowsill. He hadn’t said a
single word the whole time we’d been in the room. His thought strings,
Miri said, consisted almost entirely of equations. But now he said,
“Lunch?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Lunch! The one tie between Terry
Mwakambe and Drew Arlen: food. Surely even Terry and Miri must see the
joke, standing here in this room, this building, this project… Lunch!

Neither of them laughed. I felt the shape of their bewilderment. It
was a rain of tiny, tear-shaped droplets, falling on everything,
falling on the apocalypse in my mind, falling on me, light and cold and
smothering as snow.