Engineering Infinity (26 page)

I nodded, staring straight ahead.
The woman on the bench was handing the mantis to the man. The man said
something, and the skinny woman smiled and said, “Yes,” while nodding, closing
her eyes and tilting her mouth.

“Is your life fascinating?” Berry
asked.

“Not normally,” I allowed.

“Well then,” she said. “Every
time you feel bored and ordinary, be grateful. Because that’s the best evidence
that you are genuinely, joyously real.”

At one point, I said, “You know
what I want to do, don’t you? I want very much to kiss you.”

Her name was still a mystery, and
I was equally unknown to her. But bless the girl, she didn’t jump up and run
away. What she did was stare hard at me, never blinking, and after what seemed
like a very long while, she said, “Oh, you want to kiss me, do you?”

“Yes, very much,” I said.

“Since when?” she asked.

I suppose she expected to hear
that the idea popped into my head now, or maybe when I first saw her walking my
way. But I surprised both of us, saying, “I woke up today wanting to. I just
hadn’t met you yet.”

It isn’t often that inspiration
finds me. And looking at my life, I can’t think of ten other times where this
much success has come from a few words.

The girl nodded and smiled,
saying, “Yes.”

And we kissed. For a very long
time, we held that pose. She even let me put a hand on her bony back and
shoulder.

We pulled apart, and I said, “You
like Chinese.”

She nodded warily.

“I have enough carbon points for
one exceptional dinner,” I promised.

Hunger made her face prettier.
She didn’t trust herself to say, “Yes.” Her enthusiasm might scare me off. So
instead, she nodded and took a deep breath, handing the mantis back to me.

She asked, “What does the mantis
think about?”

“Her next meal,” I suggested.

“Besides that.” Then the girl
laughed, saying, “I think she knows that she is the centre of the universe, and
we’re all just objects, soulless but entertaining to her.”

On that note, I stood and started
to place our friend back into the tree, and that’s when I looked at the
infinity window again. I suppose I wanted to see approval from our audience.
But the window had gone out, and except for a giant gutted room and some
upturned office furniture, there was nothing to see. There was nothing but
glass and the girl’s reflection, and mine, and my arm up high, as if I was
waiting for some hook or hand to grab me up and carry me away.

We hollered. I think every patron
in the club yelled, loudly and most of the words angry. Mr Pembrook came
bounding out of his office. He is a red-faced man with no hair and elastic
kangaroo-style legs. Sharing our panic, he began chasing wires and tinkering
with diagnostic boards. Within the first few minutes he narrowed the blame down
to ten or twenty possibilities, none of which he could fix. His apologies were
earnest, and he wished there was more that he could do. But there wouldn’t be
any fix until tomorrow, if then, and with that sorry bit of non-news, he
bounded back to his office and vanished.

I was still beside Berry, still
working my lungs and heart. I had watched those strangers start to kiss, and
now I was staring at the white wall, some piece of me ready for whatever scene
was to come next.

And I kept thinking about that
long green mantis too.

Berry and I exchanged a few more
words. She was still attacking the easy miles when I finished, and I thanked
her for the conversation. “Food for thought,” I said. Then I called for help,
and my personal cradle swept in and took me under what remains of my arms,
lifting me up as my new friend said, “I’ll see you around, perhaps.”

“I’m sure you will,” I said.

There was something else I wanted
to say, but I resisted. I didn’t think it would be right, parting on a sour,
disagreeable note.

I live ten floors below the club,
in an apartment that encompasses an enormous volume - a wealthy man’s home with
two rooms and a private, water-free bath. I really don’t have the means for
this luxury, which is why the rest of my life is full of sacrifices. I rarely
run the air conditioning and never travel. It takes very little food to keep my
minimal body alive and healthy, which gives me extra carbon points. In this
world with too many people and too many problems, my son eats well when he
comes home. And on that day it seemed like such a blessing to see him - a robust
and busy, full-limbed gentleman who was five days short of his thirteenth
birthday.

His dinner was real potatoes and
peas and a meat that was sold under the euphemistic label Rabbit.

I had an intravenous meal and
chew stick to keep my mouth busy.

Together, we watched what
interested me - the world’s news compressed into fourteen minutes of drought
and distant wars, plus heaping helpings of heroic perseverance and robots
exploring the high clouds of Venus. Then I let him choose for both of us, and I
endured the animated fluff. I watched my boy. I smiled at him, at least until
he noticed. Then he frowned like any near-adolescent, telling me, “Stop that.”

I looked away, staring at the
emptiest of our walls. I was imagining the would-be lovers, wondering what part
of them was real, and then I pictured Berry beside me, and I told her, “This is
where you are wrong. Characters in a story can’t tell if anything about their
lives is remarkable or interesting. They just are. But there is one major
difference between stories and life. Stories come to an end. Eventually and
always, there is a last chapter, a final scene. As you said, fictions get too
big and cumbersome, and then the author gives them a mercy killing. But real
life goes on and on. And that’s how you know that all of this is genuine.”

My boy noticed something in my
gaze, or maybe I was muttering to myself. “What are thinking about, Dad?”

“Nothing, son. Nothing.”

John C. Wright

John C.
Wright attracted some attention in the late ‘90s with his early stories in
Asimov’s
(one of them, “Guest Law,” was reprinted in David Hartwell’s
Year’s
Best SF
), but it wasn’t until he published his
Golden
Age
trilogy (consisting of
The Golden Age
,
The Golden Transcendence
, and
The
Phoenix Exultant
) in the first few years of the new
century, novels which earned critical raves across the board, that he was
recognized as a major new talent in SF. Subsequent novels include the
Everness
fantasy series, including
The Last Guardians of Everness
and
Mists of Everness
, and the
fantasy
Chaos
series, which includes
Fugitives
of Chaos
,
Orphans of Chaos
, and
Titans
of Chaos
. His most recent novel, a continuation of the
famous
Null-A
series by A.E. van Vogt, is
Null-A
Continuum
. Wright lives with his family in Centreville,
Virginia.

1.

Imagine the boulevards of
Golgolundra on the world’s last day, and the angels circling like vultures
above it. Everywhere is noise, and lights, and gaiety, and crime, and chaos.

Imagine every wall and window of
the crowded towers colourful with graffiti. The graffiti of these times are
bright, not sloppy, composed of computer-assisted images of artistic depth and
merit. They move, they sing, they speak to passers-by, and some of them reach
from their billboards and kill whomever seems dispirited, obnoxious, dull; tiny
flicks of paint flying up, reforming in mid-air into blades or poisoned plumes
of gas.

Other people, beautiful or
monstrous or both, dancing in the street in their fantastic costumes, applaud
and cheer when some vivid near-by death splatters them with blood. They do not
wish to seem dull. The whole city screams and screams with laughter.

Why this forced gaiety? Why this
hideous display? Today is the birthday party for Typhon, their founder; today
is the wake for mankind.

Tomorrow the angels drown the
world.

The streets are a festive
combination of war-zone and Mardi Gras.

Imagine most of the crimes are
committed by the young, who are more extravagant. A shy young boy sees a
laughing woman sway by, surrounded by handsome admirers raising glasses of
Champagne and poison. It takes him but a moment to program his assemblers. A
diamond drop, unnoticed, stings her flesh or flies into her wine. A moment
later it has taken carbon from her blood to construct a series of gates and interrupts
along major nerve-channels in her spine. The programming is precise and
elegant, there is no jerkiness as her arms and leg muscles move, stimulated
without her control. She tries to cry out for her companions. Instead, her lips
move, she hears her voice make clever excuses, and away she walks with the shy
boy. He becomes a shy rapist, perhaps using his controllers to overload the
pleasure centres of her brain, or pain centres, before doing whatever else to
her his bored imagination might conceive.

Or imagine a laughing woman,
irked by an unwanted stare, or prompted by real fear, who programs her
assemblers to shoot into the boy’s flesh, so that, in mid-festival, surrounded
by unsure giggles, he will fall, his arms and legs distorted into clumsy lopsided
shapes, or boneless tubes of flesh, while he stares in horror at the grotesque
growths sprouting up from what was once his groin.

And perhaps she does not know who
has offended her. Without sumptuary laws, faces and bodies change from day to
day like images in nightmare. Better, she thinks, to program all assemblers to
reproduce and strike at random. Any flesh they enter, check for genes. Spare
those who carry XX chromosomes.

Now imagine, not two such folk,
but a city of such people, creatures of godlike power and infantile rage. The
sky above Golgolundra is dark with brilliant diamond points, thicker than
confetti, a blizzard, and by now no one can tell who sent them out, or when, or
why, or what their original programs were.

And where the assemblers fight
each other (which they do often) the reaction heat from their rapid molecular
manipulations starts fires in the city. No one fights the fires.

More people would be dead, more
horribly, were it not for the Invigilators. They soar in the high pure air far
above, surrounded by rainbows and rings of force.

Their technology is very
different from that of the Earth.

When they dive, one can see
manlike shapes; faces and forms of ruthless beauty. Their personal shields
clothe each one in a radiant nimbus of gold, and the forces which give lift to
their flying-cloaks make their wings to shine. Where the nimbuses sphere their
heads, the glancing light makes golden rainbows appear and disappear.

Their faces are inhumanly perfect
and stern. The mental training systems brought by the Ship of the Will give
each one a perfect calm and utter sanity; the calm of a frozen winter pond.

Is it any wonder men call them
angels?

From their eyes dart slender
rays, like a warship’s searchlight, sweeping back and forth, penetrating crowds
and clouds and hidden places.

Where they glance upon weapons or
explosives, or fighting machines, they squint, and the rays of light tremble
with mysterious force, and consume what they see with fire.

Sometimes the weapons, before
they are found, discharge a futile shot or two toward the angels, whose shields
flare to higher energies, flashing like whirlwinds of fire. People applaud when
this happens.

Imagine Golgolundra. Everyone
laughs. No one is happy. Everyone is doomed.

2.

There is one young man among the
dancing crowds who does not dance. He dresses in black and does not laugh. He
is not doomed. And, perhaps, he has a chance, if small, to become happy.

In his forehead glints a ruby
gem. Any passer-by with the proper machine can read his thoughts. The grim look
on his face saves them the effort; his thoughts are clear.

The crowds part when he walks by.
The dancers fall silent. The graffiti images recoil and do not molest him.

He is Idomenes, son of Ducaleon.
His genetic modifications are not the same as those who live in Golgolundra. He
is a Promethean; they are Typhonides.

He comes to the central tower,
which serves Golgolundra as administration, rebellion-centre, entertainment
capital, and whorehouse. Idomenes paces down the wide corridors, looking
neither right nor left. The monstrous statues, grotesque murals, or weeping
deformities in their glass cages do not attract his attention.

From his black cloak, black
diamonds fan out, sweeping the corridors before and behind him like nervous
soldiers or presidential bodyguards, edging around corners, darting near
anything suspicious, maintaining their spacing and their overlapping fields of
fire. He ignores all this motion. He walks.

When he comes before a certain
door, perhaps he is impatient with precautions. The swarm of black diamonds
flutter back beneath his cloak, or come to rest in jewelried patterns along the
chest and sleeves of his dark doublet.

The door recognizes him, and,
without a word, politely opens.

Lounging at ease on a day-bed on
the balcony, dreamily watching the distant fires, a woman of haunting beauty
reclines. Her skin is the colour of coffee with cream, her hair is as black as
the midnight sea. She wears it very long. When she stands, it falls fragrantly
past her rounded hips and brushes her shapely calves. When she lies on her
stomach it is long enough that, even when braided, it can be used to tie her
wrists and ankles. When she lies on her side, as she does now, it forms
luxurious cloud-scapes, and falls, little waterfalls, from bed to floor, stray
locks swaying.