Engineering Infinity (40 page)

Patrice had gone grey in the
face.

“You going to crash out, child -
?”

“No, go on -”

The Shet rearranged his bulk on
the inadequate office chair. “The autopsy’ll tell us the details. Then you came
along, Patrice. We saw a chance to get ourselves to the crime scene, and wasted
Diaspora funds pushing on an open door. And you nearly died, because we drank
the nice fresh water from this Habitat. Which happened to be doped -”

“The atavists thought the
willingness
they’d cooked up for Lione would work on you,”
explained the Ki-anna. “They’ve never heard of ‘fraternal twins.’ Ki
litter-mates can be of any sex, but otherwise they are identical. You were
begging to be lured to the Grottos, it was perfect, you would replace Dr
Ferringhi. Luckily, you and your sister
weren’t
clones.
You were affected, but you weren’t ready to be butchered. You fought for your
life.”

“You see, Messer Ferringhi,” said
Bhvaaan, “what really happened here is that a pair of murdering atavist
bastards thought they’d appoint themselves as Chief of Police a child
who had been eaten
. A girl like that, they thought, will
never dare to do us any damage. Instead they found they had a tiger by the
tail...” He opened the casefile tablet, and pushed it over to Patrice. “They’re
glamorous, the Atavist An. But your sister would never have fallen for them in
her right mind, from what I’ve learned of her. Still want to withdraw this?”

Patrice was silent, eyes down.
The Ki-anna saw him shedding the exaltation of the drug; quietly taking in
everything he’d been told. A new firmness in the lines of his face, a deep
sadness as he said farewell to Lione. The human felt her eyes. He looked up and
she saw another farewell, sad but final, to something that had barely begun -

“No,” he said. “But I should go
through it again. Can we do that now?”

The Ki-anna returned to her
quarters.

Roaaat joined her in a while. She
sat by her window on the streets, small chin on her silky paws, and didn’t look
round when he came in.

“He’ll be fine. What will you do?
You’ll have to leave, after this.”

“I know. Leave or get killed, and
I must not get killed.”

“You could go with Patrice, see
what Mars is like.”

“I don’t think so. The pheromones
are no more, now that he knows what ‘making love to the Ki-anna’ is supposed to
be like.”

“I’ve no idea what making love to
you is supposed to be like. But you’re a damned fine investigator. Why don’t
you come to Speranza?”

Yes, she thought. I knew all
along what
you
were offering.

Banishment, not just from my own
world, but from all the worlds. Never to be a planet-dweller any more. And
again I want to ask,
Why me? What did I do?
But you
believe it is an honour and I think you are sincere.

“Maybe I will.”

John Barnes

John Barnes
has published 28 volumes of fiction, probably 29 by the time you read this,
including science fiction, men’s action adventure, two collaborations with
astronaut Buzz Aldrin, a collection of short stories and essays, one fantasy
and one mainstream novel. His most recent books are mainstream novel
Tales
of the Madman Underground
and techno-thriller
Directive
51
.

He has done a
rather large number of occasionally peculiar things for money, mainly in
business consulting, academic teaching, and show business, fields which overlap
more than you’d think. Since 2001, he has lived in Denver, Colorado, where he
has a wonderful girlfriend, an average income, and a bad attitude, which he
feels is actually the best permutation.

Stephanie Ilogu knew the Southern
Ocean was
supposed
to be cold. Lars had been
battling to cool the ocean since Stephanie was seven years old.
If my teeth chatter, I’m disrespecting my husband’s success.

Maybe I
wouldn’t think so much about my numb feet and face, or the dank sogginess
leaking into my hair through my watch cap, or how much cold air leaks in under
this huge parka, if I had something to do besides listen to my husband and his
ex-wife make history together, so I can write about how great they both are.

Lars
had
warned her about his ex’s enthusiasm. “Bigger than Brazil in less than three
months!” Nicole leaned far out over the railing, risking a five-meter plunge
into the dense mat, which looked like floating spinach. Below the first,
surface meter, black, oily fibre extended forty meters down, so dense and deep
that the Southern Ocean’s surface was nearly flat despite a face-stinging
headwind.

Lars wore his parka hood up, and
from behind him Stephanie could not watch his expression as Nicole arched her back,
revealing Greek-statue glutes under glistening skin the colour of hot
chocolate. Twisting tightly at the waist, she grasped the sampling pole beside
her, hooked heel behind knee around the rail, and dangled over the green,
motionless, freezing sea.

She wore her thin one-piece
bathing suit for company or cameras and no other reason. Naked except to
broadcast, Nicole had walked on Mars, swum under the ice on Europa, and spent
four years outdoors in methane snow and slush on Titan. If Nicole fell into the
slimy cold mess below, to her, the icy sea that could chill a human to death in
minutes would call for a slight speedup of her fusor. She could then tread
water for weeks, swim north to Cape Town, or walk on the sea floor to Davis
Antarctic Station.

Nicole whipped up in a back flip
and lighted as neatly on the ice-coated deck as if she’d been wearing sneakers
on a dry sidewalk. Stephanie reminded herself that those bare toes had dealt
with far worse.

Nicole peered through the sample
jar. “Mat’s still spreading outward at eighty kilometres a day. And if this
sample is like every other one, there’s more genetic diversity in this jar than
we’ve found in the solar system up till now. The million new species we’ve
catalogued have DNA less like anything on Earth than a Europan tentacled clam
or a Martian braidworm. The ocean still has surprises! I love it!”

“I hate surprises,” Lars said. “Surprises
are what good management is supposed to control.”

“I love surprises,” Nicole said.
Her huge grin invited Stephanie into the conversation. “No surprises, no news
media, no job for Steph. And the sea
should
surprise
us.” Her sweeping, circular gesture embraced the horizon;
Clarke’
s
bow cut ceaselessly into the featureless plain of mat, stern jets churning a
darker path that closed up in less than a kilometre. “Science is about knowing
enough to know what’s just uncommon and what’s a real surprise. Most people are
-”

Clarke
cleared its forward intake screens. An immense stream of green and black mat
shot upward and forward, sounding like God’s clogged toilet clearing. The
headwind blew the plume, the colour and texture of black bean and broccoli
soup, back onto them.

“I think we’re done, for the
moment,” Lars said.

Just before going below,
shivering and holding her breath against the stench like rotten fish and
cabbage, Stephanie looked back at Nicole bobbing for another sample. Her
beautifully muscled legs wrapped around the railing in a figure-four; beyond
her upward-reaching feet, all the way to the horizon, the Southern Ocean was a
bright green sheet in the clear wet sunlight.

Stephanie usually liked
undressing in front of Lars, but the fresh memory of Nicole, her body as fine
today as when it was built, made her hesitate. Lars grabbed the hem of her
parka and pulled it up over her head, stripping her into the refresher slot
until he knelt to remove her safety boots. “Now you do me.”

The freezing, stinking seawater
that had drenched him spattered onto her as she removed his parka, but she didn’t
mind when she saw the smile as his gaze caressed her.

He gently stroked her hair,
forehead, and cheek, his hands still warm and damp from his glove. “She has too
many muscles,” Lars said, reading Stephanie’s mind, “and not enough colour
contrast.” He folded his all-but-paper-white fingers gently into her deep brown
ones, where she had been caressing the forearm stroking her cheek, and guided
her hand to the back of his neck. His hand returned to her cheek, and trailed
down along her neck, and over her collarbone. “See? An old poop like me needs
high contrast or he’d never be able to find his way around. Now let’s boil the
stink and cold off ourselves.”

In the roaring hot shower, she
scrubbed his shaven head fiercely, the way he preferred; he relished lathering
her and rinsing her off. When they had washed and kissed enough, he said, “Well,
now at least we don’t reek of spoiled sardines.” They towelled each other off
in the small space between the bed and the closet, close enough to feel each
other’s warmth. “I’m feeling a little more secure,” Stephanie said. “It’s just
- oh, everything. She’s so beautiful.”

“They built her that way,” Lars
reminded her, “because they thought the planetary exploration program would be
more politically sustainable if the people out there doing it could attract
fans on Earth. And my god, they were right. We had a hell of a fight to bring
the six of them back to Earth and put them on useful projects; even today
almost half the population wants to watch new exploration shows with the
humaniforms bouncing around on some useless rock out in space.”

“It makes me think she’s not
really human,” Stephanie said. “You took away everything she was made for and
everything she lived for - yet she came back here and
married
you. That’s not a person. A real person couldn’t do that.”

“A person without much choice can
do all kinds of things.” He fastened his clean tunic. “We married each other to
establish that the six of them were persons and citizens. Otherwise the
corporations would’ve used humaniform technology to make billions of slaves.
Can you imagine beings like Nicole spending six hundred years as a nanny, a
butler, or a sex toy?”

“She says she
likes
to work.”

“She likes to exercise her
abilities, which are those of a very capable oceanographer and marine
biologist. She’ll enjoy figuring out why all this crap is growing in the ocean
- “

“I wish you could just order her
to fix it.”

“As a bureaucrat, I might like
that, but as a person who was once married to that person, I don’t want
obedience, I want her best work, things I’d never have thought to ask for that
solve problems I didn’t know were problems.”

“But you hate surprises. And she
has every reason to hate you and you don’t know why she’s helping instead.”

“I was a reasonably decent
husband for a guy who started late without a clue. As for why humaniforms live
with us, work with us, and don’t seem to be too pissed off that we took them
away from the environments they were made for - well, they seem to like us.
They’ve all been married to plain old biological people. Nicole herself has had
two husbands since me. She’ll probably have a good solid twenty more, in the
next few centuries. She likes people. And you’d have to be a jerk not to like
her, once you get to know her.” He hugged Stephanie. “Look, she’s beautiful,
she’ll live a long time, and she can go places we can’t. Otherwise she’s about
as superior to us as a really great athlete combined with a pretty smart
scientist. Haven’t you ever met any humaniforms before today?”

“No, I haven’t. Think about it,
Lars, when would I? I got the reporting job straight out of school, and by that
time you were already courting me. My parents were high level bureaucrats in
West Africa, which isn’t a very important province; it was just Dad’s good luck
that you knew him from school, but we weren’t anywhere near the social level
where the humaniforms circulate. And I’m not sure I’d have taken the chance to
meet one if I could. To tell you the truth I’m scared of them. They creep me
out.”

“All right. Well, you’ve got the
biggest opportunity of your life right now, to report this story.” His voice
was strangely cold; the small and frightened person inside her could not turn
to him for the usual comfort, and she felt horribly alone, looking into his
matter-of-fact, judging eyes. “So you can bail on the opportunity, right now,
and I’ll find someone who can talk to Nicole to record this story. Or you can
get over feeling ‘creepy’ and talk with her. Drop the job or drop the feeling,
Stephanie.”

He’s scared I’ll
drop the job.
That decided her. “All right. I’ll learn to deal with her.”
But she’s so beautiful and Lars slept with her for ten
years. A ten-year marriage couldn’t have been just to prove a legal point, a
month
would have done that. Why didn’t I realize that till now?
“At least I’ll try.”

He looked like he tasted
something bad. “You’re meeting a remarkable person, not undertaking an ordeal.
Have you paid any attention to any
accurate
source
about humaniforms or just to the junky, scary stuff in the media?”

That hurt. “Lars, okay, obviously
you think I’m a bigot or a phobe, so what
should
I
know about Nicole?”

“Mostly how much she’s like you -
smart but not freakishly smart, with more empathy, emotional stability and
sense of duty than most people have. That fusor in her chest, her ability to
adjust her sensations to stay comfortable and sensitive, that body made of
materials that tolerate very wide temperature and pH ranges - that’s a spec
sheet, that’s not her. If you prick her, she won’t bleed, she’ll block the
pain. If you tickle her, she’ll laugh because she likes to laugh. She’d be hard
to poison but hydrofluoric acid would work, and she’d die.”