Existence (76 page)

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Authors: David Brin

BOOK: Existence
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Not because it hurts. It
does,
often intensely. But that’s not my reason. Pain doesn’t have the reflex power it used to possess. I’ve been through so much already, it’s become a familiar companion. I tend to view it as … data.

Was that a terribly
robotic
thing for me to say? In keeping with the electromechanical fingers that I flex and the gel-eyes that track from the same sockets in my head, where once stared the brown irises I was born with? But no, I’m not revolted by any of that. Nor even to find myself now a compact cylinder, riding around on cyborg seg-wheels. The clanking-whirring aspect isn’t as bad as expected.

I admit I was surprised, the first time I
looked
through these eyes at my new, mechanical hand, and saw what it was holding. That forty-thousand-year-old stone tool-core that Akinobu Sato gave me, back in Albuquerque. For some time I could only stare, as my new fingers flexed, squeezing the ancient artifact as—involuntarily—my other new hand came over to caress it. The touch sensations were a creepy mix of familiar and bizarre.

Oh, it was good to feel an object again, though the sensory web feeding signals to my brain triggered accompanying glitters of synesthesia.
Sparks
seemed to follow, each time I stroked the ancient facets where some pre-ancient engineer once fashioned blades, using the highest tech of his age. Turning the stone over, I heard tinkling sounds, like distant, fairy bells, ill tuned, smelling of both soot and time.

“Why did you give me this?” I asked the docs, who answered, in some puzzlement, that I had
asked
for the Pleistocene stone relic. Out of some unconscious sense of irony, perhaps? A juxtaposition of tool use, from man’s beginning and his end, like in that Kubrick film?

I had no memory of the request.

Oh, this whole process is fascinating. And I’m not ungrateful! Dr. Turgeson asked me, today, if I was glad I chose to participate in these experiments, rather than take the other option—

—diving into cryonic deep freeze, hoping to waken in a more advanced age with better medicine.

Well, why
not
hang around here and now, when I’m appreciated and fully capable of staying in the game? With vision and mobility, I may yet have a career, dashing about the world, interviewing celebrighties who won’t be able to say no to the famous hero-reporter in her hard-cased segsuit and never-blinking cyberais. Anyway, who wants to bet on cryonic resurrection in some rosy future … with the artifact aliens saying there’s no tomorrow?

That’s not the problem. Nor was I much upset the time Wesley came to visit, accompanied by his new wife. Their offer to do a group-thing was flattering. (My ovaries are one part of me that survived the explosion intact.) But I wasn’t interested.

No. My complaint is just this. That I look forward to
down time.
To turning off the distracting new body and surrounding world. To dive back into the cyber belowverse for twenty hours out of twenty-four. Joining you, my real friends. My smart-mob comrades. My fellow citizen-soldiers. My hounds, sniffing and correlating and baying after the truth!

So, what do you have for Mama today? What happened during the brief but tedious time I had to be away, dealing with the physical world?

 

57.

ISHMAEL

The Basque Chimera.

Mei Ling knew the words, of course. Everyone on Earth had heard the legend: How a brave maiden offered up her womb to carry the seed of a reborn race. A type of human that had gone extinct tens of thousands of years ago.

When the virgin mother’s home—a research center in the Spanish Pyrenees—evaporated in a mushroom-shaped pillar of flame, millions reckoned it righteous punishment for many sins, like arrogance, pride, even bestiality.

Tens
of millions grieved.

And hundreds of millions breathed sad sighs of release. While deploring violent murder, they felt relieved to see a tense matter put off for another generation.

Mere tens of thousands clung to hope, nursing rumors that Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte still lived, that she had somehow escaped the fiery holocaust in Navarre, finding some place of refuge to birth her child. Even in faraway China, living atop a ramshackle shorestead beside the polluted Huangpu, with barely enough linkage to watch grainy, emo-dramas, Mei Ling had followed this story, so much like a tragic, romantic legend from the fabled days of Han.

Now, with the real Madonna and child standing up to greet her, Mei Ling felt awkward and tongue-tied. Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte was shorter than expected, with dark, tightly curled hair, olive complexion, and a warm smile as she offered her right hand. Mei Ling briefly wondered if she was supposed to kiss it, as one did with royalty in some occidental movies of bygone days. But no, it became a handshake of the new style, as both women clasped each other’s forearms, more sanitary than pressing sweaty palms together.

Agurne’s warm squeeze expressed comradeship. Solidarity. “I am so very glad to meet you,” she said in Beijing dialect with a thick foreign accent. As their hands parted company, “We have much to discuss. But first, please let me introduce my son. He has lately chosen for himself the name
Hijobosque.
Hijo, please say hello.”

The boy looked ten years old or more, though less time than that had passed since pillars of flame heralded his birth in the forested hills of Auzoberri. Though modesty forbade her to stare, Mei Ling noted that his face bore no sign of the heavy brow ridges that appeared in most artist renderings, predicting the likely appearance of a—

—she could not recall the name of the cave people who used to inhabit Europe and much of Asia, before the arrival of modern man. They had been thick-boned, short-legged, robustly built people … and those traits seemed to carry through in the boy, though not in any extreme way that shouted
stranger!
His posture was proudly erect and he seemed no hairier than any other man-child. Perhaps the bony eye-hoods were removed by doctors, to help him hide among regular humans.

“Please call me Hijo,” he said in a voice that sounded both deeper and more constricted than normal, as if he were deliberately trying for a nasal twang. Or, perhaps he was just overstressing his tones, in speaking Mandarin Chinese.

When Hijo shook hands with Mei Ling—the older way—Mei Ling felt almost sure there was something different in the way bone and muscle and sinew were put together. His gentle squeeze conveyed a sense of repressed strength. Lots of it.

Nervously expecting him to say something profound, Mei Ling found Hijo’s next words comfortingly normal.

“Baby,” he said, spreading open both hands. “Can I hold your baby? I promise to be careful.”

Remembering that quiet strength, Mei Ling couldn’t help glancing at Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte, who merely smiled in a relaxed way. So did the strange little boy, Yi Ming, who had arranged this encounter, guiding Mei Ling through countless twisty passages beneath the Universe of Disney and the Monkey King. Lifting Xiao En out of his sling carrier, she set an example of holding him, then turned the infant in order to hand him over … watching.

There was no cause for worry. Hijo hefted Xiao En with evident skill and ease … he must have handled babies before. And Xiao En chortled pleasure at having someone new to charm. In truth, he was getting so big, Mei Ling found it a relief to surrender the weight, for a time.

Hijo made cooing sounds that drew from Xiao En a drooling, gap-tooth smile. Though they were strange to Mei Ling’s ear … as if
two
creatures were crooning in different parts of a forest, at the same time.

Watching the two of them together, Mei Ling wondered how the Basque Chimera had been able to stay free for so long. The modern world’s overlapping cameras fed each other, reporting to smart daitabases. Sure, there had been efforts to conceal the boy’s differences—having undergone reconstructive surgery herself, Mei Ling recognized signs that Hijo’s nose had been altered and possibly even the slope of his forehead. But other things, like a pronounced bulging of the back of the skull, could not be disguised. Though, now that she thought about it …

… Mei Ling glanced at Yi Ming and realized, some of the telltale traits were shared with millions of others walking around today. People with normal, human pedigrees.

“Shall we sit?” Agurne invited Mei Ling to join her on a couch. Not far away stood one of the multi-access consoles where men and women—all of them clearly abnormal—had plugged and wired and harnessed themselves, grunting and twitching as complicated light-shows flashed from goggle-covered eyes.

“I do not—” Mei Ling swallowed, trying for her best grammar. “I do not understand why I am thus honored.”

Agurne laughed, a gentle sound.

“Please. We both became pregnant and bore healthy sons under difficult circumstances. We both successfully fled the clutches of great powers. How is it any less of an honor for me to meet you?”

Mei Ling found herself blushing. And she knew that made her scar tissue stand out, embarrassing her further.

“How … may I be of service?” she half whispered.

Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte inhaled deeply. Her eyes glittered with compassionate concern.

“Normally, I would not be so rude. You have no reason to trust me. At the very least, we would talk a while. Get the measure of each other, one woman and mother to another. But there is so little time. May I go straight to the point?”

“Please … please do.”

Agurne motioned with one hand toward the janitorial smart-mob, harnessed into their multisensory portal stations. “All over the world, small groups like this one are joining forces, in an urgent quest for understanding. They can sense that something is happening. Something that cannot be entirely encompassed by words.”

Mei Ling swallowed hard. She glanced at the boy who was now sitting on the floor, holding her son. Although he was turned partly away, Hijo seemed to sense her question.

“Yes … I can feel it, too. I am helping. In fact, I have to get back to work, real soon.”

Agurne smiled with adoring approval, then turned back to Mei Ling and continued.

“I cannot explain what it is that they are doing, or claim to understand, except that it seems to be about destiny. Things and ideas and emotions that may determine the future of humanity, if Allah-of-all-names wills it.”

Mei Ling could find no words, so she waited for the other woman to say more.

“Do you know what many of these teams are doing right now?”

Mei Ling shook her head. No.

“They are searching for your husband. And the crystal he was last seen carrying into the sea.”

She had known, of course, all along. Deep down. This could only be about the accursed
Demon Stone
. “I wish he never found the terrible thing.”

“I understand. You have cause for bitterness. But do not judge too quickly. We don’t know what role it will play. But one thing is certain. Your husband will be safer if he and the stone can be drawn out of shadows. Into the light.”

Mei Ling pondered this for long seconds.

“Can that be done?”

The other woman’s smile was rueful, apologetic.

“I don’t know the details. They are searching for him by sifting the daita-sphere. A myriad corners and dimensions of the Great Mesh. The tides and currents and drifting aromas. Many things that are deeply hidden, encrypted and buried behind bulwarks of firewall isolation—these nevertheless leave spoors that can be detected, if only by the studious
absence
of mention.”

Mei Ling blinked silently, wondering how this foreigner—born in New Guinea, raised on Fiji, and educated in Europe—became so articulate in Chinese.
Better than me,
she observed.

“These are the sort of not-there traces that the
Blessed Throwbacks
sometimes can detect, invisible to the rest of us.”

“But not to me!” inserted Hijo, who had laid Xiao En on a plush rug, and was playing a game of peekaboo, to the baby’s delight.

“No. Not to you,” Agurne responded, indulgently.

“In fact, I can tell that Mei Ling’s children will be special,” the Neanderthal boy added. “Even though I don’t know why. Nobody can know the future. But some things just leap out. They’re obvious.”

Hijo’s faulty use of the plural almost made her protest.
I have only one child.
But Mei Ling shook her head. This was no time for petty distraction. She turned back to the mother.

“How can I help? What can I tell you?”

Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte leaned gently toward Mei Ling.

“Everything. Anything you can remember. We already have many clues.

“Why don’t you just start at the beginning?”

A GLIMMER

The gullet of the sea serpaint isn’t as gross or disgusting as he expected. The walls are soft and he has only to crawl back a short distance to find a space shaped to fit a recumbent person.

While twisting into the seat, Bin hears the jaw of the mechanical beast close with a thump. There follows backward movement, undulating, shaking, like a worm wriggling out of a hole. By some tech-wizardry, the small space around him begins emptying of water. Soon, a hiss of air.

Bin spits out the mouthpiece—a gasp of shuddering relief. The breather had gone foul. He gratefully rubs his eyes.

A patch of wall near his head is transparent—a window! How considerate. Really. It makes him feel ever-so-slightly less a prisoner—or a meal. Pressing his face, he peers outside. The palace ruins are a jumble, collapsed further by the fighting, now lit by slanting moonlight.

While the robot backs up, Bin spots his former attic shelter. Briefly, before the machine can accelerate forward, he glimpses the opening—and perhaps a shadowy silhouette. At least, he thinks so.

Enough to hope.

 

58.

DESPERATION

“They aren’t just battling it out with lasers anymore,” Gennady reported. “Now, many of the space attacks appear to involve kinetic energy weapons.”

“You mean pellet guns?” Akana asked. “Wouldn’t those be slower? Harder to aim, with all those asteroids jumbling about, on different orbits? And your target might get a chance to duck.”

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