Slant (51 page)

any physical connotations, though he has had rather impractical dreams... He's never told Ayesha any of this, of course.

He puts his pad in his pocket. From this point on, the map is useless. He's back to dying bugs.

Anybody with half a brain can see Torino is absolutely right. Schnee told him that significant and aggravating night. Nature is a complex of minds. Every species has its own neural boundaries, gathering information and fixing it as knowledge. And knowledge is anatomy, the continuing body of the species--

To Seefa, every bee in a colony is an obvious analog of a neuron in a brain, though capable of both more complex neural judgment and motion. Node in the hive lattice and muscle combined. And how is a hive, viewed as a whole, basically different from you and me, or any other animal, but most e7?ecially social animals? The social order is a kind of super-mind, nested within the species super-mind. It's so obvious it's trite.

Nathan silently agreed that it was trite. Also, dead wrong. He has never thought much of Torino's work, and Seefa's ideas were, if anything, even wilder.

He crouches over a black and yellow wasp. It bobs its abdomen wearily as it crawls along the hall, trying to get back home.

The problem with our concept of mind is that we confuse our own kind of selj awareness with thinking in general. Self-awareness is an attribute of certain kinds of social animals. Why should a mind be self-aware? It's enough it's world-aware. If it isn't socially connected to other minds, it doesn't need social filters or self-modeling. It's self-making, self-sufficient. It measures and embodies and acts. A world-aware mind is just one step close, to God than you and I.

He values self, his own, Jill's, Ayesha's, the selves and awarenesses of his friends and family. He doesn't give an empty damn for theory and selfless science at the moment. Intellectual games don't help him keep up his courage.

There's a door ahead, heavy steel, half-open. He hears a buzzing from the other side of the door, soft and insistent, all-pervasive in the otherwise silent hallway.

Nathan takes a deep breath, holds it, and peers through the door, more than half expecting to die.

The next room is warm and dry, not completely dark, but very nearly so. His eyes adjust slowly to the dimness. He doesn't dare use his flashlight.

The walls are covered with irregular lumps: wasp nests. The floor is thick with large black and red ants mnvin, nurnnefillv between rll rn,,4 ...... to

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A simple winding trail has been kept clear, bare concrete floor, not quite a

foot wide. It crosses the room, passes around the mounds, perhaps--he hopes--

extends to a door on the other side.

There is no time to backtrack and find another way.

He makes his first step, listens. The sound is a constant hum and a whispery,

chitinous shuffling. The wasps fly around him, but do not land or make ag gressive moves. The air is full of them, however. If he sucks in his breath, he

might drag a few of the stinging insects into his mouth, into his lungs.

He's soaked. Sweat pours from his face and down his back.

Maybe these are just failed experiments. Maybe Seefa keeps them around

for protection. They're good at that, certainly but they aren't uncontrolled or

hair-trigger, like killer bees.

Nathan estimates, hopes is perhaps the better word, that he has crossed the

room halfway. He can dimly see a yellow glow bouncing from several clustered

ant mounds that reach to the roof like stalagmites in a cave. He walks gingerly

around the mounds, and a wasp buzzes against his cheek, making him jerk to

one side. For a nauseating moment, he feels he is about to lose his balance and

topple into the ants, but he recovers with an out-thrust arm and steadies

himself.

The wasp does not sting, the insects remain calm. Controlled.

Controlled, or self-controlled. Humans have been talking with bees and

other social insects, in various ways, for sixty or seventy years. Bee-direction is

a well-established science used in agriculture. Maybe Seefa has mastered control

of some kinds of social insects, and that's where her accomplishment ends.

But as his eyes adjust, he sees that the nests, the ant trails, even the flight

paths of the wasps, the arrangement of their clumped paper nests, is hauntingly

tiliar. Not circuitry--nothing so crude as that--but arrangements dictated

by pure lattice theory. Not random, not natural; evocative, deeply familiar to

any student of thinker design.

Self-ordered, cooperative, connected, after a fashion.

A controlling fashion established, he tells himself, by none other than crazy,

unfashionable, out-of-control Cipher Snow.

He sees the light beyond the mounds. It's another door, or rather a window

in a door, but the door is closed. He can't make out what lies beyond. It's only

i. slightly brighter beyond the door than in here with the insects.

What Nathan can't bring himself to believe, even now, is that he has already

found Roddy, that all of this is part of the child-like, dangerous thinker who

has snared Jill.

The door handle is mercifully free of insects. He opens the door slowly.

Beyond is a small glass-enclosed chamber equipped with a decade-old Mitsu-

Shin terminal and a rolling programmer's chair. He recognizes the chair. It

was Seefa's favorite; she had it with her at Mind Design. The back of the seat

is covered with printed plastic stickers of daisies and kittens.

/ SLANT 315

The door closes slowly, quietly. The insects stay in their room.

Outside the glass walls, Nathan sees a large garden. As he watches, concentric rings of lights come on over the garden, brightening slowly to full sun-

glare. He puts his hand over his eyes, half-blinded. "Seea?" he calls out. Silence.

He approaches the glass. The garden covers a space perhaps a hundred feet on a side, surrounded by waist-high walls, and beyond the walls, he can barely make out the dim reaches of a larger chamber, outside the sunlamp glow.

A swinging door opens in the glass. Nathan steps out into a rich scent of moist dirt and greenery: peas, their tendrils curling up narrow stakes onto row after row of trellises. Bees hum industriously between small blossoms.

To his left, four large gray and white boxes rest on concrete pads at the edge of the garden--older model INDAs. Thick fibers push from the sides of the boxes and spread in a pale radiance, then curve down and enter the dirt.

Nathan stands on the dirt and stoops. His fingers dig into the rich black loam, encountering a slickness of warm slime, disturbingly like reaching into a woman's genitals. He pulls his hand out quickly. The soil is laced with two kinds of fiber, and tiny plastic spheres. One kind of fiber is optical, carrying signals back to the INDAs, he thinks. The other kind connects the plastic spheres, which are obsolete medical monitors, ten or fifteen years old. He racks his memory for more details on these little spheres. He was given some as a young boy. They analyzed the contents of gastrointestinal tracts, looking for possible infections. They have since been replaced by diagnostic toilets.

Seefa has conducted her work on a very slim budget, with great ingenuity. Nathan can no longer doubt what he is seeing.

The soil is thick with bacterial growth, connected with and nurtured in some way by the peas on their trellises. The outdated medical monitors sample the bacterial populations and report on biological solutions to challenges posed by the interfacing INDAs, perhaps in the form of antibiotics or tailored bacteriophages.

The bacteria "swap spit," exchange plasmids, recipes, solve the challenges, and in so doing, with immense subtlety and power, though perhaps very slowly, bring to bear on human problems the most fecund and ancient powers of nature.

It is genius, pure and simple. Nathan was wrong. Seefa was right. No one would listen to her, and she was driven to th/x, to supplying answers and tools to demented elitists.

Despite himself, Nathan's eyes moisten. Under any other circumstance, this would be a cosmic moment, as great as finding life on another world.

His feet press into Roddv's core substance. Roddv's flesh RdHv'

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Roddy is indeed a little boy, standing in a mound of dirt. And perhaps by now, crucial parts of Jill are encoded in the bacteria-laden loam, as well. He scrubs off his feet before re-entering the glass cage. Then he sits in Seefa's chair, and tries to make sense of the INDA displays that spring up before him.

36

It is all so very confused. Jack Giffey stands in one poorly lit place like a ghost, and then his memory blurs and shifts and the Other stands in another equally gloomy place, and somehow the flechette pistol has been fired many times, and the woman lies on the floor. He smells smoke and electricity. Giffey hunkers down and lets the gun drop. There might be more left to do, but he isn't at all sure what it is. He's positive of only one thing--that something has gone very wrong inside him. If he is a human smart weapon,. the programming has failed. And yet-- He's killed Seefa Schnee. That's an accomplishment, but it is not all that he was sent here to do. It may not have been part of his specific instructions, but within his discretion. So was this a malfunction, too? The dead woman, a mistake? He looks up and for the first time notices where he is. A dark vaulted ceiling rises at least forty feet above, lit with tiny sparks of service lights. A door opens pe the stairs behind him, and he and the dead woman are on a walkway susnded above a pool of temporarily inactive slurry, dark and viscous. The construction is unfinished. Nano pathways weave through the recesses like high-rise highways in an antique vision of the future. Drums of architectural nano have been stored down here, hundreds of them stacked high in one corner. He suspects they are empty. Omphalos is poorly planned, over budget: ambition without wisdom. Jack Giffey and the Other, together, agree that this is not surprising. The Other has been involved in strategic and tactical plans, right-hand man to Colonel Sir, and everything he sees here smacks of rank incompetence. He looks around and tries to get to his feet, but his mouth explodes with loud obscenities and his mind goes white. When it stops, he is flat on his back. Someone says, "There you are, old fellow. Take it easy now." A foot kicks away the fiechette pistol. The Other looks up with eyes narrowed. A heavy-built man in a plain brown longsuit is kneeling beside him. "Shot her, did you?" he asks. The Other nods. "He shot her."

/ SLANT 317

"I am," the Other agrees. The conservatively dressed man has very broad shoulders and a no-nonsense, stiffly handsome face that does not easily express emotion. "Not your fault," he says. "As soon as we put two and two together, we knew we had to track you down and get you offline." "Offline. Kill me? For what I did before?" "No. You're safe enough from me. I don't even know what you did..." "I killed hundreds of civilians in a massacre in Hispaniola in 2034," the Other says. "Not personally. I was--" "Right. I don't need to know. Your cover is compromised. You've been screwed up by this fallback virus or whatever it is." "I wondered about that." "You're smart, old fellow. Can you get up?" "I think so. I tend . . . to swear a lot. Don't be startled and.., don't shoot me if I have a fit." "I won't." The Other stands. Jack Giffey seems like a character in a vid, vivid and unreal. "Where is my family? Are they still safe?" "If that was part of the guarantee, they're still safe." "It was. Immunity and sanctuary. Was I working alone?" "You mean, were you the only one on this case? No. But you might be the only one who made it this far... Where's Jenner?" "Dead." "The only one," the broad-shouldered, emotionless man confirms. The Other stands over the woman's body. It's quite a mess, with all the burrowing, corkscrew rounds of the flechette pistol having done their work. He must have unloaded his entire clip into her. But something isn't right. "Who was she?" the Other asks. The large man turns and glances down. "This one? This is a complete miss, old fellow," he says. The Other bends over and looks at the body more closely. "It's an arbeiter," he says. "Yeah. A decoy." Somehow, this catches him by complete surprise. A successful ruse in the middle of all this nonsense. He stammers and jams his hand into his mouth, biting his knuckles until the urge passes. "I forget what else I'm supposed to do." "Nothing. You're done," the large man says. "We're getting you out of here as quietly as possible. Others will finish the work now. Where's the Hammer?" For a moment, he has no idea what this question means. Then he remembers. "It's upstairs. Out of the way. It needs constant direction. The assault... damaged its autonomous brain." He makes circling gestures with his hands.

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The large man listens intently. "Does it still have a load of explosive?" "Yes."

They move back along the walkway, under the high, aloof worklights, through the door, and back up the four flights of stairs. Halfway up, he remembers that he is very curious about something. "What's my name?" he asks.

"Black," the large man answers. "Carl Black. By the way, I'm supposed to say to you: 'One and seven don't count in cigars.'"

The grizzled man flinches in earnest now and grips the railing tightly to keep from falling. The name and the password do their work.

Jack Giffey dies. He's a little frightened as he goes--Carl Black feels this much--and then the construct, the memories, the attitudes, where they are

not part of Black himself, fizzle out like bad connections in a network. "Come on, old fellow," the large man says, taking his arm. "Thank you," Carl Black says.

He does feel old, completely used up. It's all he can do to finish climbing the stairs.

37

"Who in hell are you?"

Jonathan opens his eyes and peers up through the open doors of the elevator. A small, thin woman in black blouse and pants stands just out of reach, staring anon at him with wide, scared eyes. She dangles a cigarette between thumb