“Then you’re a fool too,” Bunnish cried. “He’s nothing, he’ll never be anything. I’ll see to that.”
Peter stood up. “I don’t think so, somehow. I don’t think you can hurt us anymore. Any of us.” He looked at the others. “What do you think, guys?”
E.C. cocked his head thoughtfully, and ran a finger along the underside of his mustache. “You know,” he said, “I think you’re right.”
Delmario just seemed baffled, until all of a sudden the light broke across his face, and he grinned. “You can’t steal ideas I haven’t come up with yet, can you?” he said to Bunnish. “Not in this timeline, anyhow.” He made a loud whooping sound and stepped up to the chessboard. Reaching down, he stopped the clock. “Checkmate,” he said. “Checkmate, checkmate, checkmate!”
LESS THAN TWO WEEKS LATER, KATHY KNOCKED SOFTLY ON THE door of his study. “Wait a sec!” Peter shouted. He typed out another sentence, then flicked off the typewriter and swiveled in his chair. “C’mon in.”
She opened the door and smiled at him. “I made some tuna salad, if you want to take a break for lunch. How’s the book coming?”
“Good,” Peter said. “I should finish the second chapter today, if I keep at it.” She was holding a newspaper, he noticed. “What’s that?”
“I thought you ought to see this,” she replied, handing it over.
She’d folded it open to the obits. Peter took it and read. Millionaire electronics genius Bruce Bunnish had been found dead in his Colorado home, hooked up to a strange device that had seemingly electrocuted him. Peter sighed.
“He’s going to try again, isn’t he?” Kathy said.
Peter put down the newspaper. “The poor bastard. He can’t see it.”
“See what?”
Peter took her hand and squeezed it. “All the variations are unsound,” he said. It made him sad. But after lunch, he soon forgot about it, and went back to work.
THE GLASS FLOWER
ONCE, WHEN I WAS JUST A GIRL IN THE FIRST FLUSH OF MY TRUE youth, a young boy gave me a glass flower as a token of his love.
He was a rare and precious boy, though I confess that I have long forgotten his name. So too was the flower he gave me. On the steel and plastic worlds where I have spent my lives, the ancient glassblower’s art is lost and forgotten, but the unknown artisan who had fashioned my flower remembered it well. My flower has a long and delicate stem, curved and graceful, all of fine thin glass, and from that frail support the bloom explodes, as large as my fist, impossibly exact. Every detail is there, caught, frozen in crystal for eternity; petals large and small crowding each other, bursting from the center of the blossom in a slow transparent riot, surrounded by a crown of six wide drooping leaves, each with its tracery of veins intact, each unique. It was as if an alchemist had been wandering through a garden one day, and in a moment of idle play had transmuted an especially large and beautiful flower into glass.
All that it lacks is life.
I kept that flower with me for near two hundred years, long after I had left the boy who gave it to me and the world where he had done the giving. Through all the varied chapters of my lives, the glass flower was always close at hand. It amused me to keep it in a vase of polished wood and set it near a window. Sometimes the leaves and petals would catch the sun and flash brilliantly for an incandescent instant; at other times they would filter and fracture the light, scattering blurred rainbows on my floor. Often towards dusk, when the world was dimmer, the flower would seem to fade entirely from view, and I might sit staring at an empty vase. Yet, when the morning came, the flower would be back again. It never failed me.
The glass flower was terribly fragile, but no harm ever came to it. I cared for it well; better, perhaps, than I have ever cared for anything, or anyone. It outlasted a dozen lovers, more than a dozen professions, and more worlds and friends than I can name. It was with me in my youth on Ash and Erikan and Shamdizar, and later on Rogue’s Hope and Vagabond, and still later when I had grown old on Dam Tullian and Lilith and Gulliver. And when I finally left human space entirely, put all my lives and all the worlds of men behind me, and grew young again, the glass flower was still at my side.
And, at very long last, in my castle built on stilts, in my house of pain and rebirth where the game of mind is played, amid the swamps and stinks of Croan’dhenni, far from all humanity save those few lost souls who seek us out—it was there too, my glass flower.
On the day Kleronomas arrived.
“JOACHIM KLERONOMAS,” I SAID.
“Yes.”
There are cyborgs and then there are cyborgs. So many worlds, so many different cultures, so many sets of values and levels of technologies. Some cyberjacks are half organic, some more, some less; some sport only a single metal hand, the rest of their cyberhalves cleverly concealed beneath the flesh. Some cyborgs wear synthaflesh that is indistinguishable from human skin, though that is no great feat, given the variety of skin to be seen among the thousand worlds. Some hide the metal and flaunt the flesh; with others the reverse is true.
The man who called himself Kleronomas had no flesh to hide or flaunt. A cyborg he called himself, and a cyborg he was in the legends that had grown up around his name, but as he stood before me, he seemed more a robot, insufficiently organic to pass even as android.
He was naked, if a thing of metal and plastic can be naked. His chest was jet; some shining black alloy or smooth plastic, I could not tell. His arms and legs were transparent plasteel. Beneath that false skin, I could see the dark metal of his duralloy bones, the power-bars and flexors that were muscles and tendons, the micromotors and sensing computers, the intricate pattern of lights racing up and down his superconductive neurosystem. His fingers were steel. On his right hand, long silver claws sprang rakishly from his knuckles when he made a fist.
He was looking at me. His eyes were crystalline lenses set in metal sockets, moving back and forth in some green translucent gel. They had no visible pupils; behind each implacable crimson iris burned a dim light that gave his stare an ominous red glow. “Am I that fascinating?” he asked me. His voice was surprisingly natural; deep and resonant, with no metallic echoes to corrode the humanity of his inflections.
“Kleronomas,” I said. “Your name is fascinating, certainly. A very long time ago, there was another man of that name, a cyborg, a legend. You know that, of course. He of the Kleronomas Survey. The founder of the Academy of Human Knowledge on Avalon. Your ancestor? Perhaps metal runs in your family.”
“No,” said the cyborg. “Myself. I am Joachim Kleronomas.”
I smiled for him. “And I’m Jesus Christ. Would you care to meet my Apostles?”
“You doubt me, Wisdom?”
“Kleronomas died on Avalon a thousand years ago.”
“No,” he said. “He stands before you now.”
“Cyborg,” I said, “this is Croan’dhenni. You would not have come here unless you sought rebirth, unless you sought to win new life in the game of mind. So be warned. In the game of mind, your lies will be stripped away from you. Your flesh and your metal and your illusions, we will take them all, and in the end there will be only you, more naked and alone than you can ever imagine. So do not waste my time. It is the most precious thing I have, time. It is the most precious thing any of us have. Who are you, cyborg?”
“Kleronomas,” he said. Was there a mocking note in his voice? I could not tell. His face was not built for smiling. “Do you have a name?” he asked me.
“Several,” I said.
“Which do you use?”
“My players call me Wisdom.”
“That is a title, not a name,” he said.
I smiled. “You are traveled, then. Like the real Kleronomas. Good. My birth name was Cyrain. I suppose, of all my names, I am most used to that one. I wore it for the first fifty years of my life, until I came to Dam Tullian and studied to be a Wisdom and took a new name with the title.”
“Cyrain,” he repeated. “That alone?”
“Yes.”
“On what world were you born, then?”
“Ash.”
“Cyrain of Ash,” he said. “How old are you?”
“In standard years?”
“Of course.”
I shrugged. “Close to two hundred. I’ve lost count.”
“You look like a child, like a girl close to puberty, no more.”
“I am older than my body,” I said.
“As am I,” he said. “The curse of the cyborg, Wisdom, is that parts can be replaced.”
“Then you’re immortal?” I challenged him.
“In one crude sense, yes.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Contradictory. You come here to me, to Croan’dhenni and its Artifact, to the game of mind. Why? This is a place where the dying come, cyborg, in hopes of winning life. We don’t get many immortals.”
“I seek a different prize,” the cyborg said.
“Yes?” I prompted.
“Death,” he told me. “Life. Death. Life.”
“Two different things,” I said. “Opposites. Enemies.”
“No,” said the cyborg. “They are the same.”
SIX HUNDRED STANDARD YEARS AGO, A CREATURE KNOWN IN LEGEND as The White landed among the Croan’dhenni in the first starship they had ever seen. If the descriptions in Croan’dhic folklore can be trusted, then The White was of no race I have ever encountered, nor heard of, though I am widely traveled. This does not surprise me. The manrealm and its thousand worlds (perhaps there are twice that number, perhaps less, but who can keep count?), the scattered empires of Fyndii and Damoosh and g’vhern and N’or Talush, and all the other sentients who are known to us or rumored of, all this together, all those lands and stars and lives colored by passion and blood and history, sprawling proudly across the light-years, across the black gulfs that only the volcryn ever truly know, all of this, all of our little universe…it is only an island of light surrounded by a vastly greater area of grayness and myth that fades ultimately into the black of ignorance. And this only in one small galaxy, whose uttermost reaches we shall never know, should we endure a billion years. Ultimately, the sheer size of things will defeat us, however we may strive or scream; that truth I am sure of.
But I do not defeat easily. That is my pride, my last and only pride; it is not much to face the darkness with, but it is something. When the end comes, I will meet it raging.
The White was like me in that. It was a frog from a pond beyond ours, a place lost in the gray where our little lights have not yet shone on the dark waters. Whatever sort of creature it might have been, whatever burdens of history and evolution it carried in its genes, it was nonetheless my kin. Both of us were angry mayflies, moving restlessly from star to star because we, alone among our fellows, knew how short our day. Both of us found a destiny of sorts in these swamps of Croan’dhenni.
The White came utterly alone to this place, set down its little starship (I have seen the remains: a toy, that ship, a trinket, but with lines that are utterly alien to me, and deliciously chilling), and, exploring, found something.
Something older than itself, and stranger.
The Artifact.
Whatever strange instruments it had, whatever secret alien knowledge it possessed, whatever instinct bid it enter; all lost now, and none of it matters. The White knew, knew something the native sentients had never guessed, knew the purpose of the Artifact, knew how it might be activated. For the first time in—a thousand years? A million? For the first time in a long while, the game of mind was played. And The White changed, emerged from the Artifact as something else, as the first. The first mindlord. The first master of life and death. The first painlord. The first lifelord. The titles are born, worn, discarded, forgotten, and none of them matter.
Whatever I am, The White was the first.
HAD THE CYBORG ASKED TO MEET MY APOSTLES, I WOULD NOT have disappointed him. I gathered them when he left me. “The new player,” I told them, “calls himself Kleronomas. I want to know who he is, what he is, and what he hopes to gain. Find out for me.”
I could feel their greed and fear. The Apostles are a useful tool, but loyalty is not for them. I have gathered to me twelve Judas Iscariots, each of them hungry for that kiss.
“I’ll have a full scan worked up,” suggested Doctor Lyman, pale weak eyes considering me, flatterer’s smile trembling.
“Will he consent to an interface?” asked Deish Green-9, my own cyberjack. His right hand, sunburned red-black flesh, was balled into a fist; his left was a silver ball that cracked open to exude a nest of writhing metallic tendrils. Beneath his heavy beetling brow, where he should have had eyes, a seamless strip of mirrorglass was set into his skull. He had chromed his teeth. His smile was very bright.
“We’ll find out,” I said.
Sebastian Cayle floated in his tank, a twisted embryo with a massive monstrous head, flippers moving vaguely, huge blind eyes regarding me through turgid greenish fluids as bubbles rose all around his pale naked flesh. He is a Liar came the whisper in my head. I will find the truth for you, Wisdom.
“Good,” I told him.
Tr’k’nn’r, my Fyndii mindmute, sang to me in a high shrill voice at the edge of human hearing. He loomed above them all like a stickman in a child’s crude drawing, a stickman three meters tall, excessively jointed, bending in all the wrong places at all the wrong angles, assembled of old bones turned gray as ash by some ancient fire. But the crystalline eyes beneath his brow ridge were fervid as he sang, and fragrant black fluids ran from the bottom of his lipless vertical mouth. His song was of pain and screaming and nerves set afire, of secrets revealed, of truth dragged steaming and raw from all its hidden crevasses.
“No,” I said to him. “He is a cyborg. If he feels pain it is only because he wills it. He would shut down his receptors and turn you off, loneling, and your song would turn to silence.”
The neurowhore Shayalla Loethen smiled with resignation. “Then there’s nothing for me to work on either, Wisdom?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “He has no obvious genitalia, but if there’s anything organic left inside him, his pleasure centers might be intact. He claims to have been male. The instincts might still be viable. Find out.”
She nodded. Her body was soft and white as snow, and sometimes as cold, when she wanted cold, and sometimes white-hot, when that was her desire. Those lips that curled upwards now with anticipation were crimson and alive. The garments that swirled around her changed shape and color even as I watched, and sparks began to play along her fingertips, arcing across her long, painted nails.
“Drugs?” asked Braje, biomed, gengineer, poisoner. She sat thinking, chewing some tranq of her own devising, her swollen body as damp and soft as the swamps outside. “Truetell? Agonine? Esperon?”
“I doubt it,” I said.
“Disease,” she offered. “Manthrax or gangrene. The slow plague, and we’ve got the cure?” She giggled.
“No,” I said curtly.
And the rest, and on and on. They all had their suggestions, their ways of finding out things I wanted to know, of making themselves useful to me, of earning my gratitude. Such are my Apostles. I listened to them, let myself be carried along by the babble of voices, weighed, considered, handed out orders, and finally I sent them all away, all but one.
Khar Dorian will be the one to kiss me when that day finally comes. I do not have to be a Wisdom to know that truth.
The rest of them want something of me. When they get it, they will be gone. Khar got his desire long ago, and still he comes back and back and back, to my world and my bed. It is not love of me that brings him back, nor the beauty of the young body I wear, nor anything as simple as the riches he earns. He has grander things in mind.
“He rode with you,” I said. “All the way from Lilith. Who is he?”
“A player,” Dorian said, grinning at me crookedly, taunting me. He is breathtakingly beautiful. Lean and hard and well fit, with the arrogance and ro
ugh-hewn masculine sexuality of a thirty-year-old, flush with health and power and hormones. His hair is blond and long and unkempt. His jaw is clean and strong, his nose straight and unbroken, his eyes a hale, vibrant blue. But there is something old living behind those eyes, something old and cynical and sinister.
“Dorian,” I warned him, “don’t try games with me. He is more than just a player. Who is he?”
Khar Dorian got up, stretched lazily, yawned, grinned. “Who he says he is,” my slaver told me. “Kleronomas.”
MORALITY IS A CLOSELY KNIT GARMENT THAT BINDS TIGHTLY WHEN it binds at all, but the vastnesses that lie between the stars are prone to unraveling it, to plucking it apart into so many loose threads, each brightly colored, but forming no discernible pattern. The fashionable Vagabonder is a rustic-spectacular on Cathaday, the Ymirian swelters on Vess, the Vessman freezes on Ymir, and the shifting lights the Fellanei wear instead of cloth provoke rape, riot, and murder on half a dozen worlds. So it is with morals. Good is no more constant than the cut of a lapel; the decision to take a sentient life weighs no more heavily than the decision to bare one’s breasts, or hide them.
There are worlds on which I am a monster. I stopped caring a long time ago. I came to Croan’dhenni with my own fashion sense, and no concern for the aesthetic judgments of others.
Khar Dorian calls himself a slaver, and points out to me that we do, indeed, deal in human flesh. He can call himself what he likes. I am no slaver; the charge offends me. A slaver sells his clients into bondage and servitude, deprives them of freedom, mobility, and time, all precious commodities. I do no such thing. I am only a thief. Khar and his underlings bring them to me from the swollen cities of Lilith, from the harsh mountains and cold wastes of Dam Tullian, from the rotting tenements along the canals of Vess, from spaceport bars on Fellanora and Cymeranth and Shrike, from wherever he can find them, he takes them and brings them to me, and I steal from them and set them free.