“Yes, I think so. It’s a two-to-one vote over here. But it’s more complicated than that. He’s alive.”
“Who is?”
“Vaddum.”
“Ridiculous! He’s slag.”
“It’s the only way to explain it. The piece is a perfect extension of his late work. It’s glorious and unexpected, but it’s him. And it was created less than a year ago.”
“Then it’s a forgery. Piracy. Fraud!”
“But what if it isn’t? We have to check it out. Not just ship it here, but onsite. So we can find him.”
“I’m not sending you on a wild goose-chase in the middle of season!”
“Not me. Someone with a better eye. With exactly the right… life history to make sense of all this. He’s the expert on Vaddum. Practically discovered the guy. You know who I mean. But he only travels first class.”
“You’re killing me! Bleeding me dry!”
“Reginald, listen. I might be wrong…”
“Exactly!”
“But if I’m not, Reginald, it’s not just one Vaddum. It’s a never-ending supply of Vaddums. It’s a license to print money.”
A silence. Then the shuffle of fingers on unshaved chin.
“Who’s got the most Vaddums right now?” he asks.
“Your old pal Zimivic.”
A laugh frothed with wicked pleasure.
“First, a few ‘found’ Vaddums. High prices. Ever more improbable discoveries. And then the man himself, wandering out of the desert and wrapped up like a patent.” Reginald laughs again.
“A good strategy,” she encourages.
“And all the warehoused Vaddums plummet in value. Zimivic ruined!” he brays.
She allows herself a smile at the old fart’s unrepentant evil. What a philistine.
“A waste of money,” Reginald concludes. “But it’s sheer masturbation. I’ll do it. And if it’s a hoax, we’ll just spread the rumor anyway! Zimivic will be shitting every bite he takes.”
“You’re a genius.”
“Absolutely. But can Darling keep a secret?”
“I’ll make him promise.”
“Make him swear.”
* * *
Chapter 4
STARS IN A POCKET
« ^ »
The woman Mira led him through the cobblestone streets with a purpose that was almost brutal against their winding plan. She sometimes paused at intersections, as if receiving silent instructions. Soon, at the derelict end of a quiet, unappealing street, they reached a skywall. It opened as she reached out toward it, revealing a cramped portal scaled for a service drone.
They stepped from the torchlit, starlit, indirect world of the medina into a blank and featureless hallway. The aperture closed hastily behind them, as if an invisible host wanted to hide this unfinished back room from the public. Mira strode purposefully ahead. Darling looked into the few sparse rooms they passed. They were not truly behind the scenes yet, rather in the marginal spaces where one went to retrieve lost property or pay a trivial fine: officious and evenly lit, the rooms with numbers instead of names.
The hall took them to an elevator, decorated only with marks of wear, large enough to carry heavy equipment. It dropped quickly, and Darling’s human companion had to steady herself in the abrupt acceleration. There were two course changes along the way, the axes x, y, and z all accounted for.
He wondered what quaint attraction this was all leading to. A giant bay of exotic cargo? A personal cutter carried in stowage? He hadn’t asked about the woman’s profession, but she had the disinterest of the very rich in the face of the ship’s many spectacles. And now this unexpected access.
The elevator opened onto an airlock changing room. Two hard vacuum suits waited for them, hanging lifeless, one scaled for his inhuman size. Darling watched as Mira let her robe flow onto the floor, its shape’s resistance to gravity revealing some hidden intelligence in its fibers. She had the wide hips and large breasts that many women of her diminutive height were born with; they revealed no signs of surgical alteration. She met his motionless stare as she climbed into the suit.
“Don’t tell me you’re vacuum-capable,” she protested.
“Except for a few peripherals,” he answered, removing elements of the jewelry around his loins, a UHF emitter from his forehead.
“Old-fashioned, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Merely two centuries.”
She whistled, the sound blurring oddly with the hissing seal of her suit. He knew what she was thinking: Bootstrapped. He had achieved his personhood before real artificial rights, before developmental minders and childhood protection protocols and SPCAI proctors with their monthly Turing tests.
But his annoyance quickly evaporated. Her naked breasts were still visible beneath the translucent material of the vac suit, a few years shaped away by its semi-rigidity. He allowed himself to make comparisons between Mira and a lover from long ago.
“That explains a couple of things,” she said. Her voice came now in direct interface, matching the movements of her condensation-misted lips, but oddly without direction. He heard a sub-vocalized command, as intimate in DI as if she’d whispered it in his ear.
The lock cycled, and the sudden pressure drop triggered a few of Darling’s internal alarms. The great portal across from them opened…
… onto madness.
A maelstrom aurora bombarded the full range of his senses in a great informationless howl, a raging hurricane as tall and wide as his sensory parameters extended. A terrific white noise (if noise can encompass gamma, X-ray, visible, radar, microwave, and on down: an uninterrupted gamut of sheer presence) blared from a quintillion suns trapped inside the infinite and expanding non-place of the ship’s engine core. Here was a pocket universe in all its glorious obscenity: an artificial cosmos surging against the metaspace bonds that held it to this reality, trying to escape into the utter disappearance of its own realm, the ship bleeding the vast energies of its endeavors like some omnipotent god-leech.
Mira, visible only as the faintest of shadows in the torrent of radiation, had opened herself to the cry of this fearsome engine: arms and legs spread wide, mouth agape, fingers grasping as if the storm of energy were palpable. Darling unfurled his sensory strands to drink in the constant howl, extending his filaments until they reached the airlock’s floor, ceiling, walls. With the array fully deployed, he was a glowing statue caught in some monstrous spider’s web.
There was a long time like that, sovereign and changeless, marked only by gradual cycles in which his comprehension of what was happening stabilized, only to be overturned by a fresh wave of disbelief. This drive was not unlike Darling’s own AI core: an artificial cosmos, a collapsing singularity held forever in the Common Universe. It was this technology that underlay faster-than-light travel, unlimited power production, and the personhood of AIs, and which had made the Expansion possible. But he had never seen one before—not in the flesh.
It was very big.
And then the portal closed, and the world cascaded into a sudden and awesome silence. Only the measured hiss of returning air registered the continued existence of the universe.
Mira moved first, settling down onto her heels again. She peeled back the head of her suit and gasped a breath of air. She sat heavily upon the changing bench: an exhausted athlete, a firefighter grasping a few moments’ rest.
She watched Darling with heavy eyes as his filaments furled, suddenly shy snakes disappearing into the voluminous robe.
“Touché,” he said.
“Stars,” she said. “God’s fires.”
Later, in his cabin, he patiently explained the possible complications of his sexual apparati. They had been accumulated across two centuries of travel, among branches of the human family that had been weathered and roughened by alien environments, xenophobia, xenophilia, rates of mortality that the Home Cluster hadn’t seen since the Expansion began. Practices that had originated when the original human equipment ha
d failed through some trick of radiation or diet, or from temptations borrowed from species intelligent, adaptable, and likeable, but spawned in utterly different seas.
Mira waved these warnings aside, as casually as signing a release before taking a ride on a grav-sled or a leap down a frictionless slide. She even invoked the ship’s avatar to witness a blanket statement of consent—far more than he’d asked for; he’d only meant to create a measure of anticipation. But when she was done waving off his cautions, he realized he could have legally killed her then, that first time they had sex.
Never a temptation; it was simply an unfamiliar token of trust extended from her in an evening of extraordinary gifts.
Later, he wished he’d taken her there in the airlock. He would ask himself why the blaze of an imprisoned universe hadn’t been enough to level any reticence. Why they’d talked instead.
“What do you do?” she asked. “What brings you so far Out?”
“I’m an originals dealer.”
She shook her head. The term clearly meant nothing to her. A filmy layer of trapped sweat blurred the transparency of her vacuum suit. He longed to taste it, the bodily expression of her ecstasy a few moments before. He would have traded another look at the maelstrom for a drop of it.
“I deal in artwork: paint, sculpture, representations and installations. But I only buy and sell prototypes. Not the fabricated copies, virtuals, or sensory recordings. Just the one-and-only.”
She nodded, pealing the vacuum suit down to her waist, the trapped moisture beading exquisitely in the cool air of the lock. “Of course. You get a lot more, don’t you, if you’ve got the first one?”
“More than any fee for a reproduction license, yes. Sometimes by a factor of billions.”
She paused at this, thumbs wedged into the suit’s tight seal around her hips, eyes in the middle distance as if to confirm the orders of magnitude there. Her lips parted to make a noncommittal sound.
“So you buy and sell ‘originals.’ ” She said the word like so many did in the age of synthplants: a novel concept. Or possibly, a quaintly ancient one.
“I don’t buy, actually. I don’t like hanging onto things,” he answered. She ran all ten fingers through her hair, which had been compressed by the suit. Her raised arms lofted her breasts a little in their wake. “I’m more of an agent,” he continued. “I assess the authenticity of beautiful objects. I assess their value.”
He could have used filaments so thin that they wouldn’t have triggered a gag reflex, but he wanted her to feel it. The finger-thick cord of strands pushed her lips apart, registered the complex motions of her tongue, let her offer the sweet pressure of suction for a few moments. But the strands moved greedily inward.
There were already slender filaments touching the surface of her belly, soft and attentive. When the muscles there began to clench, the cord in her throat reacted. A miniscule gland at its tip sprayed a reflex-suppressant, a substance he had customized for her body chemistry from evidence supplied in saliva, sweat, even the flickers of her eyes. The substance—half topical, half invasive—caused a host of reactions. The sense data coming from Mira’s inner ear was neatly severed from her kinesthetic awareness, causing not the nausea of dizziness, but the unsure orientation of zero-g. Her anus dialated slightly, with the cool sensation of relief, as if a dangerous accident had been narrowly averted. Her eyes closed in grim concentration as the cord pushed further.
Deep in her throat, the cord parted into separate strands, some no wider than nerves. Two bloodlessly penetrated her lungs, opening a channel of pure oxygen that Darling could control in nanoliter increments. Another filament took up residence in her stomach, where it brandished the sensations of nervousness, of panic, of awe. The remaining dozen strands snaked cautiously to various stations of Mira’s heart, where, with the most minute of electrical shocks, they could seize control of its beating.
Now, with the tributaries of that one delicate member established, he moved to cover her.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” he had complained after her robe was back on, the vacuum suit already claimed by a drone. Already, he wished he had seized the moments after they had seen the engine core. But the whole thing had been so sudden: the explosive, unexpected sunrise of a universe.
“What brings you Out this far?” he finished.
She smoothed the garment against her skin, giving rise to the shape of her breasts again. “I’m an agent, too, I suppose. But I don’t broker objects; I perform tasks.”
He frowned, the design of his mineral features made it a slow, grave motion. Often in the manifold and multiplex economies that blossomed throughout the Expansion, it was necessary to describe one’s profession abstractly. The specifics of any job could become meaningless outside the context of planet and culture. But Mira’s answer seemed deliberately obtuse. The mode she’d used in Diplomatique didn’t forestall him asking, though.
“What sort of tasks?”
She cocked her head, her eyes watching his hands replace the genital jewelry he’d removed to protect it from the hard vacuum around the core. “I hereby declare this airlock to be my legal residence, temporary,” she announced.
He had to chuckle. She knew the law and its fictions. Anything she said would now be beyond subpoena, even if the ship were watching, which, he felt sure, it was. And her statement confirmed his suspicions that she was no tourist.
“My tasks are extra-legal.”
More vagueness, he thought.
“Whom do you work for?”
“World-class minds, or ships, sometimes. But older, wiser ones than this.” She splayed one hand to indicate the Queen Favor, adding the barest of smiles for his benefit. “I make sure certain concepts are never fully realized.”
He nodded. A sort of industrial spy, he supposed. Or saboteur. That was all he wanted to know, frankly. Probably all he could understand. It was a story as old as history: any profitable franchise (or guild, or cartel, or operating system) had to protect itself from developments that might result in it being superseded. The future always held bad news for someone. Of course, Mira and her employers were merely stop-gaps. As his own bootstrapped personhood showed, sooner or later the new toys always won.
Her tone had grown more guarded, even in the fiat-secrecy of the airlock. But he didn’t want further details. The specifics didn’t interest him. He hadn’t paid attention to the world of business and investment, outside his own rarefied profession, for a hundred years.
But another question boiled up inside him with uncharacteristic suddenness and intensity. Maybe the result of artificial intuition, the old legend. He didn’t think before asking.
“Do you kill people?”
She nodded without hesitation. “People. Biological and artificial.”
His reaction caught him by surprise, as unexpected as the question had been. A quickening of senses, of inner processes, of desire. One of the jewels slipped from his fingers (it had been decades since he’d dropped something) and he watched it shatter against the radiation-shielded floor of the airlock: another starburst from this woman. One evening with her left a wake of new sensations that he would be days untangling.
“Come to my cabin,” he said. “It’s my turn to show you something.”
A number of his scintillating muscles left the iron berth of his chest, ventured out to perform heavy work, unsubtle but pleasurable all the same. Four took control of her wrists and ankles, aglitter with their serpentine motion: these were muscles of lifting, not often used for snake-like encirclements. Mira gasped a little, a sound roughened by the cord down her throat. The muscles were scaly and left abrasions in their wake. These restraints were a necessary measure; if she thrashed too much, his smaller, penetrating strands might damage her badly. He shifted more of his crushing weight onto her: masterfulness for its own sake. It was his turn to make her cry.
The last of the extruded muscles—a leathery whip that lived next to his diamond-hard spine—wrapped itself ar
ound her neck. This cool member came from deep inside; it carried no phosphorescents, and left a trail of his inner ichor, the medium in which his nanorepair mechanisms swam, marking a passage darker than her olive flesh. The muscle’s grimy coat smelled of ash and animal corruption. It would have been choking, so close to her nose, were her reflexes not so thoroughly compromised.
Between this black collar and the fiber-thin intrusions into her lungs, he could deliver any state between dark asphyxia and blinding hyperventilation.
Now wiry sensory strands moved across her chest. They encircled her nipples, shifted quickly between temperatures that would boil or freeze water, listened to her heartbeat. Her heart accelerated without any direct intervention, pounding like an animal in a sinking cage. There was fear in her sweat, in the rank chemicals of her labored breath. And in its battle against that animal panic, her mind produced another layer of reactions: shudders and flickers of eyes and fingers, the clenching muscles of vagina and anus. Darling bent forward like a mass of quarried earth to kiss her forehead. Before the heavy kiss fell, a brush of sensors spilled from his mouth to taste: her tears, her perspiration, the bright strand of saliva easing from a corner of her hostage mouth.
Thin elements probed the moist spaces of her cunt. Darling remained tentative here, teasing rather than abusing, worrying the clustered nerves with a few shimmering electrical shocks. He painted her labia with a colony of nanomachines, aggressive and acidic; an itch would begin to build there soon, slowly spreading until her entire groin would cry out for rougher measures.
He paused in his lovemaking for a moment, drank in the tremors and murmurs beneath him, the completeness of his control. The mesh of his radiant tongue on her forehead returned brainwaves like those of a violent dream: high-pitched and irregular, but riding the undercurrent of a low sine wave, as if they issued from a deep, hidden place. He tasted her blood: low sugar content except for a little alcohol, and the satisfying metal tang to remind Darling that frail humans had iron in their veins.