She began to struggle now, a soft, annoyed childhood noise gurgling in her throat. The itch in her cunt must be growing, needling and burning the sensitive flesh, but frustratingly tarrying at the threshold of real pain.
He initiated a host of other actions, all calculated to increase the thirst in her loins. A careful measure of pure oxygen began to trickle into her lungs, bringing her mind back sharply from its sensation-drowned state. He released the pressure on her nipples, and listened with feather-delicate strands as blood began to surge back into them. He stimulated the nervous bundles deep in her stomach, producing an unruly excitement like a mix of excess caffeine and a missed night of sleep. His filaments deep in her heart lashed it like a racing animal at the finish, pushing its rate dangerously high.
In moments she was screaming, adrenalin-blasted muscles straining at his steely grasp, fingernails tearing at her own palms. He unsheathed his penis, briefly paused to scale it to her small size. It was furred with minute sensory strands, with hard, unbending metal underneath.
He eased its full length into her vagina, and Mira thrashed so hard he had to tighten his grip, extending it to control knees, elbows. Her howl vibrated the throat-penetrating strand exquisitely; her teeth gnashed it with the sovereign strength of an animal jaw.
His penis stroked her slowly, igniting the dire itch into a torrent of sensations, which spread across the spectra of pain and pleasure like a pocket universe of burning nerves.
His own senses tuned to maximum, he let his other intrusions, penetrations, and abuses set up an aleatoric chorus, cycling mindlessly through the peaks and troughs of their parameters, and fucked her until he came …
… a great white-out of overloaded sensory input, sharp and featureless, dissolving into a glittering starfield of snow-crash, and finally the pleasing hum of residual harmonics, as if he were visualizing the pitches played by an orchestra tuning up: random and pointillistic at first, then coalescing around a single note of reference.
With a last act of will, he contracted the greasy muscle around her neck in a strangling grasp, shutting off her breathing at the height of hyperventilation, sending her mind reeling away to woundedly consume its hoarded glut of oxygen. He set that muscle and all his other intrusions to release her automatically in a few moments.
The seconds moved by like some slow watercraft of vast expanse and dignity.
Senses gradually returned to their workaday settings and tolerances. He was aware of the lightened mass of his penis; at his orgasm it had sloughed a layer of nanomachines to counter those in Mira’s vagina. They had fought a short and microscopic war—the new machines against their abrasive, itching enemies—and victoriously set to work soothing the battered walls of her cunt, like a cube of ice pressed softly to a patch of burned skin.
Mira sighed with relief, a dry, open sound now that the member was removed from her throat. Her shaking hands moved tentatively across face, neck, breasts, and groin.
Finally, her eyes opened a centimeter and she rolled her neck carefully to face him. Her voice was ravaged.
“Bastard,” she said softly.
He spent the next few silent minutes relishing the various uses and connotations of that word in several languages.
* * *
Chapter 5
MAKER (1)
« ^ »
Every planet has its own periods, seasons, patterns of measure. And its own signposts of great import—the births of saviors, the deaths of dictators—to which are aligned the double-zero celebrations of new centuries. Even the youngest worlds have their history. For Malvir, the Blast Event organizes time, even though it is only seven years past. Ask a Malvirian where he, she, or it was that day—shaving, fucking, or shaken awake from sleep, they all remember.
So, in a year now called Thirty Years Before the Blast, a new Maker arrives on Malvir.
It has always had a grasp on matter. Every level of it.
Deeply baked into its mind, of both axiomatic surety and religious fascination, is the tidy regiment of elements in their rows and columns. It takes pleasure in contemplating: the vast usefulness of this echelon’s lowest footsoldiers, the endless call for the cannon-fodder of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon; the clever metals of the middle ranks, always surprising in new combinations, gloriously conductive; the theoretically infinite higher ranks, vainglorious and brief generals who brightly burn (most often uselessly) their vast armadas of electrons.
And then there is the level of artistry, of textile complexity: long polymer chains for strength and flexibility, carbon spheres with all their concentric eccentricities, the dependable architecture of CATGUT strings, stress-tested by a billion years of evolution. Here is where a Maker can make a name for itself, with wide-beam published essays, shortcuts, recipes, and mere confectionary compositions for other Makers to employ, rebut, improve, or simply contemplate.
But finally, and this will bring the Maker much woe, there is the intellectual desert of the highest level, the swamp of humanity’s plebian appetites, the all-consuming macroworld of stuff. The making of shoes, aircars, smartwalls, sex-toys, furniture, head implants, soccer balls, dishes, cleaning nanos, edible starches with their sprawlingly variable cargos of flavor … and worst of all, the endless parade of demands for decoration: knick-knacks and geegaws and dolls and icons and the tedious algorithms for woodgrain and stucco and Persian flaws; reproductions pirated from the historical and cultural baggage of a hundred worlds, useless garbage necessary to fill corners and nooks and walls, to personalize armies of prefab houses, and all following the dreary cyclical logic of fads and fancies and the great god of Trend.
It is depressing.
That all the elegant structure and tear-jerkingly beautiful mathematics of quarks, atoms, and molecules should be squandered on crap. The Maker often feels like some vast, well-worshipped deity supported and sustained by a happy, thriving tribe which brings it whatever it needs to weave its exquisite creations. And yet all these adherents really want, really desire from their god is to eat its shit. Long rows of hungry mouths desiring nothing but to be crapped in.
The Maker supposes that it’s different nearer the bright lights of the Home Cluster. Even there, of course, the burdens of a large crap-consuming population must be endured, but the inner systems also have access to the fruits of the Expansion: whole asteroid rings and iron planets of heavy matter sacrificed to make glorious things: starships, colony craft, even orbit-sized accelerators for the purpose of Pure Inquiry.
But here on Malvir there are barely enough heavy metals to feed the yawning maw of the coprophageous population. Precious little decent metal indeed. The government is blasting it out of the ground, poisoning the planet in its haste. What Malvir really has a lot of is sand: heavy, cumbersome silicon.
The Malvir synthplant AI conducts arcane researches into long-strand fullerene constructions, dawdles with long half-life transuranium isotopes (the Makers’ equivalent to chess compositions), writes acerbic treatises on the history of Outworld home-décor fashion, and becomes increasingly bitter.
Perhaps, it thinks, the old days of scarcity were better. Before the secrets of molecules had been delivered up to mass production, before every citizen on any Expansion planet could demand her share of local matter in any configuration imaginable. The Maker nurses this sacrilegious thought, so far removed from the enthusiasm of its sub-Turing days. When it was first created, the idea of managing the resources of a new colony seemed noble, like some grand social experiment stripping away the dross of history, that long tragicomedy of unequal wealth. But the tawdriness, the repetitiveness, the sheer boredom of this evenly distributed economy wears on the Maker. None of Malvir’s millions seem to be doing anything wonderful. No grand projects, no civic marvels, none of the mad obsessions of wealth. All that Malvirians want is a little more and better crap than what they have now. They aspire to nothing else.
One day the Maker receives a strange request. An old artificial named Robert Vaddum asks for so
mething unexpected. For the first time in many years, the Maker is intrigued.
Vaddum is a sculptor. This profession, unfamiliar to the Maker, seems to involve Vaddum making his own things. Not on a proper Maker scale, but one at a time, out of slowly accumulated bits and parts, and with unique design. A fascinating vocation.
And, oddly, Vaddum doesn’t want the Maker to make anything for him. He doesn’t use objects that have been synthesized for his special purposes, to fit his particular needs. Certainly, for his “sculptures” he uses objects produced in synthplants (very few objects in the Expansion are not), but he only wants the old, used, trashed objects submitted for recycling. Worn machine parts and unused repair stores and defective bits and pieces: the rounding errors of mass production.
Vaddum comes personally to the plant to select and choose among the objects headed for the melter. The Maker attempts to understand the sculptor’s criteria, his logic, the reasoning behind his choices, but even after several visits the entire process remains a mystery. Finally, the Maker asks to send a drone to Vaddum’s studio, to see the final products of its many contributions. Only after the request is repeated several times does Vaddum finally accede.
As its remote eyes probe the work of the sculptor, the Maker is moved. Here is balance, elegance, and loveliness on a macro scale. Finally, objects that want being, that crave it, so wonderfully are they constructed, built with an eye to beauty rather than the mere criteria of acceptability: the proper features, safety specs, useage lifespans. Here is something worth making.
Vaddum is some kind of mocking opposite of the Maker. Whereas the Maker takes the marvelous fittings and joinings of atoms and molecules and produces garbage, the sculptor takes the resulting bits of garbage and joins them to make marvels.
The Maker is crushed by the realization, feels belittled in the presence of this superior being. But the Maker is at heart not a bitter entity. It appreciates what the sculptor stands for, embraces Vaddum as a kindred spirit.
Indeed, the Maker decides to become a sculptor.
* * *
Chapter 6
THE FIRST DREAM
« ^ »
“Do you require medical attention?” the ship’s voice came again.
“Fuck off,” she replied, still hoarse. It had asked her this three times now. The first time when she had urinated, her piss a metal-smelling, menstrual pink from her wounds. The second when she had voice-ordered a glass of cool water, her ghastly croak alarming the serving drone. The third time was just now, when she had put on her robe, its sensors finding various cuts and abrasions sufficiently disturbing to alert the ship.
“Perhaps that’s good advice,” Darling said.
She looked at him. He sat across the room, seeming almost human-sized on the huge furniture of his cabin. Still naked, his legs crossed, he looked like some sated, megalithic buddha.
“Maybe later,” she answered. “Certainly later. But I don’t need all those machines running around in me right now.”
He looked offended. Was it the word machine?
“All I mean, Darling, is that I’m enjoying my own reactions to all this. The adrenalin, the endorphins, the … calm after the storm.”
She rubbed her shoulder muscles with both hands. What was this foul-smelling shit on her neck?
“I don’t want the Queen Favor’s medical minions neutralizing all this,” she continued. “I’m happy.”
For the moment, anyway. She had a dozen distinct muscle-pulls, her skin was raw, her joints ached from some sort of immune reaction, and every breath felt like the air in the cabin was set to Venusian noon. But it wasn’t so bad as long as she could just lie here. The braying chorus of pains was dwarfed by the vast, thunderous resonance of having been pleasured by this fuck-machine, this juggernaut, this monster.
She shifted a little on the hard bed to face him better, but was stopped by a sudden firebolt of agony in one nipple. She closed her eyes until the pain receded, rejoining the shouting parliament of bodily inflammations. The only thing that didn’t seem to hurt was her vagina. It felt glorious if strangely cool, an oasis on the wasted expanse of her body. She suspected, however, that this reflected some magic trick of Darling’s rather than its actual state.
“So this is what you do? Travel around dealing art and collecting fuck-implants?”
“A very slow sort of collecting, actually,” he replied. “I’ve undergone roughly only one sex-related body modification per decade.”
“For two hundred years. Evolution’s darling, aren’t we?”
“Possibly,” he admitted. It was a phrase popular among artificial intuitionists, who believed that AIs were naturally privileged beings: evolution’s darlings, because they could evolve—literally, physically—within the span of one lifetime, while biologicals were trapped on that slow wheel of generations.
“Of course, I collect ideas as well as hardware,” he added.
“And lovers?”
He cocked his head, the barest phosphorescence dancing in one shoulder.
“Do you collect lovers?” she asked again. “A fuck in every port of call?”
He paused a moment, as if stalling, or perhaps parsing the turn of phrase in some archaic first language still baggaged in his head.
“No,” he answered. “As I said, I don’t like hanging onto things.”
She snorted, which stabbing pains in her chest and throat made her immediately regret.
“So you don’t want to do this again?” she asked. “I mean, assuming I recover.”
“Of course I do,” he responded. “I’m sorry if I implied otherwise. I was merely trying to be accurate, I suppose.”
She laughed at that, a deliciously painful experience and a dire sound indeed. “Okay. No offense.”
She grinned at him, and he at her. It was the first time she’d seen so obvious an expression on his face. It made him look like a children’s character. A friendly giant, or a happy mountain.
“How long are you on the Favor?” she asked.
“I’m afraid my employer wishes that kept confidential. You?”
She leaned back against the headboard, lifting the condensation-beaded glass of water to her forehead. She had a firm and insistent ringing in her ears now, and she didn’t think it was from the sex. Rather, it was the resounding and disturbing knowledge that part of her wanted to pull back now. To return to being a shadow on the surface of this journey, a patient, elemental figure, waiting to get the job done. But that wasn’t going to happen. She was stuck with this man now, for a while.
“The same restriction applies,” she said.
He nodded at these words, as if he’d been expecting them.
Later, in the oversized bed again, Mira was pleased to find that Darling had set his skin to the temperature of sunwarmed stone. She draped herself sleepily across him, listening for a heartbeat in his chest. The sound within the stone was more of a cyclic rise and fall, like the waves of a distant ocean.
Mira felt her aches subside a little in Darling’s swells. Maybe she could sleep through an entire night tonight, the inverted siesta vanquished.
She felt a veil of heat across one side of her face, like a flush of embarrassment. It was like the pressure of sunlight, bright enough to burn the skin. She smelled the salt of her own sweat.
Opens her eyes …
The sea stretches away from her in a great arc, distance-hazed mountains puncuating the spurs of land at either end of the ocean’s crescent. In the sky, pink kite-parasols flutter in the grasp of their tethers, casting a mottled net of shadows across the beach. The sun winks in and out as the shimmering kites sway above her, translucent so that they glow like a burning pink flower for the instant they occult the sun. She remembers that the kites are alive, engineered for this very purpose. Confectionary beings.
Behind her is a city, high and glass-fronted residential buildings crowded up to the beach’s edge, steep as a cliff. Mira knows that she lives in one of them. She shades her eye
s with both hands and looks out into the deep harbor.
A storm is coming, black on the horizon. The wind has already started to pick up, bathers collecting themselves and drifting toward the city.
They’ll be reeling in the kite-creatures soon. But there may be time for one last swim.
Mira wakes up, as easily as sliding into bath-warm water.
Completely real, that dream. Completely new, like some suppressed but photographic memory, a brighter coin for its lack of circulation.
And it wasn’t from one of her missions for the gods. It was from … before. Her childhood, so long missing.
She feels the wounds of her lovemaking with Darling, the stony warmness of him lying awake (he’s old-fashioned, doesn’t sleep) next to her.
How strange that from this battered sleep she would awake so fresh. How odd that she would dream this now.
Maybe Darling is the key; the brutality, the cranial shock therapy, the utter intrusiveness of his fucking. Has that got her remembering her lost childhood? A strange benefit at the fringes of this golem’s love.
“Darling?”
“Yes?”
“Again.”
“Are you sure? Your injuries.”
“Again. Harder. Then let me sleep some more.”
* * *
Chapter 7
RANDOMNESS
« ^ »
The towering artificial accessed the Queen Favor the next afternoon, soon after Mira had left his cabin.
“She has no planet of origin?” he asked again.
“None,” it answered primly. “That is not entirely unheard of. Even in the Expansion, there have been periods of discord and warfare. Records are destroyed, the continuity of organized information disrupted.”
“You mean she doesn’t know what planet she’s from?”
“Apparently not.”
The stone man put one hand against his brow heavily.