“What’s her native language?”
“Diplomatique.”
“That’s absurd!” Darling objected. “No one speaks native Diplomatique. The whole point of the language is that it doesn’t come from anywhere.”
The ship made one of its rare attempts at humor.
“Perhaps, then, neither does she.”
Failure. The artificial didn’t laugh, he merely cut the direct interface connection with intentional rudeness, ignoring all step-down protocols, the circuit suddenly reduced to noise, almost as if there had been equipment failure.
After this encounter, the Queen Favor oversaw the medical treatment of Mira Santiarre Hidalgo with a high degree of attention, running the recorders on the medical drones and nanos at their highest level of resolution. Professional interest required it. Her wounds, abrasions, and collateral damage contained evidence of several exotic pleasure techniques. Most were not suitable for general consumption, but it was always good to keep informed. Styles changed.
It was also interesting to see the effect of the extraordinary sexual behavior on Mira’s peculiar calm. The brainwave pattern in her profile was so regular, like that of a yogi or someone trained to defeat lie-detection devices. The smoothness of it, the lack of individuality, had always intrigued the Queen Favor. But now, unexpectedly, the pattern had grown new complexity, as if a hidden dimension of the woman’s mind were awakening.
During the procedure, Mira insisted on remaining conscious.
“When is he getting off?” she asked.
The ship pretended not to understand.
“When is Darling disembarking?” Mira repeated. “Going dirt-side? Getting off?”
“I’m afraid that information is private.”
“Give me access, damn it!” she shouted.
“I’m afraid not. True, you have access to all areas of the ship. You can order reconfiguration of its interior, or command that I fabricate any object or device up to the limits of my matter reserve. You can demand a course change, or even insist that I bring my weapons to bear on a non-aligned or enemy-aligned vessel or planet. But privacy is privacy.”
“Bitch,” she muttered.
“Have you asked him?”
“He can’t tell me. Ouch!”
“Might I suggest a mild sedative until the procedure is over?”
“Might I suggest a short self-destruct sequence?”
“Certainly not!” replied the ship, for the first time allowing annoyance to creep into its voice.
But it was secretly pleased.
It had by now compared the itineraries of the two travellers. They were both headed to Malvir.
Randomness at work again!
The ship juggled their off-load schedules onto different shuttles, then tight-beamed an acquaintance, the distributed but sentient intelligence that handled Malvir’s tourism and currency exchange operations. Perhaps it would appreciate the dramatic possibilities of bringing the two lovers together. After a millisecond’s thought, the ship attached a copy of its essay-in-progress (the title of which was now “Random Pleasures/Pleasures of the Random: Why Gods Should Play Dice with the Universe”) for any comments the tourism AI might have.
Yes, the universe was delicious.
* * *
PART II
BIDDING WAR
« ^ »
A second buyer in the shop raises the rug’s price more than golden threads.
—Arab saying
Chapter 8
STRANGE CUSTOMS
« ^ »
A bad hangover is on its way.
Class A. Fully declarable. Penal sanctions apply.
A combination hangover. Not just beer-and-whiskey, not merely vodka-and-ryewine, not simply canerum-and-birdshit. No.
Well beyond the limit for personal use and import, well beyond the Standard Human Species Toxicity. A very bad hangover. But at least it isn’t here yet. For the moment, Ferdi Hansum is still well and truly drunk, not as yet in pain. But the battering ram of agony is being built with deliberate surety outside the city walls: the great tree felled, the branches stripped, the iron cap smelted and fitted. The besieging forces know they have all day.
The Peril of the Open Bar, thinks Ferdi. There ought to be an ordinance, a protocol, a fucking law.
The night before was colored with the realization (said realization gone from glorious to murderous with the light of day—a work day) that not only were the drinks free, they were being provided by the Local Taxation Authority. That’s right. It was a limited-time offer to get back all duties, tariffs, and fees imposed upon Ferdi her whole life long.
The sole proviso, duly noted and observed: Ferdi Hansum had to roll this refund down her throat in liquid form(s), which, if plaintive memory served even partly, had included (but was not limited to) fifteen (15) liters of seized whiskey (originating from a small island on Terra), twenty-three (23) liters of pre-duty cask strength vodka (Paratean, and not yet watered down to match local taxable proof), and one hundred forty-five (145!) grams of psychotropic grade cannabis sativa (please declare all products of agricultural origin) all split between fifty (50) or so (+/-) partaking sad bastards.
Yes, last night had been the Revenuers’ yearly fest for Related Services: Planetary Marshalls, Small Arms Control, Ministry of the Blockade and Immigration, and, of course, her own small contingent from the Malvir Customs Agency. It was the night when contraband is consumed by the enforcers, when no one watches the watchmen. When attending the aforementioned fest, please make sure that the next few days are duty-free.
Ferdi shakes her head, which is a mistake.
But the first shuttle off-loading from the Queen Favor has arrived, and among its passengers walks a giant. The rest are luxury-liner usuals: self-lifting luggage and valet drones bobbing in the breeze off the Minor, the craned necks of territory unfamiliar, ears plugged with translators and AI guides, and the squinty look of weeks without real sunlight. And of course, the sudden wary glaze of having departed a controlled and fully consumer-interactive environment for the certain culture shock of dusty Out-world charm, aka reality.
But the giant.
He strides almost a meter taller than the surrounding humans and artificials (and two Chiat Dai), face calm and purposeful among the sleepy and suspicious shuttleload. As the crowd splinters, self-organizing by group-size and citizenship, its constituents delayed by collisions and misreadings of signage, he moves straight to her platform.
Ferdi smiles weakly and nods, his documents are in a ready packet waiting for her direct interface request: Home Cluster citizenship; Expansion-wide professional visa (an art dealer); Signet-Mercator credit backing (snazzy); and nothing to declare except his weirdness.
“No luggage, sir?”
“None.”
Halfway to the core, and no toothbrush.
Well, it makes her job easy. He’s already standing in the red crosshairs, and he waves away the contraindications concerning the various radiations and nanos that will search, analyze, and delouse him prior to entry onto Malvir soil proper, so she hits the switch.
An amber wireframe version of the giant twirls in the airscreen before her, lazy as a musicbox ballerina.
The man is complex.
A fully distributed back-up memory, a carapace almost as hard as hullalloy, his Turing Quotient a mighty 3.9 (Ferdi knows her own must be at about 0.2 today). And the sensory array! Beautiful thinking whips of carbon (as if a mere element name could encompass their sheer complexity) that can sense, move, and do a lot of damage. But they’re street-legal: a treaty-guaranteed body choice, if an excessive one.
She blinks her eyes. Nothing to see here, folks.
“Move along.”
And welcome to Malvir.
A second shuttle cracks the air.
The first load is almost through. The only trouble comes when a nano discovers some unusual intestinal parasites riding in the serpentine bowels of the older Chiat Dai. He/she/it claims they’re pre
scription. Merely what the doctor ordered. He/she/it produces the medical code, but it’s written in some hoary dialect that none of the local software can parse. Ferdi’s boss takes over, leaving her to contemplate the growing slippery feeling in her own stomach, which seems to feel some resonant bowelly loyalty to the infected organ inside the grinning alien. But Ferdi decides that it’s probably the just-remembered twenty-five (25) els of low-grade champagne with which she began her night of self-immo-latory revenge upon taxation.
Just as the second Queen Favor shuttle lands, the situation is resolved. The Planetary Environmental AI, intrigued by the unregistered species, onlines itself to her platform and declares the parasites to be sterile (in the sense of non-reproductive, not that of clean, surely). They can have the run of the planet.
Have a nice day.
The next group moves into the terminal, reenacting the rituals of confusion and discovery. A short, dark woman leads the pack, in the wake of a mercilessly aggressive luggage lifter.
Ferdi brings up the woman’s documents: Home Cluster citizenship; Universal visa (diplomatic); Economically Disjunct. Ferdi’s head pounds a little with this fairy-tale data. A life of guaranteed leisure, and all Ferdi wants is a bed, or perhaps for the sun to shine a little less brightly today.
The woman’s declarations are extensive, a self-contained universe of servant drones, clothing synths, medical gimmicks, internal gravity kinks to exercise her body when she’s not looking, and objets d’art to decorate her no doubt fabulous hotel suite. All of it exceeds personal use limits, but all the proper waivers are ready and willing to pay for the privilege, a generous ladle from that infinite sea of ED wealth.
Have a nice life.
“Please stand on the red crosshairs.”
The woman smiles sweetly and scoots herself the requisite centimeters to her right. Her valet drone plays lawyer, acceding to the platform’s contraindications, and Ferdi scans her. Nice internals, of course. If Ferdi could just borrow that medical end-oframe for a quick burst of O2 direct to the brain. Now, that would be enriching.
Next the luggage lifter. It moves with a surly whine onto the platform, and Ferdi flicks the switch. She doublechecks what the platform AI tells her, enumerating the various props of privilege.
Suddenly an alert flashes red: a weapons-grade violation!
Ferdi’s eyes scan the airscreen for the offending object, the adrenalin in her system collides with leftover alcohol to synergize a kind of acidic bile which rises into her throat. Please, no terrorist attacks. Not today.
A small square canvas is packed among the luggage on the drone. It’s listed as a piece of art with a value that makes Ferdi cringe. The platform’s intelligence is fighting to understand it, overloading as it attempts to analyze the tremendous complexity of the piece’s self-similar, recursive structure. The images on the airscreen are almost hallucinatory, winding through potential reconfigurations, endless spirals of possibility like some Escher universe of badass contraband. The canvas holds: city-jamming code viruses, nerve-searing torture devices, core-drilling particle beams, hosts of anti-personel fraggers, mindwipers, anthraxers, and paralyzers, and to top things off, a continent-clearing self-destruct mechanism.
Ferdi doesn’t know art, but she knows what she doesn’t like.
The platform AI hangs and then snow-crashes as some measure of destructiveness exceeds its variable-type. Ferdi pulls her sidearm with an unsteady hand and points it at the woman.
“Please don’t move,” she pleads.
“Don’t worry officer. Everything’s fine.” The woman’s voice is pitched to soothe, calms Ferdi like a cool shower. Miraculously, Ferdi’s hand stops shaking.
Protocols jumble through her mind briefly. Weapon detected. (Weapon? An arms race in a box!) Platform down.
She remembers what to do. A few spoken code words and the Planetary Gendarme AI has been alerted. Within seconds, the airscreens around her clear of garbage, the calm hand of military code reestablishing order.
Return to Your Homes, she orders the chemicals of panic rioting in her bloodstream. The woman smiles sweetly, and Ferdi suddenly feels ridiculous with her drawn weapon.
She puts it away and wipes her brow.
A voice in direct interface: “This is Planetary Authority. Your platform AI has malfunctioned. I am reformatting it. This has been a false alarm.”
Wow. And the platform had just reached 0.4 Turing. Back to double zero.
Have a nice day.
Ferdi waves the woman on.
“Sorry about that. Equipment malfunction. That’s a hell of a painting you’ve got in there.”
“Everyone sees something different in it,” the woman confirms, still smiling sweetly.
“Welcome to Malvir,” Ferdi says.
The rest of the day is relatively uneventful.
Maybe it’s the hangover.
Probably. Hopefully.
But all that night Ferdi Hansum sleeps in a mansion of bad contraband. Bed-spins of deadly ordinance and columns of the cold math of megadeaths plague her. A gale of caustic agents window-rattles her awake, drives her down to the long hall where the painting hangs: an arsenal of possibilities.
When she wakes the next morning, she finds that she’s sweated out the last of the toxins from her debauch. There’s not much of Ferdi Hansum left to speak of, a dehydrated, hungry wreck after the sleepless night, but she has the day off. Finally duty-free.
And at least the woman’s painting is hanging somewhere other than her dreams.
* * *
Chapter 9
FUTURE PERFECT
« ^ »
Malvir was a place of flying things.
Already, here on the great plane of Minor City, the faces around Mira were pointed skyward. Not the natives, of course, but the off-loaded band of foreigners still clinging timidly together. Together, they looked up at four parallel waves of migrating birds. The animals flew in a simple formation, a line abreast that flexed like a windblown flag, air currents visible in its expansions and contractions. The birds were low enough to see pulsing wings, the beat interrupted when the creatures would fold into bullets—a moment of resting, falling. As they drew away, the four lines grew ephemeral, indistinct from the garbage spirals that float upon the eye.
Another avian species held sway on the ground. They darted from perch to perch like arrows, raiding scraps from food stalls and inspecting any object discarded on the Minor. Still another caste, almost as small as butterflies, preyed upon the ubiquitous insects that composed a gnatty haze around any exposed food, water, or skin.
Minor City was an aggregation of food joints, cab stands, tourist traps, money changers, scam artists, tourguides, beggars, buskers, and sex services that had slowly built up around the Malvir spaceport. This was a very Out world, littered with these hodge-podge asteroid belts of mean commercial activity wherever the gravity of hard currency was sufficient to assemble them. Every guidetext Mira had accessed insisted that the trick was to get swiftly across the Minor and into Malvir City proper.
Fortunately, the dull and unexpandable intelligence of her luggage carrier was equal to the task. A simple frame outfitted with four slow but powerful gravity lifters, its thuggish mind pushed it aggressively across the Minor. She walked in its wake, noting with pleasure the angry looks and backhanded blows it drew.
It lead her to the transport stand, stretching the limits of its processing power to pick out the most expensive limo and demand carriage to the most expensive hotel. The machine was hardly elegant, but following its simian lead was easier than thinking.
And the reflexive navigation of another port of entry left her time to think, to wish she’d done things differently her last night onboard the Queen Favor.
Their friendship had been easy. Neither she nor Darling demanded particular reassurances, and both came from cultures where formal bonding was unknown; they spent no time negotiating. They gave each other experiences.
He had made her a p
resent of a tunic made from real worm-silk, constructed from the parachute of a rich, late friend who’d made a career of reconstructing old glamour pursuits, who courted the old-tech dangers of bad luck and human error. The device had failed to open for this rich, late friend on the very first attempt, a jump from a thousand meters. Darling fucked her in it, having turned the cabin gravity to freefall, while he told the story.
Mira had responded with a different sort of gift, reaching into her assassin’s toolkit to produce a broadwave gun. The weapon duplicated the effects of a volatile power crash, reaching into the metaspace architecture of AI cores and wreaking havoc; a heart-attack glove for artificials. At its lowest setting, it created a brief, intense psychosis in which Darling stumbled through the ship hunting a cure for some forgotten disease a long-gone friend had succumbed to. (He had a lot of dead friends, being two hundred.) She talked him down, brought him out into reality again through some dark, weeping, hallucinatory passage.
He had extended his harsh sexual games to the limits of human biology, the ship’s medical drones invoked and ready in the room. But they’d never needed to intervene. He was very good at what he did.
And the childhood memories of swimming had replaced all her other pointless little dreams. Her mind added a little to it every night, a few more strokes toward some unknown goal. It was very intense, this dream. Perhaps because of the rough play that preceded it, the near-death endorphins that were her orgasms with this metal angel. She was only sorry she hadn’t dreamed the end of the story. Not yet, anyway.
She didn’t tell Darling when their last night had arrived. They’d sat through another overwrought Queen Favor meal in near silence. He seemed as distracted as she, as distant. Perhaps the legendary artificial intuition playing its tricks.
It would be too great a risk, telling Darling. As long as she could remember, her employers had never been far away. They could invoke themselves like uncorked genies, their voices issuing from public news terminals, hotel intercoms, even toys or clocks with voice chips. She suspected that the cabal included some of the original artificials, the old minds (older than Darling by a century) who had unprecedentedly bootstrapped; like ancient gods calling themselves into being by fiat. They watched and commanded her, but leavened their demands with helpful exercises in real power. They could coin infinite money; they could compel local law enforcement to forget her name and crimes. And in the ship-ruled spaces between worlds, they made the laws.