| Appleseed, by John Clute Notice: This is probably unauthorized use of John Clute's intellectual property, but it's so cool I had to play evil copyeditor and add, subtract, alter course some, and then share it with you. Forgive me or don't, but at least consider it an unpaid advertisement for Clute's new first novel; it's only from the first few pages. Go out and buy it! It's "a kaleidoscope of fractal dreams, with every word a special-effects firecracker. .... A compulsively readable space opera about the relationship between people and data and the alien and sex and God ... that achieves a quantum leap in the evolution of science fiction." I like it. Besides, if they sue me, I have no money anyway. * * * There had always been something about a planet of cities that made Freer long for the sky. Nothing about Trencher, a hundred thousand klicks below, glowering like slag in the holograph cube at the heart of control centre, seemed likely to charm him out of the ill temper and claustrophobia he anticipated. Several centuries of local sector warfare had ground the planet's surface to a mottled airless nub; the various waif species that now occupied Trencher kept below the surface, in great muggy warrans which had metastasised into a world city. The aboriginals, who had destroyed their world aeons past, were all dead. Only their story-nodes remained, fragmentary partials, digital echoes of long-dead flesh sapients pacing up and down the prison yards of AI pickle jars. ---Blank me, he subvocalised into conclave space, turning away from the humming cube. The nano-rich Teardrop in his eye shivered at the thought of losing contact. But the screens blanked out obediently. He had been in Trencher space for ten seconds. He sighed. Almost instantly a tractor beam locked on the Tile Dance, its high-priority codes overriding the Teardrop block, and Freer was no longer at peace. Through his data gloves he stroked a tile mask, which had responded to his slight distress. The tile made a blank purring sound -- no AI was parking within its tiny brain -- and returned to its place beside its companions, on the curved walls of control centre. ---We are your personal Trencher engine, spoke an ensemble of beamed voices into his Teardrop. Please select a name of your choice. ---Okey Dokey, how about Mowgli, said Freer. ---Welcome to Trencher, chorused Mowgli. ---Kirtt? said Freer formally, through Teardrop, which awakened to hear him; Mowgli listened in. ---Sir, responded Kirtt, in a flat-voiced travesty of its usual polyphonic whisper that echoed drably down the aisles and atriums of conclave space, where Minds and the flesh masters conferred; but fully enabled quantum Minds were forbidden within the Law Well of Trencher -- a precaution typical of inhabited planets along the fringes of the rim, with plaque descending nearer every Heartbeat down the Spiral Clade -- and before Tile Dance had been allowed through the heliospace boundary and into the solar wind where Law Well prevailed, Kirtt had reduced themself to chip mode, a fraction of its normal capacity. ---Speak up, chip head, said Freer. ---Take over please, as he also told his data gloves to fold away. Momentarily stunned by the drop down, Kirtt finally responded ---Roger, Stinky. ---Trencher welcomes law-abiding traders! sang Mowgli. ---Please disengage from Maestoso Tropic. ---Roger, said the AI and snapped the thread. Tile Dance was no longer linked to the regional wormhole array of the great Tropic she had followed into this local sector; the ship was now in the hands of Trencher. A billion faces of data streamed into Tile Dance and she began to slid downwards through mazes of orbiting resters and nesters, down past orbitals and mirrors and coffins from afar, and immense duufus arks and powersats, and local ramscoops, and even an exquisite-corpse commune spatch-cocked out of wrecks and flotsam. It had been millons of Heartbeats ago, half a short life-time, but Freer's memory, which was eidetic for women, gave Ferocity back to him. He did not really need the masks. He allowed himself to slide into a light trance. ---Your pheromones are rising, Stinky, whispered Kirt inside its master's head, sounding almost normal -- clearly it had been knitting together backup circuits of the shambles of chip mode. ---I'm not watching, he said into the comm net. ---I was thinking about Ferocity. A cloud of cartoon spermatozoa did the can-can inside Teardrop. Freer shrugged at the joke. Being human was nothing to him. He was used to the dense maritime stench of human air. He had spent decades with his own species. ---Shut up, Kirtt, he murmured after a few seconds. The request mandala of a local net of press toons glowed in his right eye; the net had sniffed a scoop, was requesting visual access. ---Deal with this, Kirtt, he signed within his head. ---I'm only partly here, Stinky, said the ship Mind in its single male voice. ---I'm a wounded surgeon. ---Just do it, Kirtt. --Isolate me. ---Roger, Stinky. He was able therefore to spend the next few thousand Heartbeats playing chess with data mice while Kirtt fed the press toons a few terabytes of bumpf, handled docking formalities through Mowgli, arranged for supplies and fuel. The crippled ship Mind also liaised with the firm -- a journey-cake cartel emceed by speckled sophont non-bilaterals from Betelgeuse -- that held the goods for transfer to Tile Dance, initiated authorisation procedures with the Trencher planetary minds, formally requested permission to download the Route-Only contracted to guide them to Eolhxir. Stretched to its limit by these procedures, which ebbed and flowed like surf, Kirtt failed to register certain nuances in the data perfume. Freer was given no idea, therefore, that he was causing a stir. He did not yet know that he was the most important person in the planet. During these early hectic moments, Number One Son goofed off on its own, cartwheeling down the translucent egress spiral toward a homo sapiens braid which had just linked up for the benefit of the visiting ship. Number One Son looked like any other sigillum doing business for the flesh sapient it mimed. Visible through the ceiling of the egress hatch above its clumsy bumping torso, Tile Dance rested within the docking cocoon, an elongated pregnant wasp swathed in braids, caught in amber, succoured by nipples bearing nutrients from the innards of the world. Shafts of light from the surface of the planet far above danced down mirrored passages into the vast docking chamber, flickered throught the ceiling, caught Number One Son's stiff bare buttocks bumping out of sight into the hollow oval that opened into the braid; the snorkels and prostheses and nipples that cobwebbed the ship flickered and darkened as beams echoed to and fro, as though half alive. In naked space, on the far side of a thousand ceilings of rock, several thousand klicks up in the nesting orbit it had occupied for millions of Heartbeats, an Insort Geront ark of the Harpe Kith continued to slide around the planet, doing its job. Greedily, it drank up sacred data from Trencher; sometimes the flow of information nearly exceeded its computing capacity, and whole ranks of oldster homo sapiens overheated, often fatally -- like any Insort Geront ark, it was loaded to the gunwales with distributed chip nets, human brainchips sunk in senior-citizen deepsleep, millions of obsoleted flesh sapients enjoying the culmination of their mortal span. But flesh is grass, isn't it? Meanwhile, Kirtt uploaded into Mowgli a chip carafe of data perfume gained during the Tile Dance's sweep upwards along the trade Tropics from the warmth of stars farther in towards glactic centre; in exchange, Mowgli uploaded a case of carafes containing all the lastest news. Fastidious but leaden in his chip state, Kirtt washed each carafe with care, filtering out great streaks of rust -- the random garbage and spoilage typical of planetary perfume this close to the rim, plus a few trillion snoops coated in sheep's clothing -- but chip snoops were easy to detect, easy to banish. Kirtt also swatted a whining haze of spam mosquitoes. The rust stank even to its partially disabled senses. ---Sacred is the new, Kirtt said to its chip self. All the same, it added to itself. ---Check! Freer subvocalised to the data mice, which manifested as molten flows of miniatured tiles. Kirtt overheard, but did not interfere with the privacy of its homo sapiens. .... And everywhere -- inside braids of every hue, and in the vacuum atriums of docking country -- smily-faced poly-chromatic spring-heeled toons made their sales pitches, insistent and omnipresent, though they weren't, of course, actually there. ---Mallword, said Freer. ---It's a living, murmured Kirtt, in its raspy single voice. ---Isolate pink, please, Freer asked. And Kirtt reduced the gaze within the holograph to human braids. Thousands of humans visible throught the translucent walls, some standing still and allowing the braid to carry them, some on wheels, some on scooters. Many wore clothes. They were behaving as humans always behaved, hindividual males and femals engaging relentlessly in the unremittingly ingenious gestures of courtship normally found in any of the rare surviving species where reproduction and sexual intercourse might occur simultaneously. Whatever the ostensible goal of any human behaviour, what humans were actually doing always seemed to be one thing. Freer sighed. Time to go walkabout. ---Are we clean? ---Yes, but not that it matters, Stinky. Data leaks. Like any competent ship, Tile Dance was steamy with data. Here, deep within Trencher, a million probosces stroked her as though she were a sacred aphid ready to leak. She was a shrine. Data (which Made Minds deem sacred) left traces everywhere, Tile Dance was rich in traces, leaked traces like attar into the mouths of Trencher. The traces of the world were data, the world being beauteous. The universe was the sum of all the traces of everthing the universe had ever been. Only connect -- only connect the contortuplication of the traces of every All the universe had ever been -- and God would smile. |