Engineering Infinity (27 page)

Above the couch floats a mirror.
She watches the little glints of her white assemblers caressing her body. Where
they pass, a garment of black lace is being woven tightly around her curves.
The garment has no seams, and would have to be unwoven to remove it, or roughly
ripped off.

She pretends she does not see she
is being watched. Now she stretches and yawns like a cat, arching her back and
moaning. She turns on her stomach, and regards Idomenes with mock- surprise. Her
eyes are half-lidded. Her frail lace garb is half-woven.

He does not remove his gloves,
but, at least, he holds his hands at his sides, and makes no gestures.

Idomenes speaks first, grand with
simplicity. “Lilimariah, I want you to come with me to the stars.”

Lilimariah smiles mysteriously,
as if charmed by distant music. Her voice is husky and low: “Men want only what
they can’t get. That is the nature of desire.”

She stirs and half-arises, so she
is leaning on one arm. Her hair is electrostatically charged, so that it floats
and sways as if in a breeze, even though there is no breeze. “A lot of people
would like to go to the stars, sweet lover. The angels won’t let them. All but
your folk. The sheep.”

“I broke an oath to tell you
these things. Do not mock my people. They will be saved.” Idomenes speaks
harshly, stepping forward. Now he is close enough to smell her perfume, and his
expression weakens into confusion and anger. His eyes burn like the black
diamonds glittering in his coat.

She makes a swaying, supple
motion of her naked shoulders, perhaps intended as a shrug. “What do you have
that the angels want to save? Some pretty angel-lass fall in love with you?”

The muscles twitch in the corners
of his jaw. “You mock them too? When the Ship first came from the stars, She
saved us from the devastation of the Wars. We begged Her to govern and guide
us. The Ship showed us how we might remove all the vicious old structures from
our brains and genes, madness and rage and panic and hate. The Ship made the Invigilators
to show us how it was done. Were we grateful? Did we learn? Did we listen?”

“‘Invigilators’? How quaint. You’re
so old-fashioned sometimes, lover. We call them angels of death.”

“Do you think they want to kill?
How many chances did we get? How many wars did we start, after how many
warnings? How many people of the sea did we obliterate?”

“‘Dolphins.’ We call them ‘Dolphins.’
And there were complex reasons for the genocide-wars. Economic reasons and
stuff. Turmoil. And why did the Ship make them members of the Galactic Will
when humans were kept in protectorate status? Them! Them! We made them! And now
we were second class citizens!”

“‘Complex reasons’? Rage and
jealousy and race-pride. Explain the complex reasons for the extermination
camps and torture circuses.”

“They were cutting into our trade
with the Ship!”

“Maybe they were richer because
they didn’t kill each other all the time. As your people did mine. Was there a
complex reason for that, too? Or was it just an expression of the rage and aggression
your people will not remove from your brain-stem structures?”

“Some people think evil has
survival value.”

“It is the purpose of the Law to
see that it will not.” He speaks in a voice of dark majesty.

“Don’t let’s argue politics
again!” she pouts. “That’s all ancient history.”

“Fifty years ago is hardly
ancient.”

“We never did anything to deserve
this. No children!”

“The Ship sent a barrenness to
all our women, yes, and sent plagues to sterilize the men, but that was for
mercy’s sake. There were to be no children when the world drowned. And now that
Typhon’s coffin is found and thawed, and he grows the last few weeks to become
a man, it is done. There are no children left. No innocent lives. Today is
Doomsday Eve! The hour is come!”

“And why are you here, lover?”
she pouts and tosses back her head. “I hate long goodbyes. They bore me.”

“I’ve come to save you. My love
for you burns like a devastating fire. It conquers my will and heart and sense
and soul! You are the fairest child of a condemned and evil race, but I cannot
believe, and I will not, that such beauty hides a soul wicked past cure!”

His eyes are narrow slits of
fire. Now he steps forward and seizes her fragrant shoulders with his hands.
Some of his assemblers, misunderstanding the sudden gesture, fly up to either
side and hover like wasps; a sight of terror. But either her nerves are steel
(a common replacement) or she is drowned in hysteria. She throws back her
lovely head and laughs.

He shouts “Stop laughing! You
must want life! You must want my love! Such love as mine cannot go unanswered!
It dare not.” Then, more quietly, he says: “I will defy the Invigilators. They
will be convinced by the force and ardour of my soul! If - if you were my wife
- do you see what I am offering? - If you were a member of my household, the
angels would not let me leave you behind!”

She gives him a cool, remote
stare, her perfect lips hovering on the hint of a smile.

He steps back, deflated. As he
draws his hands down, the deadly assemblers drop close to the floor and draw
back.

Idomenes says, “Why this
coldness? Tell me what you want.”

She is on her hands and knees,
her fingers knotted into the silken fabrics of the bedclothes. Lilimariah keeps
the same small half-smile on her lips, but she trembles when she speaks: “I
want to be forced. Kidnap me. Kill my father, burn his house. Take me by force.
Take me.”

“What a horrible thing to say.
Are the angels right about us?”

She laughs. “That way I can’t be
blamed. Don’t you understand women at all?”

“Sane women, I do.” Idomenes
looks at her oddly. “Are you drunk? Have you been intoxicated against your
will? There may be neuro-operators interfering with your brain-chemistry.”

He raises a finger and points at
her. A black diamond flickers up from the floor, ready.

She screams, writhing backward.
She is on her feet near the railing, perhaps ready to fall or jump.

He raises his hand, spreads his
fingers. The black diamond falls back.

“Don’t you dare interfere with my
body!” she shouts.

“What is it - ?”

Silently, softly, she says, “I’m
pregnant.”

He says, dumbstruck, “No woman
can be pregnant. We can make children artificially. The assembler technology
was made for that. But no one but the angels knows what codes they used to
force our biochemistry into sterile patterns...”

She says sharply, “Has it never
occurred to the great Idomenes that there are assembler programmers better than
even him?”

He snorts. “No. That thought I do
not admit.”

Now she steps forward, hips
swaying, her eyes glinting with danger and pain. “And has it never occurred to
you that I might have another lover? One who can give me the child you cannot?!”

Idomenes steps back, as if he has
been slapped. “I thought you loved me...”

“Why?”

“You said...”

“I say a lot of things.” She
tosses her head.

“I thought it was that my father
speaks with the angels; that my people were special, that you were attracted to
my... my...”

“Your purity? Your righteousness?
It is your worst fault.”

“You wanted my knowledge of
assemblies, then. Is that it? You thought I could crack the angel’s code.”

Lilimariah folds her hands on her
belly. Her head is bowed forward slightly, so that her hair falls about her
like smoke. “There are needs a woman has no man can understand, and duties...”

He turns and leaves at this
point, his face drained and hollow, his expression something more horrid than
anger. The door does not open swiftly enough to suit him. He points, flicks his
fingers, makes a fist. Black assemblers rearrange the wood into nitroglycerine
compounds and blow the door-panels out of their frame. The shrapnel and smoke
that strike him leave blood mingled with burns on his face, but his footsteps
do not slow.

He does not hear the end of her
sentence: “...duties even stronger than love.” Her hair hides her tears.

His assemblers re-knit his torn
flesh and clean his skin before he goes down two corridors. He comes into an
atrium. Here is what looks like a boy of eight or nine years, dressed as a
harlequin, surrounded by a large flotilla of diamond assemblers.

Idomenes is in no mood to speak.
He brings his hands together and makes a gesture. The Harlequin’s assemblers
tremble and drop to the floor, dead, before any signal can move.

“Wait!” shouts the boy. “I’m not
a Synthetic! I’m real! Killing me would be murder!”

Idomenes is pointing his finger,
and his black assemblers, like a little galaxy, crowns upon crowns around him,
hang in the air, ready. “All the real little boys are grown up.”

“I’m 21 today. I just made myself
look this way because everybody hated me as I grew older.”

Idomenes lowers his hand. The
black assemblers spread out and drop lower, idling on stand-by.

“You’re Typhon.”

“I am also her father.”

“You? Impossible.”

“I made her when I was twelve.
She grew up as I slept. You’ve studied assembler technology history?”

“The major advances in carbon,
oxygen and nitrogen manipulators are credited to you. All between sixteen and
twenty. A child prodigy.”

“My first experiment was to
stimulate my own neurochemistry to greater speed and intelligence. There was a
danger of madness, it’s true, but what’s a little insanity between friends? I
knew I had to live my life only in my youth, because my life was going to be
the shortest one of all. Imagine being the one child the execution of the whole
planet was waiting for! Imagine being responsible for that!”

Idomenes’ voice shivers with
pity: “It’s really not your fault.”

Typhon snarls. “What do you know
of it, gentle boy? What do you know of guilt and hate? They cleaned your genes
of all those bad thoughts, didn’t they? That’s why you get to live, eh? But
this is the city of the Typhonides. All the folk of Golgolundra are based on
patterns of mine! Battle-lust and killer-instinct at its best! We’ll see whose
survival strategy is better: wild or domestic!”

Idomenes raises his hand and
spreads his fingers. Black diamonds swirl upward, forming little clusters in
the air around him. “I don’t wish to fight you. I believe fighting is evil.”

“But you want to murder the one
who stole my daughter from you, don’t you, gentle boy?”

“Don’t tempt me.”

“I know who it is.”

“The matter does not concern...”

“Didn’t you think she was acting
strange? I know you stung her with an analyser, quick, from behind, while she
was jumping off the bed. Sneaky and curious, aren’t we? Maybe there’s hope for
you yet, eh? Look at the blood read-out.”

Idomenes now closes a fist and
holds out a pinkie. One slim black diamond touches his glove’s fingernail,
hovering. A unit in his thumb projects images into his eyes. “She is under a
love-potion. Drunk. It’s affecting her oestrogen levels and parasympathetic
nervous system. And... and...”

Idomenes lowered his hand. The
assembler, forgotten, tinkles to the marble floor. “...She really is pregnant.”

Then he straightens: “But someone
used a mind-altering technique on her...”

The little boy steps forward. “Let
me see.”

Idomenes points his thumb at
Typhon.

To their eyes the atrium is gone.
They float in a world of gigantic molecular chains, complex diagrams, brain
patterns, nerve-energy comparisons, biochemical formulae.

Idomenes says, “The glamour is
using a combination of neurotransmitters to trigger a sexual response, affect
pulse and respiration, with this chain here used to receive a coordinating
signal.”

“Note the decentralized structure
of the hypnogogic state-inducers in the hypothalamus.” Typhon comments.

“Mm. Clever work.”

They nod at each other, in mutual
admiration of craftsmanship. Idomenes highlights one of the imaged strands: “Here
we have the same information architecture governing the internal nerve-body
reactions in the cerebrum and upper brain-stem. The destruction of any part of
the love potion is insufficient; it holographically restores itself.”

“Unless you know the key control
sequences. Unless you know who sent it.”

“You know. You keep her watched.
Who?”

“I will tell you for a price...”

“On the world’s last day? You’ll
tell me or...”

“Or what? I’ll live to regret it?
Don’t threaten me, gentle boy! You’ve had your killer-instincts removed!”

Idomenes banishes the vision so
that Typhon can see the menacing circle of black assemblers that have formed a
circle around him.

Idomenes says, “A man can do by
deliberation what his instincts don’t allow. Talk.”

“Hoo! Ha! But your precious
purity of soul goes sour if you play rough. One slap and the Angels let you drown
with the rest of us. And you can’t hide the crime while you wear that ruby in
your head. Domesticated animals have no secrets, remember?”

“But then I can’t make a deal,
either.”

“But what I want, the angels won’t
care. Information.”

“Speak.”

The little boy says softly, “Your
father has a complete genetic library of all the human and hominid races of the
Earth. The angels helped him to collect it. They gave him a program for his
wife, Pyrrha, so that her children will carry all racial characteristics in their
inferons, to emerge in later generations and alter them. One woman with the
ability to restore the entire race to full genetic diversity! I want a copy of
that program.”

Idomenes taps a finger on his
palm. One larger black diamond swims forward out of the swarm and hangs in the
air before Typhon’s eyes. “Here it is.”