Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (11 page)

“Now tell me in your own words what your job is, Delphi.”

“Yes, Sir. I—I’m to go to parties and buy things and use them as they tell me, to help the people who work in factories.”

“And what did I say was so important?”

“Oh—I shouldn’t let anybody know, about the things.”

“Right.” Mr. Cantle has another paragraph he uses when the subject shows, well, immaturity. But he can sense only eagerness here. Good. He doesn’t really enjoy the other speech.

“It’s a lucky girl who can have all the fun she wants while doing good for others, isn’t it?” He beams around. There’s a prompt shuffling of chairs. Clearly this one is go.

Joe leads her out, grinning. The poor fool thinks they’re admiring her coordination.

It’s out into the world for Delphi now, and at this point the up-channels get used. On the administrative side account schedules are opened, subprojects activated. On the technical side the reserved bandwidth is cleared. (That carrier field, remember?) A new name is waiting for Delphi, a name she’ll never hear. It’s a long string of binaries which have been quietly cycling in a GTX tank ever since a certain Beautiful Person didn’t wake up.

The name winks out of cycle, dances from pulses into modulations of modulations, whizzes through phasing, and shoots into a giga-band beam racing up to a synchronous satellite poised over Guatemala. From there the beam pours twenty thousand miles back to Earth again, forming an all-pervasive field of structured energics supplying tuned demand-points all over the CanAm quadrant.

With that field, if you have the right credit rating, you can sit at a GTX console and operate an ore-extractor in Brazil. Or—if you have some simple credentials like being able to walk on water—you could shoot a spool into the network holocam shows running day and night in every home and dorm and rec site. Or you could create a continentwide traffic jam. Is it any wonder GTX guards those inputs like a sacred trust?

Delphi’s “name” appears as a tiny analyzable nonredundancy in the flux, and she’d be very proud if she knew about it. It would strike P. Burke as magic; P. Burke never even understood robotcars. But Delphi is in no sense a robot. Call her a waldo if you must. The fact is she’s just a girl, a real-live girl with her brain in an unusual place. A simple real-time on-line system with plenty of bit-rate—even as you and you.

The point of all this hardware, which isn’t very much hardware in this society, is so Delphi can walk out of that underground suite, a mobile demand-point draining an omnipresent fieldform. And she does—eighty-nine pounds of tender girl flesh and blood with a few metallic components, stepping out into the sunlight to be taken to her new life. A girl, with everything going for her including a meditech escort. Walking lovely, stopping to widen her eyes at the big antennae system overhead.

The mere fact that something called P. Burke is left behind down underground has no bearing at all. P. Burke is totally unselfaware and happy as a clam in its shell. (Her bed has been moved into the waldo cabinet room now.) And P. Burke isn’t in the cabinet; P. Burke is climbing out of an airvan in a fabulous Colorado beef preserve, and her name is Delphi. Delphi is looking at live Charolais steers and live cottonwoods and aspens gold against the blue smog and stepping over live grass to be welcomed by the reserve super’s wife.

The super’s wife is looking forward to a visit from Delphi and her friends, and by a happy coincidence there’s a holocam outfit here doing a piece for the nature nuts.

You could write the script yourself now, while Delphi learns a few rules about structural interferences and how to handle the tiny time lag which results from the new forty-thousand-mile parenthesis in her nervous system. That’s right—the people with the leased holocam rig naturally find the gold aspen shadows look a lot better on Delphi’s flank than they do on a steer. And Delphi’s face improves the mountains too, when you can see them. But the nature freaks aren’t quite as joyful as you’d expect.

“See you in Barcelona, kitten,” the headman says sourly as they pack up.

“Barcelona?” echoes Delphi with that charming little subliminal lag. She sees where his hand is and steps back. “Cool, it’s not her fault,” another man says wearily. He knocks back his grizzled hair. “Maybe they’ll leave in some of the gut.”

Delphi watches them go off to load the spools on the GTX transport for processing. Her hand roves over the breast the man had touched. Back under Carbondale, P. Burke has discovered something new about her Delphi-body.

About the difference between Delphi and her own grim carcass.

She’s always known Delphi has almost no sense of taste or smell. They explained about that: only so much bandwidth. You don’t have to taste a suncar, do you? And the slight overall dimness of Delphi’s sense of touch—she’s familiar with that, too. Fabrics that would prickle P. Burke’s own hide feel like a cool plastic film to Delphi.

But the blank spots. It took her a while to notice them. Delphi doesn’t have much privacy; investments of her size don’t. So she’s slow about discovering there’s certain definite places where her beastly P. Burke body
feels
things that Delphi’s dainty flesh does not. H’mm! Channel space again, she thinks—and forgets it in the pure bliss of being Delphi.

You ask how a girl could forget a thing like that? Look. P. Burke is about as far as you can get from the concept
girl.
She’s a female, yes—but for her, sex is a four-letter word spelled P-A-I-N. She isn’t quite a virgin. You don’t want the details; she’d been about twelve and the freak lovers were bombed blind. When they came down, they threw her out with a small hole in her anatomy and a mortal one elsewhere. She dragged off to buy her first and last shot, and she can still hear the clerk’s incredulous guffaws.

Do you see why Delphi grins, stretching her delicious little numb body in the sun she faintly feels? Beams, saying, “Please, I’m ready now.”

Ready for what? For Barcelona like the sour man said, where his nature-thing is now making it strong in the amateur section of the Festival. A winner! Like he also said, a lot of strip mines and dead fish have been scrubbed, but who cares with Delphi’s darling face so visible?

So it’s time for Delphi’s face and her other delectabilities to show on Barcelona’s Playa Nueva. Which means switching her channel to the EurAf synchsat.

They ship her at night so the nanosecond transfer isn’t even noticed by that insignificant part of Delphi that lives five hundred feet under Carbondale, so excited the nurse has to make sure she eats. The circuit switches while Delphi “sleeps,” that is, while P. Burke is out of the waldo cabinet. The next time she plugs in to open Delphi’s eyes it’s no different—do you notice which relay boards your phone calls go through?

And now for the event that turns the sugarcube from Colorado into the PRINCESS.

Literally true, he’s a prince, or rather an Infante of an old Spanish line that got shined up in the Neomonarchy. He’s also eighty-one, with a passion for birds—the kind you see in zoos. Now it suddenly turns out that he isn’t poor at all. Quite the reverse; his old sister laughs in their tax lawyer’s face and starts restoring the family hacienda while the Infante totters out to court Delphi. And little Delphi begins to live the life of the gods.

What do gods do? Well, everything beautiful. But (remember Mr. Cantle?) the main point is Things. Ever see a god empty-handed? You can’t be a god without at least a magic girdle or an eight-legged horse. But in the old days some stone tablets or winged sandals or a chariot drawn by virgins would do a god for life. No more! Gods make it on novelty now. By Delphi’s time the hunt for new god-gear is turning the earth and seas inside-out and sending frantic fingers to the stars. And what gods have, mortals desire.

So Delphi starts on a Euromarket shopping spree squired by her old Infante, thereby doing her bit to stave off social collapse.

Social what? Didn’t you get it, when Mr. Cantle talked about a world where advertising is banned and fifteen billion consumers are glued to their holocam shows? One capricious self-powered god can wreck you.

Take the nose-filter massacre. Years, the industry sweated years to achieve an almost invisible enzymatic filter. So one day a couple of pop-gods show up wearing nose-filters like
big purple bats
. By the end of the week the world market is screaming for purple bats. Then it switched to bird-heads and skulls, but by the time the industry retooled the crazies had dropped bird-heads and gone to injection globes. Blood!

Multiply that by a million consumer industries, and you can see why it’s economic to have a few controllable gods. Especially with the beautiful hunk of space R & D the Peace Department laid out for and which the taxpayers are only too glad to have taken off their hands by an outfit like GTX, which everybody knows is almost a public trust.

And so you—or rather, GTX—find a creature like P. Burke and give her Delphi. And Delphi helps keep things
orderly
, she does what you tell her to. Why? That’s right, Mr. Cantle never finished his speech.

But here come the tests of Delphi’s button-nose twinkling in the torrent of news and entertainment. And she’s noticed. The feedback shows a flock of viewers turning up the amps when this country baby gets tangled in her new colloidal body-jewels. She registers at a couple of major scenes, too, and when the Infante gives her a suncar, little Delphi trying out suncars is a tiger. There’s a solid response in high-credit country. Mr. Cantle is humming his happy tune as he cancels a Benelux subnet option to guest her on a nude cook-show called Wok Venus.

And now for the superposh old-world wedding! The hacienda has Moorish baths and six-foot silver candelabra and real black horses, and the Spanish Vatican blesses them. The final event is a grand gaucho ball with the old prince and his little Infanta on a bowered balcony. She’s a spectacular doll of silver lace, wildly launching toy doves at her new friends whirling by below.

The Infante beams, twitches his old nose to the scent of her sweet excitement. His doctor has been very helpful. Surely now, after he has been so patient with the suncars and all the nonsense—

The child looks up at him, saying something incomprehensible about “breath.” He makes out that she’s complaining about the three singers she had begged for.

“They’ve changed!” she marvels. “Haven’t they changed? They’re so dreary. I’m so happy now!”

And Delphi falls fainting against a gothic vargueno.

Her American duenna rushes up, calls help. Delphi’s eyes are open, but Delphi isn’t there. The duenna pokes among Delphi’s hair, slaps her. The old prince grimaces. He has no idea what she is beyond an excellent solution to his tax problems, but he had been a falconer in his youth. There comes to his mind the small pinioned birds which were flung up to stimulate the hawks. He pockets the veined claw to which he had promised certain indulgences and departs to design his new aviary.

And Delphi also departs with her retinue to the Infante’s newly discovered yacht. The trouble isn’t serious. It’s only that five thousand miles away and five hundred feet down P. Burke has been doing it too well.

They’ve always known she has terrific aptitude. Joe says he never saw a Remote take over so fast. No disorientations, no rejections. The psychomed talks about self-alienation. She’s going into Delphi like a salmon to the sea.

She isn’t eating or sleeping, they can’t keep her out of the body-cabinet to get her blood moving, there are necroses under her grisly sit-down. Crisis!

So Delphi gets a long “sleep” on the yacht and P. Burke gets it pounded through her perforated head that she’s endangering Delphi. (Nurse Fleming thinks of that, thus alienating the psychomed.)

They rig a pool down there (Nurse Fleming again) and chase P. Burke back and forth. And she loves it. So naturally when they let her plug in again Delphi loves it too. Every noon beside the yacht’s hydrofoils darling Delphi clips along in the blue sea they’ve warned her not to drink. And every night around the shoulder of the world an ill-shaped thing in a dark burrow beats its way across a sterile pool.

So presently the yacht stands up on its foils and carries Delphi to the program Mr. Cantle has waiting. It’s long-range; she’s scheduled for at least two decades’ product life. Phase One calls for her to connect with a flock of young ultrariches who are romping loose between Brioni and Djakarta where a competitor named PEV could pick them off.

A routine luxgear op, see; no politics, no policy angles, and the main budget items are the title and the yacht, which was idle anyway. The storyline is that Delphi goes to accept some rare birds for her prince—who cares? The
point
is that the Haiti area is no longer radioactive and look!—the gods are there. And so are several new Carib West Happy Isles which can afford GTX rates, in fact two of them are GTX subsids.

But you don’t want to get the idea that all these newsworthy people are wired-up robbies, for pity’s sake. You don’t need many if they’re placed right. Delphi asks Joe about that when he comes down to Barranquilla to check her over. (P. Burke’s own mouth hasn’t said much for a while.)

“Are there many like me?”

“Nobody’s like you, buttons. Look, are you still getting Van Allen warble?”

“I mean, like Davy. Is he a Remote?”

(Davy is the lad who is helping her collect the birds. A sincere redhead who needs a little more exposure.)

“Davy? He’s one of Matt’s boys, some psychojob. They haven’t any channel.”

“What about the real ones? Djuma van O, or Ali, or Jim Ten?”

“Djuma was born with a pile of GTX basic where her brain should be, she’s nothing but a pain. Jimsy does what his astrologer tells him. Look, peanut, where do you get the idea you aren’t real? You’re the realest. Aren’t you having joy?”

“Oh, Joe!” Flinging her little arms around him and his analyzer grids. “Oh,
me gusto mucho, muchísimo!
”

“Hey, hey.” He pets her yellow head, folding the analyzer.

Three thousand miles north and five hundred feet down a forgotten hulk in a body-waldo glows.