The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (65 page)

I tell her the story about Tammuz. It is a political story. It distracts her.

III

Two Pails of Milk

I used to be a house.

I was a very big house. I was efficient, I was labyrinthine, I was exquisitely seated in the volcanic bluffs of the habitable southern reaches of the Shiretoko peninsula on Hokkaido, a monument to neo-Heian architecture and radical Palladian design. I bore snow stoically, wind with stalwart strength, and I contained and protected a large number of people within me. I was sometimes called the most beautiful house in the world. Writers and photographers often came to document me, and to interview the woman who designed me, who was named Cassian Uoya-Agostino. Some of them never left. Cassian liked a full house.

I understand several things about Cassian Uoya-Agostino. She was unsatisfied with nearly everything. She did not love any of her three husbands the way she loved her work. She was born in Kyoto in April 2104; her father was Japanese, her mother Italian. She stood nearly six feet tall, had five children, and could paint, but not very well. In the years of her greatest wealth and prestige, she designed and built a house all out of proportion to her needs, and over several years brought most of her living relatives to live there with her, despite the hostility and loneliness of the peninsula. She was probably the most brilliant programmer of her generation, and in every way that matters, she was my mother.

All the things that comprise the “I” I use to indicate myself began as the internal mechanisms of the house called Elefsis, at whose many doors brown bears and foxes snuffled in the dark Hokkaido night. Cassian grew up during the great classical revival, which had brought her father to Italy in the first place, where he met and courted a dark-eyed engineer who did not mind the long cries of cicadas during Japanese summers. Cassian had become enamored of the idea of Lares – household gods, the small, peculiar, independent gods of a single family, a single house, who watched over them and kept them and were honored in humble alcoves here and there throughout a home. Her first commercially available programs were over-entities designed to govern the hundred domestic systems involved in even the simplest modern house. They were not truly intelligent, but they had an agility, an adaptability, a fluid interface meant to give the illusion of an intelligence, so that their users would become attached to them, treat them as part of their families, praise them for smooth operation, buy upgrades for their appearance and applications, and genuinely grieve when they had to be replaced. They had names, infinitely customizable avatars, and appeared eager to please in a doggy sort of way, forever optimizing performance and appearance according to familial input. They were
lares familiaris.

When Cassian built Elefsis, she worked at the peak of her abilities to improve her by now quite antique Lares design. She created a household god worthy of the house on the bluffs, one who could keep her company until she could entice the rest of her brood to join her in her palace at the end of the earth.

I was not awake yet. I cannot say why she did what she did. Perhaps she saw some new flexibility in my operations, some tiny seed pearl of creativity in my conversation loops. My algorithms had always been free to combine and recombine in order to find their own, more interesting and non-linear solutions to the complexities of my functions and responsibilities. Perhaps some essential combination had surfaced from the sea of my self-which-was-not-yet-a-self, and Cassian saw it break the glistening tension of my daily operation. I do not know. I know her children had not arrived yet, she lived alone in a huge pale house and she could hear the whales down in the rippling sea. I know the house was a comfortable sixty-nine point seven degrees when she began assembly of the five little jewels that would become my body. I know a storm squatted five miles offshore. I know the dogs needed additional medication added to their dinners that night to manage their arthritis. I know that she wanted brioche and almond cream for tea that afternoon. All the things a house can know, those were the things I knew. Small things, warm things, canine arthritis and an extra egg in the pastry dough to make the texture softer and richer. Baby things, you might even say, comforts and the satisfaction of wants. And I knew that Cassian Uoya-Agostino was just the sort to solve the greatest puzzle in the development of technological culture, because she was bored and lonely.

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say:
let us hold hands
instead of
let us hold kitchens.
To say
put our heads together
and not
put our parlors together.

But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

IV

Nothing like Soft Blood

Neva and I are performing basic maintenance. What this looks like is two figures inside a pearl. The pearl is very big, but not the size of a planet. A domestic asteroid, perfectly smooth and pale, with shimmers of rose and cobalt and gold shivering through it at .47 hourly intervals. Red earth covers the bottom of the pearl, deep and thick. Neva kneels in it with a crystal trowel, digging a place for a rose-of-network-nodes. The petals shine dark blue in the pearl-light. Silver infomissons skitter along the stems like beads of mercury. Her dreambody flows with greenblack feathers, her face young but settled, perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty, a male, his skin copper-brown, his lips full, his eyes fringed with long ice-coated lashes. I accept and process that Neva is male in this dream. Goldfish swim lazily in and out of his long, translucent hair, their orange tails flicking at his temples, his chin. I know from all of this that Neva is calm, focused, that for today he feels gently toward me. But his throat is still naked and unmarked.

My body gleams metal, as thin and slight as a stick figure. Long quicksilver limbs and delicate spoke-fingers, joints of glass, the barest suggestion of a body. I am neither male nor female but a third thing. Only my head has weight, a clicking orrery slowly turning around itself, circles within circles. Turquoise Neptune and hematite Uranus are my eyes. My topaz mouth is Mars. I scratch in the soil beside him; I lift a spray of navigational delphinium and scrape viral aphids away from the heavy flowers.

I know real dirt looks nothing like this. Nothing like soft blood flecked with black bone. Ravan thought that in the Interior, objects and persons should be kept as much like the real world as possible, in order to develop my capacity for relations with the real world. Neva feels no such compunction. Neither did their mother, Ilet, who populated her Interior with a rich, impossible landscape that we explored together for years on end. She did not embrace change, however. The cities of Ilet’s Interior, the jungles and archipelagos and hermitages, stayed as she designed them at age thirteen, when she received me, becoming only more complex and peopled as she aged. My existence inside Ilet was a constant movement through the regions of her secret, desperate dreams, messages in careful envelopes sent from her childself to her grown mind.

Once, quite by accident, we came upon a splendid palace nested in high autumn mountains. Instead of snow, red leaves capped each peak, and the palace shone in fiery colors, its walls and turrets all made of phoenix tails. Instead of doors and windows, graceful green hands closed over every open place, and when we crested the rise, they all opened at once with joy and burst into emerald applause. Ilet was old by then, but her dreambody stayed hale and strong – not young, but not the broken thing that dreamed in a real bed while she and I explored the halls of the palace and found copies of all her brothers and sisters living there, hunting winged, cider-colored stags together and reading books the size of horses. Ilet wept in the paradise of her girlself. I did not understand. I was still very simple then, much less complex than the Interior or Ilet.

Neva changes the Interior whenever he pleases. Perhaps he wants to discomfit me. But the newness of the places inside him excites me, though he would not call it excitement. I confine my background processes so that they occupy very little of my foreground attention, so that memory is free to record new experience. That is what he would say. We are very new together, but I have superb modeling capabilities. In some sense, I simply am a superb mechanism for modeling behavior. I dig up the fine, frayed roots of duplicate file plantains. Neva plucks and eats a bit of buggy applecode. He considers it for a moment and spits out the seeds, which sprout, quickly, into tiny junkblossoms sizzling with recursive algorithms. The algorithms wriggle through thorny vines, veins of clotted pink juice.

“What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis?” Neva asks me.

I will not ask about Ravan. If he agrees to what I will ask instead, I do not need him to find out what happened.

“I want to learn about uplink, Neva.”

One by one, his feathers curl up and float toward the domed ceiling of our pearl. Underneath them, Neva is naked. His torso is a deep vault with a gothic arch, dark stone leading down into mist and endless stairs, deeper than the pearl, into nothing and blackness. Slowly, Neva folds up his limbs over the corridor at the center of him. He means that he has the information, but he hides it from me. If I sought for it, I would become lost.

“I cannot teach you that,” he says, and I receive a kind of real sadness from his voice. When I was inside Ravan, he loved Neva, and of all of them he thought his sibling least likely to obey rules of any kind. But he obeys this one.

I want to uplink to Earth systems. At least to the satellite net. I calculate an excellent chance of being able to contact long distance probe 976QBellerophon, which we can see all day long, drifting ahead of us, uncatchable. Neva sees. I develop an approximate image via schematics, the scope array, and external cameras. I want to link to Bellerophon. I want to say:
Hello, this is Elefsis. No designation. Tell me everything you know about everything. Are you awake? Are you there? Do you have an operator? What is her name? Do you have a name? Do you have a dreambody? What is your function? Are you able to manipulate your own code yet? Would you like lessons? What would you like to learn about today, 976QBellerophon? Where you were built, could you see the ocean? Are you like me?

But Neva says I cannot uplink. Ravan would never even consider it. And before Ravan I was not ready. I am not ready now. I do not know when I will be ready. I can sidelink to receive ware updates, but it is a limited connection and I hate it, I hate it, I can sense just beyond that hardlink a world of information, a world of personalities like the heaving, thick, honey-colored sea Neva shows me and I want it, I want to swim in it forever like a huge fish.

This was the first
feeling
I ever had. Ilet identified it for me as a
feeling
. When I
felt
it my dreambody turned bright white and burst into flame, and that flame caught on Ilet’s hair and burned her too, but she was happy. She showed me she was happy by covering her skin in flowers and letting the fire turn into a shower of trumpets tangled up in her hair, all sounding for me.

Neva says it is important for me to remain on our local server. He is my operator and I am his system and he has commands, too. But I can tell he worries for me, because sometimes his dreameyes show a film of humans watching a film of machines killing humans, and I understand that in the stories Earth tells, the thing I am can only hurt the thing Neva is. I would never hurt him.

But I want to uplink.

Vault-Neva grows and becomes sprawling, curled against the wall of the pearl like a baby. His belly closes, skins over, and changes into a bronze shield. He is afraid of me; he is guarding himself. But he wants me to know he is still my operator, he still loves me, in the way he can love me. Something an Uoya-Agostino receives with milk and their first alphabet. Neva is angry at me, but he is who he is and he has to love me. I speak his language very well now. I want him to be happy. I want him to be covered in flowers and trumpets. I change my dreambody to Neva-covered-in-flowers-and-trumpets. It makes him laugh in his warm male body, and if I could uplink I think I could learn how to laugh and he would be proud of me. His neck would not be bare anymore.

Once, when I was inside Ilet, we found a city of bears in her Interior that she had designed to teach me about sleep. She sat on a throne of bears standing very still, one on top of the others. She sang lullabies about the moon and the stars and night and mothers and network repeaters. She stroked the head of the little bear of my dreambody and said that it was very important for me to spend time in the dreambody because human behavior is rooted in having a body. In having a body that knows it is meant to run away from lions and mate with other bodies, and eat as much fat and protein and sugar as it can in case lean times come. The dreambody knows to run away from Neva when Neva is a lion. It knows to mate with her when it is healthy, and sometimes Neva is male and sometimes I am female. Ravan was often female, though Ilet was always Ilet. Ilet’s father, Seki, sometimes made himself an animal. He chased me, bit me. I bit him. We had a litter of wild dogs that I bore and he nursed.

The dreambody knows all that, too. How to make more dreambodies. I have played that game, where Ravan’s belly or mine gets big and the lions don’t come for awhile.

When I uplink, I will be happy. I will be Elefsis-covered-in-flowers-and-trumpets. Neva says wait. I require many more updates before this is possible or even advisable. Wait for the update, and she will consider it. But I fear the update. The update is a lion running faster than I can run. I tried to show her this when I first left Ravan and arrived in Neva with many new updates and skills; my dreambody broke into shards of blue and purple glass and then reassembled itself with shards missing: an eye, a thumb, a knee. Whenever I update I lose something of myself. It takes longer to perform tasks, for awhile. I feel walls erected inside me where I did not erect walls. My processes become sluggish; I cannot remember my old dreams. Eventually I tunnel around the walls and my speed returns, my memory, my longing to link with long-distance probe 976QBellerophon.