Harsh Oases (32 page)

“Fuck you! Maruta’s not my woman, she’s her own woman. And you can’t have her!”

Magister Zawinul lowered the hand I had refused to shake, and frowned. With absurd irrelevance, I wondered what ineffable higher-level states of supra-consciousness these human subroutines could be intended to mirror.

“You deny the sub-Planckian connections that bind you and her, because you cannot see them as I can. If it were you I wanted instead, I would have politely informed the woman that I was taking her man. But as matters stand, I did the reverse.”

“Screw all that shit about who belongs to who! Why are you even talking about taking Maruta? You’re a godling! Whatever you think you need her for, you can make her equivalent faster than I can spit!”

“Not so. Some noetic-plectic aspects of the plenum are irreproducible, unique, even from my perspective. Humans belong to that category. Hence I must have this specimen, and no other. She completes me.”

I started to bluster some more, when Maruta interrupted me. Stepping out from behind me, she said, with admirable if not entirely altruistic fervor, “Lu, it’s no use. If he wants me, I’ll have to go.”

I looked at her. She seemed bewitched by the Magister’s glamour, her face reflecting his aura, which danced in her eyes. I gripped her by the shoulders and shook her.

“Snap out of it, ’Ruta! You don’t know what you’re getting into!”

Magister Zawinul softly placed one hand on my own shoulder then. It felt like a silk glove filled with live bees. “She is making a wise decision. Do not interfere with the woman’s choice—”

His touch was enough to make me explode.

I whirled around, aiming a solid blow at his jaw.

When my fist intersected the magisterium corona, it was as if my hand had transected an event horizon. The motion of my limb simultaneously sped up and slowed down, smearing across all scales. But my fist never connected with Zawinul’s jaw.

I was trapped immovably, as if I had tried to bop a tarbaby. There was no pain involved for me. No physical pain. But my heart ripped in two as I witnessed what came next

I had to watch as Zawinul’s magisterium expanded to enclose Maruta selectively in its field. The two of them began to ascend.

My hand popped out of the retreating corona, freeing me—but too late to do anything.

When Zawinul’s aura touched the stressor fields of the ceiling, the entire building underwent instant catastrophic collapse. Whether Zawinul intended this or it was just an accident, I can’t be sure.

But they say with Magister-level entities that “accident” is a null term.

The Sand Castle and much of its furnishings were configured of shaped stressor fields confining whirling grains of common beach sand along various architectural planes. The building was only two stories high and not very big, so there was probably less than a ton of sand dispersed along its dimensions.

But all of that sand came down in a flash when the stressor fields died, burying me and all the other patrons.

The next thing I knew, public-safety guardians were blowing off the mounds of granular debris with shaped-field wands, hauling out the victims, applying whatever medical fixes were deemed necessary, up to and including complete revivification for the suffocated, and then lining us all up to have our brains slowed down by Ess-Cubed.

The Singularity Suppression Squad.

I tried to protest. I wasn’t so concerned for myself and the forthcoming neurotampering. I knew the effects were necessary and temporary. But Maruta’s uncertain fate was uppermost in my mind, and I felt that any delay my slowed reactions might incur just added risk to her plight.

I attempted to step out of line, saying, “I’ve got to contact the Reticulate. A woman’s been kidnapped—”

One of the SSS men, a burly bruiser with a surprisingly high-pitched voice, pushed me back. “The Reticulate knows everything already. We’re the only authorities you need to see right now, sir. This won’t take but a minute—”

And with that admonition, they hit us with a full blast from their Vingean-model, handheld synapse degraders.

I could feel my mind slow down and contract. The tenor of my thoughts didn’t alter, but their speed decreased radically. As measured by the rate of my molasses-thick mentation, time seemed to lengthen interminably. All the untouched curious bystanders in the streets around the collapsed Sand Castle were talking and moving at what appeared to be super-fast rates.

The SSS men and women began to hustle us into waiting transports. I wanted to ask where they were taking us. I opened my mouth to speak, but only managed to disgorge a single glacially protracted word: “Whu … huh … huh … air …?” But by the time the last phoneme exited my throat, we were already bundled into the transports and underway.

I knew that my planet had to protect itself against the possibility of magisterial contamination, of any accidentally or deliberately planted Singularity seeds left behind in the minds of those who had brushed against Zawinul. And the best way to do that was to deny the Singularity the wetware platforms it needed to replicate, with a dose of glial freeze- down followed by a short quarantine.

The threat of going posthuman was a constant danger that every civilized world in the galaxy, human or alien, had to be continually on guard against. (What, exactly, was so bad about going posthuman, was never made precisely clear by the Reticulate. But most sentients preferred the familiar to the unfamiliar, and that natural tendency sufficed to make the posthuman worlds a bete noire.) Still, I resented on some level the necessity of having my own personal brain impounded, so to speak, in the cause.

By the time I finished this short chain of thought, I and my fellow zombies found ourselves already installed in comfortable—but locked—temporary quarters, where ceiling-mounted degraders kept us suitably quiescent.

Four days of this treatment were sufficient for the experts to declare us free of contamination. Our mentalities were restored to their baseline levels, with a bit of free neuro-toning thrown in as a little thank-you for our cooperation.

Once freed, I headed straight for the nearest offices of the Reticulate.

I told my story at successively higher levels of the interstellar bureaucracy, until I found myself in the office of a fourth-degree Lustron named Permananden Avouris. Avouris was a Licorice Whip, a gender- less being who resembled that favorite human candy: long thin supple curveless body with ridged skin. As a testament to the jokester nature of any putative Creator (one contemporary cult believed that massed magisters working retro-chronally were responsible for the creation of the multiverse), the Licorice Whips came in two races, red and black. Avouris was a black.

Coiled in his chair, his limbless upper torso gently swaying back and forth in a faintly hypnotic manner, Avouris reviewed my case before speaking. At last, he said, “You are Lucerne Locarno?”

“Yes, yes, I thought that would be well established by this point!”

Ignoring my indignation, Avouris continued. “You have no legal standing in this case on which to initiate any formal complaint or remediative action. You are not pair-bonded to Maruta Forcroy or otherwise contractually entangled. Is entangled the right word?”

“But I’ve known Maruta for ten years now. We’ve been lovers on and off again for half that time.”

“These relationships are nugatory.”

“Look, the Singularity himself said that Maruta was my woman. He claimed that sub-Planckian connections existed between us.”

“The testimony of any magister-class entity is automatically deemed non-falsifiable, suspect and inadmissible in any Reticulate proceeding. You cannot appeal to the transgressor in this case. It is surreal. Is surreal the right word?”

“I shouldn’t even have to be pressing the Reticulate on this matter. One of your citizens has been abducted.”

“Actually, that is citizens, plural. At the same moment Magister Zawinul appeared to you and Maruta Forcroy, he was simultaneously appearing to exactly one thousand, four hundred and thirty-two other female individuals on this world, all of whom ended up absquatulating with him. Is absquatulating the right word?”

This was news to me. In my quarantine I had heard nothing of this mass theft of my world’s women. Talk about a rogue! But the fact that one thousand, four hundred and thirty-two other individuals shared the fate of my lover only intensified my concern for Maruta.

“Lustron Avouris, you have the immediate responsibility of getting Maruta Forcroy and all those other women back.”

“Maruta Forcroy accompanied Magister Zawinul willingly, as, ultimately, did all the others. We have reality-stamped recordings of each separate event. Additionally, we do not approach any magister-class being either diplomatically or with forceful display. In the former case, results are at best unpredictable. In the latter, generally lethal or unpleasantly transvaluative.”

“But Maruta didn’t go willingly, she was coerced! She acted that way only because the Singularity was threatening me! She acted to save me! And now I have to act to save her, with or without your help!”

I stood up to leave. The mobile elements of the Licorice Whip that passed for a face realigned into a new configuration.

“Wait one moment, Lucerne Locarno. If you insist on pursuing this matter yourself, I am obligated to inform you that there is a standard procedure which the Reticulate offers to aid you in your quest”

I sat down again. “Tell me about it. Is it dangerous?”

“Until the moment you step through the Indrajal to meet the Singularity, it is not dangerous at all, but rather just tedious and masochistic.

“Is masochistic the right word?”

So here’s what Lustron Avouris outlined would happen to me, if I consented to accept aid from the Reticulate in my quest to rescue Maruta (and the one thousand, four hundred and thirty-two other women Zawinul had stolen, if I felt exceptionally heroic).

First, my soul-essence—officially known as my Individual Identity Matrix—would be removed from my natural body—the only somatic shell I had ever known (I was very young back then, only two hundred and three)—and transplanted into a synthetic vessel known as a sludge- bucket.

A sludge-bucket resembled a human fashioned out of particularly sloppy grey mud by a brain-damaged child. These constructs were generally animated by off-the-shelf sub-Turing personalities and employed in doing manual labor in destructive environments. Their other use was to contain the IIM’s of criminals for the duration of their sentences, imprisonment in a sensorily deprived sludge-bucket being deemed punishment enough for most offenses. Instantly recognizable by honest citizens and constrained by various in-built chemical leashes from violence or from wandering too far from the purview of authorities, these human-containing sludge-buckets were uncomfortable pariahs for the length of their terms of imprisonment.

And now I had to become one such. Temporarily, at least.

The reason for this awkward transformation was my insistence on voyaging to Zawinul and putting myself within the Singularity’s most potent zone of influence.

Or, as Lustron Avouris termed it, “the suzerainty of the Spike. Is suzerainty the correct word?”

The Singularity was composed in some sense of human raw materials. Quantum-entangled human wetware was the platform on which all Singularities ran. Human brain matter could be uplifted to posthuman status. But the artificial goop that passed for a brain in a sludge-bucket could not. The Reticulate did not want to offer the Singularity more processing power than it already owned. My embodiment in a sludge-bucket ensured that I would not be co-opted by the magister-level entity at Zawinul.

Once wearing my hideous new shape, I would be placed in a slower-than-light spaceship and sent on a trip lasting six months. This voyage would culminate out in the Oort Cloud surrounding my native star-system. There, on a grim, airless asteroid rested a very special gate of the Indrajal dedicated to maintaining the infrequent contacts between the Reticulate and any Singularity world. This spatial isolation was intended as a kind of quarantine measure.

After Lustron Avouris finished explaining this procedure to me, I immediately had two questions.

“Aren’t Singularities by definition nearly infinite in their processing capacity? How can adding a single human brain to infinity amount to anything?”

The black Licorice Whip presented me with what I could only categorize as a finicky expression. “Yes, we assume that every magister has attained some level of mentation approaching infinity. But we cannot be absolutely certain. Our understanding of their abilities is necessarily incomplete. Therefore, we choose to err on the side of caution.”

“All right. Understood. But what about isolating the only Indrajal gate to Zawinul so far away? That makes no sense at all. We just witnessed the incursion of the magister right in our midst! Obviously, he doesn’t need to employ our network at all! He can reach us anywhere, any time he wants! So why can’t I cut out this stupid six-month delay and just use a gate right here on Silane?”

“You wish to expose millions of your fellow sophonts to direct contamination by the Singularity?”

“They’re already exposed! No one’s safe! We’ve just seen that!”

“You claim that the Reticulate cannot protect its citizenry? This is behavior most reprehensible and unpatriotic. I might very well have to rescind my official eleemosynary offer. Is eleemosynary the correct word?”