Best Science Fiction of the Year 1984 Part 32

"Then wait," he said. "It'll come."

Lying sleepless beside Tory that night, Elin thought back to her accident. And because it was a matter of stored memory, the images were crisp and undamaged.

It happened at the end of her s.h.i.+ft on Wheel Laboratory 19, Henry Ford Orbital Industrial Park.

Holding theta lab flush against the hub cylinder, Elin in-jected ferrous gla.s.s into a molten copper alloy.

Simulta-neously, she plunged gamma lab a half kilometer to the end of its arm, taking it from fractional Greenwich normal to a full nine gravities. Epsilon began crawling up its spindly arm. Using waldos, she lifted sample wafers from the quick-freeze molds in omicron. There were a hundred measure-ments to be made.

Elin felt an instant's petulant boredom, and the workboard readjusted her wetware, jacking up her attentiveness so that she leaned over her readouts in cool, detached fascination.

The workboard warned her that the interfacing program was about to be shut off. Her fingers danced across the board, damping down reactions, putting the labs to bed. The wetware went quiescent.

With a s.h.i.+ver, Elin was herself again. She grabbed a towel and wiped off her facepaint. Then she leaned back and transluced the wall-her replacement was late. Corporation regs gave her fifty percent of his missed-time fines if she turned him in. It was easy money, and so she waited.

Stretching, she felt the gold wetware wires dangling from the back of her skull. She lazily put off yanking them.

Earth bloomed underfoot, slowly crept upward. New De-troit and New Chicago rose from the floor.

Bright industrial satellites gleamed to every side of the twin residential cylinders.

A bit of motion caught Elin's eye, and she swiveled to follow a load of cargo drifting by. It was a jumble of containers lashed together by nonmagnetic tape and shot into an orbit calculated to avoid the laser cables and power transmission beams that interlaced the park.

A man was riding the cargo, feet braced against a green carton, hauling on a rope slipped through the las.h.i.+ngs. He saw her and waved. She could imagine his grin through the mirrored helmet.

The old Elin snorted disdainfully. She started to look away and almost missed seeing it happen.

In leaning back that fraction more, the cargo hopper had put too much strain on the las.h.i.+ngs. A faulty rivet popped, and the cargo began to slide. Brightly colored cartons drifted apart, and the man went tumbling, end over end, away.One end of the las.h.i.+ng was still connected to the anchor carton, and the free end writhed like a wounded snake. A bright bit of metal-the failed rivet-broke free and flew toward the juncture of the wheel lab's hub and spokes.

The old Elin was still hooting with scornful laughter when the rivet struck the lab, cras.h.i.+ng into a nest of wiring that should not hav been exposed.

Two wires short-circuited, sending a ma.s.sive power tran-sient surging up through the workboard.

Circuits fused and melted. The board went haywire.

And a microjolt of electricity leaped up two gold wires, hopelessly scrambling the wetware through Elin's skull.

An hour later, when her replacement finally showed, she was curled into a ball, rocking back and forth on the floor. She was alternating between hysterical gusts of laughter and dark, gleeful screams.

Morning came, and after a sleepy, romantic breakfast, Tory plugged into his briefcase and went to work. Elin wan-dered off to do some thinking.

There was no getting around the fact that she was not the metallurgist from Wheel Lab 19, not anymore. That woman was alien to her now. They shared memories, experiences- but she no longer understood that woman, could not sympa-thize with her emotions, indeed found her distasteful.

At a second-terrace cafe that was crowded with off-s.h.i.+ft biotechs, Elin rented a table and briefcase.

She sat down to try to trace the original owner of her personality.

As she'd suspected, her new persona was copied from that of a real human being; creating a personality from scratch was still beyond the abilities of even the best wetware techs. She was able to trace herself back to IGF's inventory bank and to determine that duplication of personality was illegal-which presumably meant that the original owner was dead.

But she could not locate the original owner. Selection had been made by computer, and the computer wouldn't tell. When she tried to find out, it referred her to the Privacy Act of 2037.

"I think I've exhausted all the resources of self-discovery available to me," she told the Pierrot when he came to collect his tip. "And I've still got half the morning left to kill."

He glanced at her powder-blue facepaint and smiled politely.

"It's selective black."

"Huh?" Elin turned away from the lake, found that an agtech carrying a long-handled net had come up behind her.

"The algae-it absorbs light into the infrared. Makes the lake a great thermal sink." The woman dipped her net into the water, seined up a netful of dark-green sc.u.m, and dumped it into a nearby trough.

Water drained away through the porous bottom.

"Oh." There were a few patches of weeds on the island, where drifting soil had settled. "It's funny. I never used to be very touristy. More the contemplative type, sort of homebodyish. Now I've got to be doing something, you know?"

The agtech dumped another load of algae into the trough. "I couldn't say." She tapped her forehead.

"It's the wetware. If you want to talk shop, that's fine. Otherwise, I can't."

"I see." Elin dabbed a toe in the warm water. "Well, why not? Let's talk shop."

Someone was moving at the far edge of the island. Elin craned her neck to see. The agtech went on methodically dipping her net into the lake as G.o.d walked into view.

"The lake tempers the climate, see? By day it works by evaporative cooling. Absorbs the heat, losesit to evaporation, radiates it out the dome roof through the condensers."

Coral was cute as a b.u.t.ton.

A bowl of fruit and vegetables had been left near the waterline. She walked to the bowl, considered it. Her orange jumpsuit nicely complemented her cafe-au-lait skin. She was so small and delicate that by contrast Elin felt ungainly.

"We also use pa.s.sive heat pumps to move the excess heat down to a liquid-storage cavern below the lake."

Coral picked up a tomato. Her features were finely chiseled. Her almond eyes should have had snap and fire in them, to judge by the face, but they were remote and unfocused. Even, white teeth nipped at the food.

"At night we pump the heat back up, let the lake radiate it out to keep the crater warm."

On closer examination-Elin had to squint to see so fine- the face was as smooth and lineless as that of an idiot. There was nothing there; no emotion, no purpose, no detectable intellect.

"That's why the number of waterfalls in operation varies."

Now Coral sat down on the rocks. Her feet and knees were dirty. She did not move. Elin wanted to shy a rock at her to see if she would react.

What now? Elin wondered. She had seen the sights, all that Magritte had to offer, and they were all tiresome, disappoint-ing. Even-no, make that especially-G.o.d. And she still had almost a month to kill.

"Keeping the crater tempered is a regular balancing act," the agtech said.

"Oh, shut up." Elin took out her briefcase and called Father Landis. "I'm bored," she said, when the hologram had stablized.

Landis hardly glanced up from her work. "So get a job," she snapped.

Magritte had begun as a mining colony, back when it was still profitable to process the undifferentiated melange soil. The miners were gone now, and the crater was owned by a consortium of operations legally debarred from locating Earthside.

From the fifteenth terrace Elin stared down at the patch-work cl.u.s.ters of open-air laboratories and offices, some sepa-rated by long stretches of undeveloped field, others crammed together in the hope of synergistic effect. Germ-warfare corpo-rations mingled with nuclear-waste engineering firms. The Mid-Asian Population Control Project had half a terrace to itself, and it swarmed with guards. There were a few off-Swiss banking operations.

"You realize," Tory said, "that I'm not going to be at all happy about this development." He stood, face impa.s.sive in red and green, watching a rigger bolt together a cot and wire in the surgical equipment.

"You hired me yourself," Elin reminded him.

"Yes, but I'm wired into professional mode at the mo-ment." The rigger packed up his tools, walked off. "Looks like wev re almost ready."

"Good." Elin flung herself down on the cot and lay back, hands folded across her chest. "Hey, I feel like I should be holding a lily!"

"I'm going to hook you into the project intercom so you don't get too bored between episodes." The air about her flickered, and a clutch of images overlaid her vision. Ghosts walked through the air, stared at her from deep within the ground. "Now we'll shut off the external senses." The world went away, but the illusory people remained, each within a separate hexagonal field of vision. It was like seeing throughthe eyes of a fly.

There was a sudden, overwhelming sense of Tory's pres-ence, and a sourceless voice said to her, "This will take a minute. Amuse yourself by calling up a few friends." Then he was gone.

Elin floated, free of body, free of sensation, almost G.o.dlike in her detachment. She idly riffled through the images, stopped at a chubby little man drawing a black line across his fore-head. h.e.l.lo, Hans, she thought.

He looked up and winked. "How's it hanging, kid?"

Not so bad. What're you up to?

"My job. I'm the black-box monitor this s.h.i.+ft." He added an orange starburst to the band, surveyed the job critically in a pocket mirror. "I sit here with my finger on the b.u.t.ton"- one hand disappeared below his terminal-"and if I get the word, I push. That sets off explosives in the condenser units and blows the dome. Pfffft . Out goes the air."

She considered it: a sudden volcano of oxygen spouting up and across the lunar plains. Human bodies thrown up from the surface, scattering, bursting under explosive decompression.

That's grotesque, Hans.

"Oh, it's safe. The b.u.t.ton doesn't connect unless I'm wetwired into my job."

Even so.

"Just a precaution; a lot of the research that goes on here wouldn't be allowed without this kind of security. Relax-I haven't lost a dome yet."

The intercom cut out, and again Elin felt Tory's presence. "We're trying a Trojan horse program this time-inserting you into the desired mental states instead of making you the states. We've encapsulated your surface ident.i.ty and routed the experimental programs through a secondary level. So with this series, rather than identifying with the programs, you'll perceive them all indirectly."

Tory, you have got to be the most jargon-ridden human being in existence. How about repeating that in English?

"I'll show you."

Suddenly Elin was englobed in a sphere of branching crimson lines, dark and dull, that throbbed slowly. Lacy and organic, it looked the way she imagined the veins in her forehead to be like when she had a headache.

"That was anger," Tory said. "Your mind shunted it off into visual imagery because it didn't identify the anger with itself."

That's what you're going to do then-program me into the G.o.d-state so that 1 can see it but not experience it?

"Ultimately. Though I doubt you'll be able to come up with pictures. More likely, you'll feel that you're in the presence of G.o.d." He withdrew for a moment, leaving her more than alone, almost nonexistent.

Then he was back. "We start slowly, though. The first session runs you up to the basic metaprogramming level, integrates all your mental processes, and puts you in low-level control of them. The nontechnical term for this is making the Christ. Don't fool around with anything you see or sense."

His voice faded, she was alone, and then everything changed.

She was in the presence of someone wonderful.

Elin felt that someone near at hand, and struggled to open the eyes she no longer possessed; she had to see. Her exis-tence opened, and people began appearing before her."Careful," Tory said. "You've switched on the intercom again."

/ want to see!

"There's n.o.body to see. That's just your own mind. But if you want, you can keep the intercom on."

Oh. It was disappointing. She was surrounded by love, by a crazily happy sense that the universe was holy, by wisdom deeper than the world. By all rights, it had to come from a source greater than herself.

Reason was not sufficiently strong to override emotion. She riffled through the intercom, bringing up image after image and discarding them all, searching.

When she had run through the entire project staff, she began hungrily scanning the crater's public monitors.

Agtechs in the trellis farms were harvesting strawberries and sweet peas. Elin could taste them on her tongue. Somebody was seining up algae from the inner lake, and she felt the weight of the net in callused hands. Not far from where she lay, a couple was making love in a grove of saplings and- Tory, I don't think I can take this. It's too intense.

"You're the test pilot."

Dammit, Tory!

Donna Landis materialized on the intercom. "She's right, Shostakovich. You haven't buffered her enough."

"It didn't seem wise to risk dissociative effects by cranking her ego up too high."

"Who's paying for all this, hah?"

Tory grumbled something inaudible and dissolved the world.

Elin floated in blackness, soothing and relaxing. She felt good. She had needed this little vacation from the tensions and pressures of her new personality. Taking the job had been the right thing to do, even if it did momentarily displease Tory.

Tory... She smiled mentally. He was exasperating at times, but still she was coming to rely on having him around. She was beginning to think she was in love with him.

A lesser love, perhaps. Certainly not the love that is the Christ.

Well, maybe so. Still, on a human level, Tory filled needs in her she hadn't known existed. It was too much effort to argue with herself, though. Her thoughts drifted away into a wordless, luxurious reveling in the bodiless state, free from distractions, carefree and disconnected.

Nothing is disconnected. All the universe is a vast net of intermes.h.i.+ng programs. Elin was amused at herself. That had sounded like something Tory would say. She'd have to watch it; she might love the man, but she didn't want to end up talking like him.

You worry needlessly. The voice of G.o.d is subtle, but it is not your own.

Elin started. She searched through her mind for an open intercom channel, didn't find one. h.e.l.lo, she thought. Who said that?

The answer came to her not in words, but in a sourceless a.s.sertion of ident.i.ty. It was cool, emotionless, something she could not describe even to herself, but by the same token absolute and undeniable.

It was G.o.d.