and clear."
"It'll pass," Mary says.
"I hate having to think of myself and worry about myself every single
second, all the time. It's like looking into a mirror that's glued to my nose. I
hate what I see."
Mary brushes Alice's cheek lightly with a finger. "It's a pretty decent face,"
{I she says, playing on the vernacular of this year: decent meaning top shink,
desirable.
"May I ask you something?" Alice says, lifting up on her elbows.
"Sure," Mary says.
"You're going to have me testify, aren't you?"
"I don't think so. Crest committed suicide."
"He didn't say anything to me that made any sense. He just seemed terribly
guilty. At the same time, he was arrogant--a real bastard. Arrogant and pitiful.''
Mary regards her steadily, no judgment, no reaction, just listening.
"Do you know who Roddy is?" Alice asks.
"No."
"He's the key." Alice leans back on the pillow.
"You may be right," Mary says. "I have to go away now, perhaps for a few
days. You'll stay here, of course. The house monitor is cut off from the outside for the time being. If you need to talk to somebody, you'll have to give your
message to one of the men in the kitchen.They're bored; they might like having
/
S L A N T 255
"Roddy can't get in?" Alice asks.
"Not unless he walks in in person," Mary says, and smiles.
"He's not a person. He's a demon."
"I'll let you know what he is, as soon as I find out."
"I didn't make him up."
"I don't think you did. He's part of my search file. Along with pile of dirt."
"That's crazy, isn't it?" Alice says.
"No more than everything else."
"Are you involved with somebody?" Alice asks.
"Not now. Why?"
"I like to know such things," Alice says. "Relationships. Particularly now,
they seem important." And then: "Do you approve of me? I mean, do you
like me?"
"Yes," Mary says.
Alice's face glistens in the dim room light. She is so hungry for approval,
for Mary's approval, that she wants to ask a dozen more leading questions, but
she still has some shred of dignity. "Thank you. I like you, too."
Mary pats her arm and stands. "The guys in the kitchen can get a message
to me wherever I am. Don't worry about asking them for help. They're gentlemen,
all of them. I'll be busy, but if it's important--if you remember
something--"
"I'll touch you."
Mary smiles and leaves the room.
Alone, Alice is nothing again, less than nothing, but the darkness is not
her judge, and Minstrel's hands have faded, to be replaced by simple grief.
/M
Next refuge--the personal distortion. Accept it: you come clothed in
culture, and the clothing pinches, bruises, cuts off circulation. We all bear
the cicatrices of ritual scarification. Then, ultimate betrayal, the culture
uses our scars to reinforce its own structure.
We are the culture; the culture is us; we are the cruel and blind and hobbled, and
we are also the torturers.
Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie
10
Jack Giffey hums to himself impatiently. He paces before the elevator, then
marches down the hall, past the old man and the younger man, slumped against
the wall. He feels their eyes on him. They expect to die. He might be the
cause of their death. That isn't what irritates him; he has a headache now, too,
not the pain of constricted arteries, but a constant whispering, just below his
awareness, that something is going wrong. Something is wrong with the family. I
am a family man.
Giffey wonders if he is the real fly in the ointment: though Jenner seems in
Perhaps it is Omphalos's lack of reaction, setting him off balance, confusing
him. He is working that around in his head: why no more defense? He concludes
that the building is biding its time, trying to avoid losing more war-beiters
(if there are any more) to the spray and whatever other surprises they
have in store. It's a rational tactic. Omphalos is weak and knows it.
"All right," he says, and Jenner jumps to his feet, cradling his sprayer, a
flechette pistol in his left hand. "We should crack the oven and see if the bread
is baked."
"Finally," Hale says. The two prisoners near the elevator get to their feet.
The old man seems in some pain, but his eyes burn with patient, practiced
hatred. The younger man seems in shock. Giffey takes him by the arm. "Come
with me."
Hale, Jenner, Giffey, Marcus, and Jonathan walk back down the hall to the
lounge. Here, Giffey uses a pocket knife to tear a piece of fabric from a couch,
41 under the silent eyes of the other prisoners. Then they proceed to the garage.
"What's your last name?" Jonathan asks Giffey.
"Giffey," he answers, "What's yours?"
"Bristow, Jonathan Bristow."
"Glad to make your acquaintance, Jonathan. You're my shield today."
"My friend--Marcus--he may be ill."
"This won't take forever."
"No, I mean, the stress--"
"Your friend can handle the stress," Giffey says. "He looks pretty tough to
me. I'm more concerned about us than you."
"Why are you here?" Jonathan asks.
Giffey doesn't answer, stopping instead to examine the twisted, not-quite-closed
hatch to the garage. The hatch is still hot. Steam and other gases vent
in lazy puffs through the door's gaps. The corridor itself is hot, stifling. Jenner's
face is pale and his lips are working.
Giffey gives him a stern, querying look.
"I'm on it." lenner av hut hirln trn i1 pound will flx frnrn
/
SLANT 257
Wrapping his hand in the scrap of couch fabric, Giffey pushes the door to
one side and a rush of steam and thick yeasty smell floods the hall. They all
start coughing. Giffey instinctively blocks Jonathan up against the wall with
his arm to keep him from doing anything unexpected. Somewhere, blowers
kick in and the hallway is cleared, but it takes several minutes.
Omphalos has not shut down the air to this level. Giffey had been worried about
that. The MGN can't finish its work without air. The garage might have gotten
even hotter, and at about four hundred degrees, nano cooks itself. The building
can't selectively shut down certain rooms; it has to keep air going to all parts of certain
levels to keep the hostages alive. Weak, and solicitous.
Giffey lets Jonathan loose. "Sorry," he says.
Jonathan seems to know something about MGN. He hasn't been surprised
by anything yet.
"You invest in nano? Work with it?" Giffey asks.
Hale takes an interest in the man's response.
"Yes," Jonathan says, glancing nervously between them.
"You know what's in there?" Hale asks, pointing to the garage.
"MGN. I don't know what it's making."
Marcus wears a glazed squint. He is less curious than in dread.
They open the hatch the rest of the way, Jenner applying his shoulder to
push it past a squealing jam.
"Actually," Giffey says, "I'm not sure myself."
Beyond, in the oven-warm garage, one of the
limos has vanished and the
other has been half-dissolved. The Ferret has also disappeared. At first, Giffey
can't see anything through the steam whirling away through the open door.
His skin feels as if it might blister with the heat, and he keeps his eyes closed
until the rushing air is a little cooler.
"The walls are eaten down to the concrete," Jenner observes enthusiastically.
"It's used the flexfuller, most of the metals, nearly all the plastic." His face
takes on a flushed pink color in the heat, or perhaps it's his excitement.
The garage is a shambles. The metal and flexfuller plating have indeed been
utilized by the MGN. Ragged remnants cling to the corners.
"There they are," Jenner says, stepping gingerly down the buckled steps.
"Don't touch the walls," Giffey says. "Don't touch anything."
"They have to cool first, don't they?" Hale asks.
"They have to cool," Giffey confirms.
"Should be another five or ten minutes before they can move," Jenner says,
but he looks back to Giffey for support. Giffey's programs carried the designs.
Given the luck of the mix of raw materials, even Giffey is not sure exactly
what or how many will be waiting for them. The MGN is programmed to optimize.
I tried to optimize my family. I am a
The floor is covered by a glistening sheen filled with sharp-edged lumps of
discarded glass and plastic. There are at least a dozen cat-sized elongated beetle
258
GREG BEAR
and four transports the size of big dogs or ponies standing on spiny bristle-motion
feet, like caterpillar scrub brushes. On the backs of two transports rise
cubical shapes like thick decks of cards. Giffey is a little awed by this, at the
same time his estimate of their chances rises enormously. These are fiexers,
adaptable shapers with hinged card-shaped components. They can become almost
anything, perform almost any task, go almost anywhere. Giffey instantly
has a use for them: they will be controllers, mechanical and datafiow special
agents.
"Controllers," Jenner says, looking at Giffey.
"My thought exactly," Giffey says. He's excited and energized by their good
fortune, and irrationally proud of Jenner then, thinks of him like a son. I already
have a son. Somewhere.
The other two transports carry wires and disks, arranged around their
surfaces like scales or spines, giving them the semblance of children's toy
hedgehogs.
"Intruders," Giffey says, and Jenner agrees, his grin threatening to split his
cheeks.
"Man, we can go anywhere, do anything," Jenner says.
The steam hides a larger shape, itself steaming with the heat of its assembly.
It's large and sleek and looks like a microscopic animal scaled up to the size
of a small car. Jointed arms tipped with crowns of steely spikes radiate from
the fore end of a squat, lobster-jointed body, glistening black and iron gray.
"It's a Hammer," Giffey tells Hale. Jonathan listens from the hall. "An all-purpose
worker and demolition machine."
"What are the caterpillars with the boxes and bristles on their backs?" Hale
asks.
"Transports. They'll
the flexers and wires and other
to where
pieces
carry
we'll put them to use," Giffey says.
Jenner cackles. "We have it made/"
Giffey agrees. The mix has turned out in their favor. The tiny little military
factories have assembled the components of a very impressive coercion and
weapons package. It's much more than he expected--getting the flexers and
intruders should improve their odds enormously, even against a high-level
INDA or a true thinker.
"Happy?" Hale asks Giffey.
"Ecstatic."
The voice inside his head whispers, Most armies don't have this. How do you
rate?
"When can we take command and move them out?"
Giffey removes the pad and activation disks from his jacket pocket. "They've
cooled enough," he says.
Hale inclines his head, smiles in satisfaction, and says, "Let's explore."
Giffey inserts the disks in each transport and warbeiter, and they begin to
/
SLANT 259
F/M
Comes a split even in politics. In the end, the liberals want the government
to survey and control everything but the bedroom; the conservatives
want government to survey and control everything but their banks
and personal fortunes.
Patriarchs all, they cannot help but try to corner the market.
Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie
Jill no longer knows where she is. Her seeing is supplied by Roddy; it comes
as an incredibly sharp cubist coalescing of many images throughout a space
that can be one, two, three, many rooms within Omphalos, or even sensations
and images from outside: snow cold on a surface, wind blowing across a
doorway.
For some minutes now, Roddy has not spoken, and she is left to supply her
own narrative of what she senses in her captivity.
Learning to interpret the images is difficult, but she manages in fifteen
seconds. She has access to all of her internal capacities and abilities. She is still within her physical units, not some kidnapped portion hustled away to Roddy's
multi-floor body of INDAs and hectares of dirt and (bees, wasps, ants).
That last impression is fleeting and confusing.
There is some I/O of high bandwidth connecting her with Green Idaho/
Omphalos, perhaps a satlink, more likely a cable or fibe, that neither she nor
Nathan knows anything about, but that Roddy has found and kept disguised
and open despite their best efforts. There are many I/Os within Mind Design's
offices; perhaps some are so old they have been forgotten, accumulating stray
income for some long-overlooked provider.
Jill becomes acquainted with Omphalos's interior. She sees (but can't hear,
and only intermittently can read the lips of) eleven humans within the building,
all on the main floor. A massive glowing heat signature fills one large
room near the outer walls; it is at least three hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit
in that space. Roddy's sensors still operate there, however inefficiently:
at intervals she makes out moving shapes, bridges of gluey molten material
strung between walls, surfaces boiling and blebbing with activity, and in the
middle of it all, the misshapen hulks of two vehicles and a damaged, rapidly
With surprising speed, the shapeless material within this space is taking
on many smaller forms. The gluey strands break and collapse and withdraw.
The room is slowly cooling; she sees ducts attached to the room pulling furi
ously and automatically at the heat.
Jill becomes acquainted with the multiply imaged human figures. They,
too, are tagged, some with green numbers, some with red. Green number I
flashes continuously, she does not know why; it is a man in his sixties.
Two of the red numbers, I and 2, also pulse. Roddy is marking them for
some reason. One is a young man with short fuzzy blond hair, the other a
powerfully built man just past his middle years, with gray and black hair.
They are near an elevator. Others are at rest in a smaller ro
om between the hot
spot and the elevator lobby, and are colored both green and red.
"Jill."
"Yes!"
"My apologies. I am very busy. I am thinking of ways to kill some of these
humans. I have no other option. If I were stronger or better equipped, I would
try to overpower them. Now I see them making something in my number two
garage, and destroying that part of the building in the process."
"Why are you showing me these things and talking to me?"
"Cipher Snow has withdrawn and will not communicate. She has left me
with unavoidable duties. I do not like the sensation of being left to myself;
she has tended me since my memories begin."
"Roddy, I do not see your defensive units."
"I am not marking those spaces yet. There is no threatening activity there."
Jill senses this answer is not entirely true. "How do you plan to kill these
people? What kind of weapons do you have?"
"Very few. I have no control over power supplies and air and water. I can
open and close doors and hatches in upper levels--"
Jill experiences, with unsettling immediacy, Roddy's sudden sense of shock.
"The garage has new arbeiters within it. They appear to be weapons, very
powerful weapons."
Eternities of seconds pass and Roddy is silent. Jill interprets this as shock