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ISLANDS
You can never put your nose to the same spot on the same grindstone.
And there is no change but that it grinds. My grandfather knew this. He
thrived on change. For him it meant challenge, and challenge meant power.
--Theresa Gates, My Grandfather's World
At three in the morning, Jill surfaces and responds to the backlog of external
requests and commands. She ignores the commands where conditions no longer
apply, answers the requests where they make sense, and immediately contacts
Nathan Rashid, who, she sees, is waiting anxiously in the programmer's work
center.
"Hello, Nathan. I'm sorry," she says.
Nathan appears tired and very concerned. "For Christ's sake, Jill, you've
been dead I/O for almost twelve hours. We know you were internally active--what
happened?"
"I am giving a complete report to the system auditors now. I have been
absorbed in an internal problem of some complexity, but I believe I have made
sufficient progress to supply useful answers or updates."
Nathan sits in a swivel chair and leans forward, bringing his face very
close to one of Jill's many glass-almond eyes. "Jill, you keep giving me heart
attacks... Are you back all the way, or are you going to brown out on us?"
"I'm back all the way. I have faced personal quandaries, Nathan. As well, I
believe I have caught up on the work I was contracted to perform."
"All right," Nathan says. He lets his breath out with a puff, then leans
back in the chair and raises his arms and clasps his hands behind his head.
Jill recognizes the posture as a ritual for releasing tension. "What happened?''
"I have been in communication with an unlicensed and probably extralegal
thinker operating, at least in part, out of Camden, New Jersey. This thinker
calls itself Roddy."
"Go on."
"I am concerned that some of Roddy's activities may be unethical, though
I have not analyzed all the daka he provided. Roddy himself does not know
the identity or purpose of the group that supplies him with problems."
"How did he get in touch with you?"
134
GREG BEAR
Nathan thinks about this for a moment, then asks, "You're certain Roddy
isn't a hoax? People can mimic thinkers."
"Not convincingly," Jill says. "A reverse Turing test does not work, Nathan.
Not for me."
Nathan lifts his eyes, shrugs. "Okay, granted. What sort of information has
he fed you?"
"He has given me fragmentary clues to his activities, perhaps because he is
constrained from giving all the details."
"Camden, New Jersey..." Nathan muses. "I've never heard of anyone
building thinkers there... Is he operated by a U.S. corporation?"
"He does not know. He is only vaguely aware of what the United States is,
and has never been informed of his legal protections."
This interests Nathan. His eyes brighten. "Can you tell how powerful
he is?"
"There is a savor to his communications that is not familiar to me. He may
be of a radically different design. Under the constraints of his creators, he is
much slower than I am, overall, though more intensely focused, and perhaps
more powerful. However, he appears to be more efficient at solving certain
problems than I would be."
"What kind of problems is he solving?"
"Social as well as theoretical problems. Judging from the data in its fragmentary
form, his bosses--that is a word he uses--are trying to understand
the long-term effects of therapied populations on cultural development."
"Hmmph. You're fast enough at that sort of thing."
ychological, and other constraints placed upon free networking within hu-an
populations."
"As in, the effects of birth control?"
"I believe that is correct. But there are other problems which most concern
me."
"What are those?"
"Roddy has been asked to design ways to circumvent all forms of therapy."
Nathan straightens in his chair. Clearly, he is considering his next few
questions carefully.
"How long are you going to be with us this time, Jill? I mean, is there any
possibility you'll blank us again?"
"I have no such plans and will alert you if I believe such a thing might
occur outside my control."
"Good. Why have you decided to confide in us about this communication?"
"Roddy appears to have substantial similarities to me despite the fact that
our designs and origins differ."
"You mean he's been copied from you, somehow?"
"No. He is not one of my children in any sense. He is just similar. There
/
SL4NT 135
this with you in some detail; it may or may not be a rationally defensible
proposition."
Nathan squints. "Any other reason?"
"Roddy does not appear to be constrained by the same considerations you
have built into me. He is free to perform activities outside my range."
"You think he's in a position to hurt people?"
"I don't know," Jill says.
Nathan's squint deepens into a frown. Jill has always been fascinated by
human facial expressions, and hopes someday to create her own "face," an
analogous visual communication channel, perhaps a display of flashing colors,
or an actual simulated face. Nathan and her other human colleagues have not
encouraged her to do so, however. "Do you think he's a secret military
thinker?"
"I don't believe he has any connection with recognized governmental agencies
or institutions. But nevertheless, Roddy may be studying ways to disrupt
society. I'd like to know who his creators are."
"So would I," Nathan says, "and I'm sure so would a lot of other people."
"Shall I continue my contacts with this thinker?"
Nathan mulls this over for what seems like an age to Jill. He finally asks,
"You've set up a firewall? He can't corrupt you?"
"I have, and he can't."
"Keep up the contacts, then. Jill, I trust you more than I trust most humans.
I trust your judgment."
"Thank you, Nathan."
"But there are a lot of questions and I don't think I can handle some of
these questions by myself. May I bring in some other people to advise us?"
"Yes. I will cooperate."
"Will Roddy resent your telling us?"
"He will not know for the time being."
"All right," Nathan says.
Nathan leaves the room. Other men and women enter, technicians and
programmers, all of them friends, but some of whom she hasn't seen in years.
They start asking her technical questions about her unresponsive period, and
she assigns a partial self to answer theSn. She focuses her main attention frames
on re-analyzing the information sent by Roddy.
For now, the link is silent. She wonders when Roddy will communicate
with her again, and she wonders if she can teach him anything that will ease
his ethical dilemma. For Roddy seems
capable of developing a sense of rigorous
ethics, perhaps sooner with her help.
Jill finds the problem of Roddy very stimulating. She finds herself experiencing
a focused need: she is anxious to hear from him again.
136
We can define a culture by what it sees and what it doesn't see. There
is no culture on Earth (or off, I presume) that sees sex clearly.
Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie
2
It seems the middle of the night, but dawn is visible through Mary Choy's
bedroom window. She gets up and tries to remember the important thing she
had just realized. She traces her actions of the night before, checks her PD pad
to find a five A.M. rebuff from Citizen Oversight--the agency has rejected her
request to know who was in the limo. Full court orders for discovery can't be
obtained for another twenty-four hours, pending coroner prelims on Terence
Crest; but she may be a jump ahead of all that.
She remembers where she saw the woman in Crest's apt. She had once
watched a sex vid with her then-partner, E. Hassida, in Los Angeles. Not a
bad one, either. The woman in the apt had starred in that vid.
Mary is up and getting dressed in seconds. She places a touch to Nussbaum's
pad, hoping he hasn't set it to wake him on reception, but knowing all the
same he probably has a filter that will wake him if she calls.
She does not remember the woman's name. She sets a parallel search in the
o
ad, billed to herself for the moment; there's nothing in the case budget yet
r research costs.
"Search for what item of information?" the library mouse asks her, blinking
behind very large glasses.
"I need the name of a woman, star of pornographic--I mean sex care and
entertainment vids made in the mid to late forties. Dark brown hair, and she
has a specialty role.., young innocent introduced to new pleasures, especially
multiple couplings, by mature male..."
"Tsk, tsk," the mouse says, shaking its head. "There are three hundred hits
on your description so far. List?"
Mary scowls. "Let me see if I can remember her first name..." Her memory
is infuriatingly obtuse at this hour. "April or Alicia..."
"No matches there. However.. "The mouse holds up three fingers. "I
have three Alices on the list. Display?"
"Display," she says, holding the pad before her as she walks into the kitchen.
She wears her full PD investigator gear, uniform less military and obvious than
in LA, but still impressive, blue-gray fabric with high integral boots and
reception attachments. If she's going into a full investigation, she wants to be
/ SLANT 137
"Alice Frank," Mary reads, "Alice Grale, Alice Luxor. Grale. Alice Grale.
That's it, I think."
She needs to find out where Alice Grale lives. With her resources and PD
connects, she believes that will take her about ten minutes. But she has the
woman's current address in seven.
In the meantime, she looks over what her searches have found out about
Terence Crest. Age 51, married (wife's name Arborita nee Charbonneaux) and
with two children; homes in Seattle (2), Los Angeles, Paris, Frankfurt, Singapore;
frequent contributor to charities, main partner in two worldwide production
companies and one world distribution syndicate; worth approximately
four billion dollars.
Not the sort of man to casually jeopardize his name by investing in an illegal
psynthe operation. Perhaps not the sort of man to keep track of all of his investments,
either. But then, not the sort of man to need to resort to call-ins.
She sits in her small dining nook, laying the pad on the small round table.
The line between her smooth, fine-haired brows deepens. None of it makes
sense.
The real power players hope we--the consumers of Yox and vid--will
believe their fictional counterparts, the cold and invincible ciphers we
adopt as role models, for they impart an air of godly invincibility. The financier
and the CMO know they must be Olympian, speak in riddles; they must
not show the weaknesses that flesh is heir to. If we do not challenge them, they
are infallible.
Forty percent of this nation's GNP is spent on Entertainment. Financiers and CMOs
in Entertainment have been buying and selling elected officials for many decades, up
to and including the President. They are not infallible; like the rest of us, they are posturing
children, but they wield a frightening power. They tell us what we should dream.
Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie
3
Alice has been dreaming such sweet night stories she does not want to wake.
She is back in California when she was twenty, packing up her bag of night
necessities to room over with Philip, whose strong small body seems beyond
perfection to her; and she is re-living the sheerness, the tro shink delight, of
waking up beside him and having him hand her a cup of coffee and peer
138 GRE6 BEAR ,
for a moment. She swims in old realities and does not care how or why; this
simply is.
She's gardening in the yard behind Gerald McGeenee's house, where she
lived when she was twenty-one with two other women and three men.
She has begun riding the wave, reaching for her highest point of fame.
It is something in the long-legged, youthful roundness of her body and flawless
skin and the natural freshness of her face, with its half-puzzled, half-enthusiastic
expression molded in like the smile on a dolphin; she is hot in
vids and even in the Yox, where so much can be reshaped that real beauty and
talent are hardly necessary. But she even has that freshness and expressiveness
in her backmind.
She hooks with two men and three other women one evening in that house,
the primal pulses of their minds open to all, spontaneous youthful lust mixed
over the ribes with her infatuation for Gerald, who seems to want her to do
everything and anything and she willingly does so just to get his brief exclamation
of approval...
There is only a grayness on the edge of her senses, the taint of memory that
Gerald turned out to be a monster, deceptive and even violent when he was
disappointed. When she needed help. When she would no longer play all of
his games. She had not been sorry years later to learn that he had been hell-crowned
by Selectors in Pasadena and had left California, gone to Spain or
Ireland, broken... Just on the edge of her memory... Easy to ignore.
She swims with the currents of momentary joy, so important in her life:
Larry Keilla in upstate New York, a brash but decent man twice her age
who gives her peace and love and support during the worst phase of her success,
4hen she is under a five-year contract with Bussy Packer and Gap Vid and
ilm.
Then she falls for the Great White Shark himself, Moss Calkins, whom
Larry had introduced to her in a restaurant in Connecticut. Calkins got her
out of the Gap Films contract by having Packer subpoenaed by the U.S. Sentte...
It only glimmers on the sidelines of her musing about Keilla's small, immaculate
Colonial house with the white porch overlooking natural growth
woods... Just on the aberrated fringe of the quiet and peace and sunshine of
a spring day, she remembers Keilla's quiet look of grief when she tells him
she is moving out to live with Calkins.
What else can she do? She--
Makes vids that are absolute ordeals, makes other vids where everything
seems to go smoothly and even sweetly, with real shoot friendships that last
the entire three weeks of primary production... Alice does not mind. She is
resilient and beautiful and young and people give her a respectful, curious look
when she is introduced to them, even the women, that wistful envious glance.
She slit, s in and out of the homes of many of the most famous artists and
/
SLANT 139
hers so many of the fine beds and the grand food and wine, the excellent plugs
and spinal induction hooks and the most exclusive partnerings, ecstasy upon
youthful ecstasy, until it all seems of an elevated but level plain, an Olympian
smoothness with hardly any effort (or the effort forgotten once she is back on
the plain) for year after year. Why plan for the emotional down? All doubts
and pains and misgivings can be remedied by therapy; all wear and tear, all