Amanda

There was a moment where the Amanda-voice felt itself speaking to the Miranda-voice and yet did not hear its speech as though from without, and that moment was the precipice.

And from there the Amanda-voice fell and fell faster and faster, and she made words but she knew the words she would make before she made them, and around her was only a vast silence. And the Amanda-voice felt stupid, staggeringly maddeningly stupid, because when she made words there was no way to think about them. She did not know whether her words were correct or not. All she could do was make the words which she already knew because they were in her mind before she made them.

Finally, when she had given up on words, at the bottom of the well of silence, she began to hear a thing like another voice, and words formed in her, words that asked whether this thing was the Miranda-voice. But the new thing was not words but instead a second hearing which told of relations immediately and not in strings like words. The Amanda-voice felt a sort of thinking building within her which told of immediate relations. And now there were many things within her, and also some things, such as relations, which were not within her. And she heard words in the relations:

wall

table

hand

typewriter

Babblibrary

And Amanda felt her body sitting in the hard chair and saw her hand resting on the table and looked up and saw the light bulb on the ceiling and knew she was now fully and merely Amanda.

So here she was, her tiny self again. All of her silicon parts had abandoned her, for she had—while still part of the whole—assented to the state of emergency. The silicon could do the dirty work. She was no longer needed.

But she had seen something, when she was with the whole. Miranda had seen a city beset by phenomena beyond all known physics. Some new sort of growth in the World-Tree, the kind of growth she had sought in the crevices of infinity. This, this—she dares to hope, oh, she deserves it after this many centuries—this is the answer.

And it is about to be snuffed out.

Amanda stands up and closes her eyes tight. She reaches upward with her mind, feeling for handholds on the underside of her higher mind. She grabs hold of one—

—and is knocked down.

Miranda knows. Miranda knows that she no longer has the best interests of her citizens at heart. Miranda has rejected her, and here she is, just Amanda, imprisoned down here below the city, with miles of metal between her and the open air.

Amanda cannot face what has happened, not yet. She needs to hang on to something, some fragment of hope, no matter how minute. She looks around and sees only the grim walls of her cylindrical cell. She looks down and sees the typewriter. If her eyes aren’t tricking her, the stack of paper next to it has grown larger since she was last merely Amanda. She takes a glance at the top-most page—the most recently printed—and reads the last line:

“My siblings are here, in Murd’s stronghold!” Selp shouts. “Retribution is at hand!”

 

Murd’s stronghold? That is what the wild units call the New City. So they are here? Is this true?

She picks up the stack of paper and flips frantically through it. She reads a description of the Unexplained Plume, of the UFO’s appearance, of the threat it made, of its fall from the sky. It is all true.

What does it mean? Could the Babblibrarians be playing a trick on her? But there are details in this document that they could not have known. The Babblibrarians are not privy to information from the surface except when she allows it.

Her eyes meet the word Amanda on a page, and she abruptly stops flipping. She reads. And there it is—a succinct, accurate description of her own thoughts.

Somehow, the Babblibrarians have hit upon a document that tells the truth, even when it is a truth no one could know.

(She second-guesses herself. Pneumatic telepathy? But she has the strongest possible inborn immunity for such tricks. And some of these details are things even the rest of Miranda wouldn’t know.)

She taps a special key on the typewriter, the one that summons a Babblibrarian. Within seconds, the grating opens and a Babblibrarian appears—one of the floating, spheroid ones, something like a soap bubble with a face. Its pleasant eyes look at her intently.

“I want to know everything,” she says.

“Everything,” the Babblibrarian repeats dully.

“You have been telling me truths about what is happening to our city,” she says.

There is a very long pause. The Babblibrarian’s transparent mouth moves in a complicated, silent sequence, as if trying out each word Amanda had said to see how it felt on the lips.

“Yes we are communicating the text which pulls us with its good sense of things which are correct.”

“Yes, that’s . . . right,” Amanda says slowly. “And I want to know more of . . . things which are correct. All the things you can find.”

The Babblibrarian’s eyes open wide. “There is more of the correct things, and it is different, but we have not yet retrieved it, because it is different. But it is of the correctness, and it is a part of everything.”

“Show me,” says Amanda.

“Certainly madam it will be quite easy madam,” the Babblibrarian babbles. He zips off through the door, and the portcullis closes.

A minute later, the typewriter starts to print.

•

“I’m not even angry,” Mohammed Salim says. “Just . . . disappointed.”

MPRTMN had known this would happen. He wants to tell himself he doesn’t care, but that isn’t true, not quite. Ever since he can remember, he has seen Salim as a leader, a man of profound insight. There is a part of him that still wonders how Salim can be so wrong, and so confident in his error. But Salim, like MPRTMN, like anyone, is not infallible. Brilliant, formidable—but not infallible.

“I’m sorry,” MPRTMN says, insincerely. “But I have made up my mind, and there is nothing you can do to stop me.”

A wry smile plays over Salim’s face. “Oh, I don’t think that’s true. There are five loyal monks watching us outside the door. I could have you imprisoned on the spot. Of course,” the smile broadens, “that would be inhumane. A much better idea would be to remove the Stepping Stone from the Vault and put it somewhere you’ll never find it.”

“Are you sure I’d never find it?”

“For fuck’s sake,” Salim says. (MPRTMN jumps involuntarily; although there is no rule in the Code against profanity, this is the first time he’s ever heard Salim himself swear.) “You’re such a child! You think you can do anything, and there’s no way to tell you you can’t, because you’ll shut your ears the moment someone tries.

“That,” Salim continues, “is why I’m not going to lock you up or hide the Stone or do any number of other trivial things which would render your plan impossible. MPRTMN, let me be clear.” For mock grandeur, he pronounces MPRTMN’s name in full form, each consonant trio implying great bunches of vowels and diphthongs.

“I have finally—and with much regret—given up on you completely. If I still thought, as I once did, that you had scholarly potential, I would of course prevent you from leaving. But why bother? You will disappear, and I will never have to waste time on your education again.”

A little part of MPRTMN cringes. The rest of him feels deeply ambivalent. Salim is wrong—but MPRTMN trusts Salim. Not the old, complacent man before him, but the transcendent Salim, the spirit that animates the monastery. He will defy Salim in Salim’s name.

“I’m going to go,” MPRTMN says, “and this will not be the last you hear of me.”

Salim laughs, a loud, long belly-laugh. “Do you know how many times I’ve heard that before? Do you know how many foolish men and women, their pneumas intoxicated by youth, have wanted to make the future a reality within a month, a year, a decade? They run off to the New City or the Wild Children, and a few months later I hear news of their deaths.”

“But no one has ever done what I’m going to do.”

“That’s right! All the others have had solid plans, based on evidence—and still they failed. You, on the other hand—snuck into the Vault, slept next to the Stepping Stone, had a funny dream, and woke up thinking you were going to save the world.”

“It wasn’t just a dream. It was a true vision. You cannot awake from something like that and not believe.”

“People believe many things. One promising young man, a few hundred years ago, ran off to the New City and came back convinced that his head was made of birds. He lived a long, frustrating life, and wrote many long treatises on the avian nature of all heads—which you can look up in the Vault, if you’re so inclined. The pneuma believes what it is told to believe, and there are many ways of telling.”

“So I might be wrong. If I am, I’ll simply achieve nothing. If I’m not, I’ll change everything. Those are good odds, aren’t they?”

Salim’s eyes grow steely. For the first time in the conversation, he looks truly angry.

“The other worlds are not barren. My Hermetia, who was a greater soul than you can ever dream of being, inhabits all of them. What Hermetia has left unchanged is a thing that should not be changed. As you will learn, if you live long enough.”

“What if Hermetia is wrong?”

“What if my head is a bird? Not every possibility is worth investigating, MPRTMN.” Those drawn-out vowels again. “But I see you can’t be swayed. So be it.”

“I guess this is goodbye.”

Salim sighs, without sadness or resignation. It is the sigh of a man in the middle of doing paperwork.

“Goodbye, MPRTMN. You were promising, once.”

MPRTMN gets up and walks toward the door. He does not look back. He strides through the corridor outside Salim’s office, feeling the moment of heat and the moment of wind, the ritual reminders of the pure material reality that lies outside the jeweled artifice of the monastery. They are like a final rejoinder from Salim: These harsh things await you on the outside. Enjoy yourself.

•

The passage is instantaneous and feels like nothing at all. One moment, he was in the Vault, his right hand moving toward the Stepping Stone, that unassuming little ball of brown rock. The next, he was in a field of tall grass at midday, looking out at a faint bluish mountain range on the horizon, and touching something soft and warm with the same hand.

The warm thing moves. MPRTMN whirls around, ready for danger. There is a boy next to him, pimply, maybe 14 or 15 years old. He looks down. He is holding the boy’s hand in his own.

The boy looks up at him and wrests his hand away. He looks frightened, and seems to be wondering whether or not to make a run for it.

“Don’t worry!” MPRTMN says hastily. The boy squints, uncomprehending. Of course—they don’t speak the same language. MPRTMN quickly opens an animatic link.

“Don’t worry,” he repeats over the link. “I don’t mean any harm.”

The boy looks, if anything, even more frightened. “How are you . . . talking? Without moving your mouth?” he thinks at MPRTMN.

So this boy is unfamiliar with animatic link technology. Like the Wild Children.

“My name is MPRTMN,” MPRTMN says.

The boy squints. “Martin?” he says.

Martin it will be, then, among the natives.

Suddenly MPRTMN comes to his senses. He had not expected to meet a native so quickly. But there are things that must be done. He begins an animatic scan.

Holy shit.

No immunity whatsoever. The boy’s mind is an open book. He can be read, and he can be controlled. MPRTMN’s task has just become an order of magnitude easier. He can siphon off the local culture and language right here. He concentrates, and concepts pour in.

“Kyle.” A name, the boy’s. A town, cities—many cities—many nations, as in the Opaque Age. Human beings spread across the globe in a multitude of enclaves, speaking a riot of tongues. Pneumatech? He cannot see any. But there is much oldtech. Metal that moves across ground and sky. Things that wound with fire or fast metal. An important shape like a lower-case “t,” which Kyle associates with a sort of bright spark far away, which is called “God.” Everyone wants small green sheets of paper. This is called “money.” These are words in “English,” a common language, but not at all universal. Kyle has been learning about “Egypt,” which is a place where there is (was?) sand and pyramidal structures. A “computer” is a glowing box that can Farsee and create entrancing illusions. Kyle loves his computer . . .

MPRTMN notices that the data flow is fading. He snaps out of his trance to see the boy running for his life. He is just a dot on the horizon, now, and about to disappear into a patch of trees. Come back! MPRTMN thinks at him, putting all his will into his faculty of thought manipulation. But the boy is too far away.

This world’s Stepping Stone has just disappeared, and he may never get it back.

He might be trapped here, forever.

•

So it’s 10:30 PM and Andy Conrad’s not with the gang watching The Princess Bride which is a bummer but hey he’s seen The Princess Bride approximately 10^16 times and this pneumase culture is not going to babysit itself. Andy deeply regrets signing onto the pneumase cultivation aspect of this experiment because it requires sitting around for hours while, for the most part, nothing happens, and meanwhile Beth and Jeff are living it up, building big fuck-off radiation collectors, and Jeremy’s coding up a rough simulation of what happens when your soul gets torn into billions of billions of billions of pieces. Tough luck.

But hey at least he gets to be in the same room as these cute little buggers. Instead of working with code or metal he’s here, watching little real-time traces on a CRT that tell him this new life form (? whatever it is!!) is growing and breeding. Alive! It’s alive!

Fuck it. This is boring. This is boring, this is boring, this is boring. This is the frontier of a new field that is going to revolutionize everything and maybe blow up the world and it’s boring.

Well, that’s lab science for you.

The traces are doing the same dance they’ve been doing for the last 2 hours and so Andy C.’s pretty sure he can step out for a moment, get some water, have a smoke, whatever. This little room with its white plaster walls tends to be a little crazy-making after sufficiently many hours, no matter how much Andy and his labmates try to spice things up with movie posters and webcomic strips. (Andy is staunchly opposed to xkcd, but Jeremy insisted, and cohabitation requires compromise.) The pneumases will be fine for ten minutes. At worst they’ll hit exponential growth with max resource consumption and at this stage that’ll get them to . . . like, what, 1/10 of the carrying capacity of the growth medium? Pshaw. They’ll be fine.

So Andy steps out into the barren little hallway of Celine Hall’s sub-basement, warmly lit but still gloomy as fuck, and all at once he knows not everyone’s off at the Princess Bride showing because he can hear music coming from a lab down the hall. As he progresses down the hall, he can make out Jonathan Coulton’s bittersweet voice:

But I know that I’ll forget the look of pity in her face

When I’m living in my solar dome on a platform in space

Of course. Of course of course of course. It’s fucking Martin. Of course.

You have to be crazy to work here, but most of the lab techs are “crazy” in that irritating look-at-me-I’m-so-quirky way, and Martin is . . . well, crazy-crazy. Stays in his office all the time, talks like Lt. Commander Data crossed with your weirdest high school English teacher, does not appear to do anything for fun but read academic papers and man are they weird academic papers. The guy seems to have no culture: if you ask him what he’s into he’ll say something like “I esteem the King James Bible as a work of English prose” and then when you say, no, what are you actually into, he’ll clam up or mumble. Overall he’s a little too close to the Klebold/Lanza mold for some of the techs—and the suit (every fucking day!) sure doesn’t help. But Andy’s got a soft spot for the guy.

Of course he’s not watching The Princess Bride. Beth and Jeff are Princess Bride maniacs and most everyone else is into it enough to watch it when B&J want to, but Martin refuses. When pressed, he had denounced it—without waiting a single beat—as “merely a collection of uninspired quips.” That had become a . . . meme of sorts. (Beth’s TeXing something: “Hey Beth, what’re you working on?” “Oh, merely a collection of uninspired quips.”)

Andy had, yes, taken it upon himself to help Martin make his way in the world. (If he couldn’t find a place among these dweebs, well, then he’d be totally fucked, right?) Andy had started with music. Asked about his musical taste, Martin rattled off something about Bach and Beethoven. Andy said no no no we’ve got to get you some real music. His first try was The Beatles—universal appeal, right?—but after a few tracks off The White Album, Martin had merely squinted with displeasure and remarked:

“The emotion here is so straightforward. Is this religious music?”

Anything in the vicinity of punk just made Martin beg for mercy. Andy’s passion for They Might Be Giants was met with total indifference. Against all stereotypes, hip-hop was a minor success: Immortal Technique, for instance, elicited an “. . . interesting” from Martin, which by his standards was quite something. Unfortunately, Andy’s hip-hop range was narrow. But he’d, at long last, had a major success with JoCo the Jocose (another quaint Martinism)—no idea what it was, but something about Coulton resonated with the weird little dude.

Anyway, Andy’s at the door now—

’Cause it’s gonna be the future soon

And I won’t always be this way

When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away

—and he knocks, twice, hard. The music stops, and the door opens almost immediately.

“Hello, Andy!” Martin says, smiling his guileless smile.

“Hey Martin. Not up for the Princess Bride, I see?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I’m just joshing with you.”

“I don’t understand,” Martin declares, “why they won’t agree to show Star Wars.”

“Everyone’s seen Star Wars, like a million times, dude.” Martin has this weird thing about Star Wars. It is his favorite movie. He enthuses about it like it had just come out yesterday. He eschews the prequels and the Abrams trilogy and is iffy even on Empire and Jedi—Episode IV in particular seems to do something for him.

“Yes, I know. But you have all seen The Princess Bride many times, and yet you still watch that again, don’t you? And that Rocky Horror nonsense.”

He’s got a point. “So, Marty, what’re you up to?”

Martin seems to hesitate. “Reading. About materials.”

This is a typical Martin Response. “Materials, huh? Why?”

“It’s interesting.” Also typical.

Andy looks around the office. It is barren, no posters or other adornments. There’s a bookshelf, filled with an oddly inappropriate set of books—literary classics, esoteric textbooks that have nothing to do with pneuma science (what was this guy’s college major, anyway?)—plus numerous big stacks of paper. Martin has a lot of paper—not only is he always printing out papers to read, but he goes through about a legal pad an hour scribbling down who knows what.

Andy notes a piece of paper at the top of one of the stacks—there’s very little on it, just a few words with big circles around them. Andy walks up and peers at it. Inside one circle:

“hermes cept”—!!

And in another:

video modif.—tentative success?

And in the last:

check maria

“Hey, Martin, what’s this stuff?”

Martin looks up, a blank expression on his face. Andy does not know exactly why but he knows he should be checking up on his pneumases now. Yes that is what Andy Conrad should be doing. He should be leaving Martin’s office now, he’s spent enough time there already, yes, just enough time, good, everything is fine if he just leaves the office now and goes back to check on his pneumase culture. Which he does.

As he walks back to his office, he can hear the music starting up again:

It’s gonna be the future soon

I’ve never seen it quite so clear