Tiphani sighed. It was good to be back. Not for the assignment. That was too much. But for Earth. She’d lived on fourteen of the fifty-three planets in the Web of Worlds, but none of them were ever as right as Earth. Even the best of the engineered ones, higher oxygen and lower gravity and milder climate and beaches and forests and mountains that made the advertising team cry with delight, there was something subtly wrong, something not-earth.
She glanced at the Shrill, tapping feebly against the walls of its cage. Jimson watched the scenery passing outside in open-mouthed wonder. The humming retro teardrop of the tourbus carved the restored blacktop of Sunset Boulevard. Past Carneys, where the early-evening crowd was gathering under the black-and-white striped canopy, their faces painted in sickly green fluorescent light. Past the Whisky and the Comedy Club and the Rainbow and the Viper Room and the towering neomodern inside-out pillar of U Be Dancin, with their authentic reproduction posters advertising bands hundreds of years dead, and authentic reproduction trash gathering in the corners of the entrance, and simulated aging and weathering guaranteed to look like it looked in its prime, back before the Mars Enterprise and the Jerists and the Corporate Age. Past the last of the seedy little shops and liquor markets and corner delis, to the broad smooth expanses of north Beverly Hills, where the Chiefs and Perpetuals of over fifty worlds drove their restored Bentleys and Vipers and Mercedes along the new-old blacktop, their hair slicked back, sunglasses clamped firmly around their rejuvenated heads. Laughing, their arm around beautiful blonde things maybe less than Staff, maybe not even real.
It would be easy to imagine that she was back at the end of the age of government, but there were no police to ticket the speeding Chiefs, no cameras hanging over intersections, ready to flash freedom away. In that, museum Earth had failed.
But it’s best not to remember some things, she thought.
Past the outskirts of Beverly Hills and into Bel-Air. The shimmering UCLA dome poked over the tops of restored mansions, orange-red in sunset. Tiphani remembered her time there, those bittersweet moments when she first realized how lucky she was to be born of Chiefs, and how unlucky she was to be born on Earth.
Through the gates of the Bel-Air Estates, where Jimson Ogilvy persisted in being Young Staff.
“It’s hard to believe this is authentic,” he said.
“What?”
“The hotel. Up here. In the middle of all these mansions. It doesn’t seem as if they would’ve allowed it.”
“It was here,” Tiphani said.
“And nobody complained?”
“I doubt if they had a very rowdy clientele.”
Jimson went silent, but still looked doubtful.
In the hotel’s tiny parking lot, there were no doormen or porters to help Jimson with the unwieldy powercart and diamondoid cage for the Shrill. Not surprising. The Shrill terrified everyone.
But that’s only Shrill instinct, she thought, remembering the unedited records of first contact. That’s not the Shrill mind. Humanity was blessed with a much greater degree of control over our instinct.
She watched Jimson struggle the powercart up the steps, trying not to bang the Shrill from side to side. The Shrill scrabbled against the transparent side of its cage closest to Jimson, not more than six inches from his face. She saw his grim look and for a moment felt sorry for the boy. Just out of indenture, and she had dragged him here. But he was a smart thing, even smarter than his cutes, though his fresh young twenty-eight-year-old features and bright blue eyes and shiny black hair were appealing as well.
The hotel’s con caught her optilink and spilled data on nearby zoos onto her field of view. She blinked through them. The Los Angeles Zoo had just been restored fourteen years ago for the turn-of-the-century festivities, and it guaranteed that all animals were provably real and of the most original genetic types they could find. She scrolled the list and nodded. There was also New York, or the African savannah. But if they could do it all here, why waste resources? Get the deal done fast, and they could even cancel their charters to the One True Shack and the Original Store. More points to her.
“We have an excellent zoo nearby,” she said, as Jimson wheeled the cart into their suite. “I’ll get us scheduled for tomorrow.”
“Zoo contains life not winner (vanquished)?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Quantity?”
Tiphani scrolled. “Several hundreds.”
Silence for a time. “Surprise at magnitude (number),” the Shrill said. “Ensure correctness?”
“That’s correct.”
“Continuing surprise at magnitude (number).”
Tiphani shrugged. “I’m repeating data from an information network.”
“How reliable?”
“I don’t have any reason to doubt it.”
Again, silence. Finally: “It will be test for next day (light).”
“Then I will await the truth with you,” Tiphani said. “If you require nothing else, my assistant and I will retire for the night.”
“Food not yet necessary.”
“Goodnight, Ambassador.”
For a moment, she thought the Shrill would say nothing, but after a few moments it said, “Pleasantness until next seeing,” and went still.
In the bedroom, she lay back on the satin quilted cover of the big bed and looked up at the big portait of Marilyn Monroe that hung above it. Marilyn looked down on her with slit eyes, squashed by perspective, abstract swatches of black and white.
Got that wrong, she thought. Marilyn had nothing to do with this hotel. But she was an icon. They used her statue in the Consumeristian Church, and lord knows she had nothing to do with churchly things, then or now.
“That was a blowout,” Jimson said, arms crossed, blazer slung over his arm. Without the Staff pin, she could imagine him a young indentured, or even one of the adventurous ones who took their own course and tried to make their own legends.
“A misunderstanding,” Tiphani said. “It asked to see our former competitors, and we interpreted it in the most human way. Our fault for being so current-culture-centric.”
“It still may be talking about war.”
“I don’t think so,” Tiphani said. “It said, people like you I’m not interested in. Paraphrasing, of course.”
“It keeps using multiple words, like dead and vanquished. That suggests war.”
“Business is war.”
Jimson put his jacket down and paced. “They don’t seem to be pacifists. And not in the business sense.”
“Their instinctual need for food is something they can’t control,” Tiphani said. “They suffer from a dichotomy of instinct and intellect. Their instinct is to obtain food and protect their territory, but their minds are rich and inquisitive. They’re very much interested in talking to us.”
“So they say.”
She sighed and sat up on the bed, to look at Jimson. “You’re a smart boy. But you weren’t part of the initial talks. I was. I’ve seen Shrills carry on a discussion of higher-order physics while beating against the walls of their cage, trying to tear apart the physicists they were talking with. A bit disconcerting, but nothing we can’t overcome.”
“We should make the boxes opaque.”
“We tried that, but even with screens hung inside the diamondoid, they complained that something was missing from their visual perception.”
“Can they see?”
Tiphani shrugged. Nobody had gotten close enough to examine one. Between their fractal-tree shells that sheared off skin like fine coral, to their carbide underfangs that easily snapped through bone, they were unapproachable. “Best guess it’s a multiple-pinhole thing, hidden in the fractal shell. Truth is, we don’t know yet.”
“And yet here we are, giving them the grand tour.”
“We should count ourselves lucky that we can communicate with them at all. They could be Floaters.”
“Floaters don’t have anything we want.”
And you’re a boy too smart to be thinking such things, she thought. She let the silence draw out, looking him in the eyes. He tried the pokerface staredown, but he was too young, too engaged. She waited until he dropped his gaze.
“Are we using artie translation?” he asked, not looking at her.
“Arties are supposed to be a myth.”
“You told me they weren’t.”
“And you’re not supposed to know anything about them until you hit High Manager. So please don’t go broadcasting it around.”
“Or you’ll get in trouble.”
“I’ll make sure your head rolls first,” Tiphani said, forcing a sweet smile. He was just young and smart and ambitious. Probably be Chief himself in less than a decade.
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
“Algorithmic translation, not AI,” she said. “If we had the resources, they’d be working on the glink datastream.”
“But we don’t.”
“No.”
“Too bad we don’t know what the Shrill is saying to its fellows,” he said, coming to sit on the edge of the bed.
“Maybe.” Latest theories were that Shrill intelligence was a network phenomenon. Like an artie. The communication between this node and its kind might be nothing they could ever decode or understand. They might have more in common with computing than humanity, except for the fact that there seemed to be something deeply biological going on within their carbide-hard shell. Let the scientists and arties argue about whether they engineered the shells themselves, or if it was a natural extension of their kind of life. Let them wonder what kind of super-efficient life-processes ran at almost 90 degrees C. Let them argue about the fragments of DNA in their droppings, or whether or not they were droppings, and do talking-head things about panspermia and relationships with earth-life and the possibility of parallel evolution. Because the real thing was that they appeared to have a biological component, they claimed to never die, and that was what mattered.
The voice of Honored Maplethorpe, came, unbidden: Spindle for immortality, Spindle for immortality, that is our offer.
And his unspoken thought, thick in the darkened room: Whatever it takes to make them accept it.
“The restaurant here, you think?” Jimson asked. “Or night-on-the-town it?”
“Later,” she said, grabbing his tie, pulling him down.
He didn’t hesitate. He was kind and considerate and even seemed interested. Tiphani smiled. It was possible, just possible, that he liked her.
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January 30th, 2009 / Comments Off