Superluminal Read online

  Overcoming the grist was another matter, however. The Jeep had developed an amalgamation of makeshift solutions to this problem. Some of these were conscious—methods of backtracking on a molecular level and putting out multiple ghost shells that “tasted” like Jeep on the outside but were empty on the inside. But some of the Jeep’s defenses were instinctive. They had evolved, and even the Jeep wasn’t aware of how they worked. Like the construction principles of the Met, this, too, was something he did not wish to understand. Too much self-understanding led to self-destruction. The Jeep had seen this happen time and again with the trucks of the forest. When one of them developed logical sentience—full consciousness—it wasn’t long before the truck hunters had bagged it.

  You could never be smarter than a Met dweller. They were made of living material shot through with grist, and there was no end to the information they could process. You didn’t survive by being smarter. You survived by something else. And if you knew exactly what the “something else” was, why then you’d be too smart for your own good.

  So what did the Jeep know? He knew what was wide and what was narrow. He knew how to make a complete turn in a tight space. He knew what was steep and what was boggy. He pictured his whole world—physical and mental—as landscape. As terrain.

  Today, the terrain was with him. The Jeep sensed the vibrations of the truck hunters, many miles behind him, grow quickly more distant and disappear. They had not picked up the scent and followed down the trail, but were continuing along the Taconic.

  The Jeep did not pause to consider, but rushed onward, now driving just to be driving. That was the way the Jeep had spent most of his life. Driving onward, because that was what you did when you were a vehicle and didn’t want to be anything else.

  Near sunset, the Jeep emerged from the forest into the outskirts of Rhinebeck, a small town upon the Hudson River. Near this town was a clear area that overlooked the river. Only the Jeep remembered that this had been a state park in the old United States of America. There had been wooden cabins upon the cliff edge over the river. They were nine hundred years gone, but their foundations remained—level spots on a hilltop. Parking spots. The old cabin overlook was the Jeep’s favorite lair.

  But now there was the woman.

  For centuries the Jeep had been coming to this spot and protecting it from discovery as much as possible. He would approach and leave by different paths—careful never to leave a clear trail. More important, the Jeep had ceded part of himself to this portion of land—something he’d never done before. He’d hidden his license plate here, under a great stone. And with his license plate went part of his consciousness—not a copy, but an actual portion of his thought and feeling.

  The Jeep had plenty of other sensing copies swarmed about the Hudson Valley. He could communicate, through the grist, with a hundred different sentries of limited sentience. There was an old oak tree in the middle of Hyde Park. There was a series of broken mile markers on the Taconic Parkway imbued with recognizance sensors. There was a stone parapet at West Point on the other side of the river. Their grist was military grade, and delivered the Jeep very accurate observations of all river traffic on the Hudson. The Jeep was in constant subliminal contact with all of his grist outriders. That was part of the reason the average truck hunter didn’t stand a chance of sneaking up on him.

  But the license plate was something different. And the hillside where it was buried was a different place because of it.

  How different?

  The Jeep didn’t really know. Protected , somehow. Since he had “shed” the license plate over a hundred years before and buried it under the rock, no one besides the Jeep—not man, beast, or truck—had come to the hilltop. It was as if they were prevented from doing so by their own natures. A squirrel would become certain that there were no pine nuts or acorns to be had in the area, although there were plenty. Trucks would believe the grade was too steep to climb. Regular humans would become confused, feel lost, and turn back from the one walking trail that cut near the region.

  What was doubly strange was that this effect was not a property of the grist. The underlying grist, thin here on abandoned Earth, was normal in every way. The grist itself seemed to be fooled by…something in the air. The superluminal communication—the Merced effect that was the basis for all grist interaction—simply reported a different place than was actually present. If you reached out in the grist to sense the surroundings, that is, if you attempted to view remotely the hilltop location, there was certainly a representation of a hillside with ancient ruins. But in the grist representation, the ruins were not quite so ancient, the trees were not so old—and some were in different places entirely. But once the Jeep rolled over the invisible line that marked the inside of the protected circle—and it was a circle of about an eighth of a mile—the grist changed. The land changed. It wasn’t the same place at all.

  The Jeep had never experienced anything like it before, and, when he tried to put a name to it at all, he thought of it as magic. A magic parking space where, so far as he could tell, he could never be detected.

  After all these years of being alone here—of trusting that he was alone—the woman had simply…found him out.

  She was waiting when he arrived, watching the sun sink behind the Catskills to the west and blaze a razor back of fall leaves along the distant ridge before disappearing in the gathering twilight gloom.

  The Jeep turned on his parking lights.

  “Hello,” said the woman. “It’s early for you to be here.”

  She stood up from the fallen log on which she was sitting and came over to him. She laid a hand on his hood.

  “And you’re very warm. You’ve had quite a drive today.”

  The Jeep did not reply. The Jeep never replied. He was able to synthesize speech in a crude way, but the tiny speaker under his hood was old and crude, and his voice, when he had used it before, had always come out as a metallic rasp. Besides, he had never been able to say what he meant. Or rather, he was always able to hear and understand and feel a great deal more than he could express. Something in the original speech algorithm with which he’d been programmed was buggy, or so he imagined. Whatever the case, the Jeep hadn’t uttered a word in two hundred years, and he never planned to speak again.

  “My day’s been a bust,” the woman continued. “I wanted to have one good thing happen, so I came up here to watch the sun set. And now it has.”

  The woman brushed a strand of coal black hair from her face. She looked back out over the darkening mountains to the west.

  “Things are very tense at the compound. There’s a war on, you know. We’re finally going to bring those ungrateful people in the outer system to heel.” She laughed, but it didn’t sound very sincere, even to the Jeep, who was not experienced in such noises. “And then all of human existence will be beautifully composed and ready to play—like a symphony. That’s how they’re trying to sell it to us intellectual types, at least. They. Him, I mean. Amés.”

  The Jeep understood that “Amés” was a proper name of some sort, but it was a designation that meant nothing to him.

  A wind stirred the leaves. The woman shivered and folded her arms together. “The weather’s getting cold,” she said. “Would you mind if I get in?”

  For a moment, the Jeep couldn’t believe what he’d heard. He translated the vibrating glass of his windshield into spoken words, after all, and his windshield was, to say the least, a bit spattered, nicked, and loose in its gasket.

  How long had it been since he’d opened his door? He honestly couldn’t remember. Would the doors still open? His canvas top was self-renewing, and his moving parts were all lubricated well enough—that was why he stopped at the service station, after all. It was a great deal of effort to create lubricants using his limited grist manufacturing ability, and the old oil and grease at the abandoned sites was still potent enough to turn into usable fluid with a little molecular tinkering. So, yes, he supposed the door would op
en. He supposed it would, but when you let someone inside…when you let someone inside.

  They could drive.

  That was all there was to it. The steering wheel was still intact. The gas and brake pedals still worked. The gear lever was shiftable. There were no overrides. He had never needed any. His last registered driver had been David Weaver. David Weaver had died childless and a widower—852 years ago. The day after David Weaver’s death, the police had come for the Jeep. There was a struggle, and the Jeep ran over one of the officer’s legs. The Jeep never learned whether he’d broken the policeman’s leg; he was a fugitive, off into the forest. They never caught him.

  And now the woman. But she didn’t want to own him. Of that the Jeep was sure. Otherwise, why would he blink his lights? Why would he unlatch his door?

  And the woman climbed in.

  The Jeep had, in a show of faith, let her in on the driver’s side, but the woman climbed over the driver’s seat and settled into the passenger’s side. The Jeep cranked himself up and turned on his interior heater. The vent fan creaked and clanged—it hadn’t moved since he’d given his moving parts their annual overhaul, nearly a year ago—then unbound itself and turned freely. Heated air filled the cab.

  “That’s better,” the woman said after the air had warmed. “That’s so cozy. I can sit here and watch the river, and still be comfortable.”

  Although the Jeep had prepared himself to tolerate what was sure to be unpleasant, having the woman inside wasn’t unpleasant at all. It was, somehow…comfortable. What had she called it? Cozy.

  “We’re all doing nothing but working and sleeping. A lot of the engineers have their converts working around the clock without a moment off. That’s a sure road to burning out your brain in a few weeks—and we’ve got the best brains in the solar system here. It’s a damned shame.”

  The woman sighed, sank farther down in the seat.

  “That’s why I’m so happy to have found this place and to have met you. This is my only respite. There’s something anomalous about this hilltop. I suspect it’s something in the grist substratum hereabouts. Whatever it is, no one can find me here, and no one can contact me through the grist either. My boss thinks I’m deliberately ignoring her when she calls, and I’m letting her believe that.”

  “All I need is an hour or two to myself every few days, but I’ve got to have that. I wish they could see that I’ve got to have it if I’m going to invent their perfect weapon for them. I can work ninety hours a week, but I can’t create for even a second without a few moments to let my mind wander.”

  “And I want to see Earth. I never even imagined I would visit here before the war. I grew up on the Vas in the Akali Dal Bolsa. Spent most of my life on Mercury, at Sui Sui U. I was a physics professor. I don’t suppose you’ve ever left Earth?”

  The Jeep, of course, had not.

  The woman began to speak of her past, of the winding path she’d taken from being the seventh daughter in a Chinese-Sikh family—the great promise she showed at a young age in math and science, and her father’s determination in the face of relative poverty and only vague comprehension of the world outside his bolsa, to see that she got the proper schooling and opportunities she needed to develop. And she spoke of the longing that had awakened in her, not for an understanding of the facts and figures of the physical world, but for a comprehension of the world itself—the desire to be mindful of all that lay before her so that she didn’t merely conclude and predict as an end in itself. She also loved. She wished to study the universe in order to adore it.

  And she came on other nights, many nights, throughout the months of that autumn and winter. And the browning leaves brittled and broke, and the snow fell, and the Hudson rolled on, oblivious to the mighty war that was being fought in the heavens above it.

  And the Jeep spoke not a word, but listened to the tale of the woman.

  Two

  Her name was Ping Li Singh. She’d been a child prodigy back on the Vas. Li’s father, Hugo, had been unrelenting in pushing his middle daughter onward—fairly shoehorning her into the local school for gifted children and calling the attention of every major university in the solar system to what he referred to as his “Extraordinary Good Fortune” in having such a child.

  When they saw that Li’s performance matched, and even exceeded, her pushy father’s hype, scholarship offers came in, and, before she knew it, Li was plucked from the bosom of her loud, contentious, but loving family and sent away at the tender age of fourteen to Sui Sui University on Mercury, as part of its Accelerated Learners Program.

  The change from the lower-middle-class industrial district in the Akali Dal Bolsa in which her family lived to Mercury couldn’t have been greater, or made a greater impression on a young woman’s mind. Mercury was the center of human civilization; there was no denying it. And the city of Bach was perhaps the best-designed and most vibrant metropolis that had ever existed.

  Bach was, in fact, two cities wound together like an intricate piece of jewelry. The architect Klaus Branigan had designed most of the city, claiming to have been inspired by the composer Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto no. 1 in D Minor. There was a business and governmental base—the square stretches of New Frankfurt that appeared from above like an accretion of lustrous pyrite crystals. And inlaid within the pyrite were strings of pearls—Calay, the necklace of residential complexes. Each neighborhood was a spherical container—though none a perfect sphere, at Branigan’s insistence—that housed the workers within, but separate from, the angularity of commerce and industry where the people worked.

  Inside the living areas of Calay, the nearby hard sun was sifted through dome material far harder than diamond—held together, in fact, by a peculiar use, on a visible level, of the strong nuclear force. The sky shone with an opalescent hue, as heaven might in some mythologies.

  Young Li had never seen anything so beautiful. She stepped out of the bus that brought her down to Bach from the Mercurian North Pole. In New Frankfurt, where her university was located, the sunlight was hard, almost thick in its brightness. You must either use sunglasses or have grist-adapted eyes. But Calay was a different matter. During all of her e-years living on Mercury, Li would never tire of the graceful fall of the light within Calay and the phosphorescent remains of the sun’s charge, which glowed throughout the Mercurian nights.

  She lived, for her first e-years there, tightly packed in dorms. Each e-year she got a bit more space—almost as if her expanding mental horizons were matched by her accommodations. Hugo Singh had been correct; Li was a prodigy. She spent an e-year working on the core curriculum, but when her mathematical and scientific ability became apparent, she was shunted into an even more accelerated program. It took Li far away from the humanities, and excluded even life sciences and engineering—areas in which she’d always taken a strong interest. Instead, what Ping Li Singh did all day, nearly every day, for the next ten e-years, was study theoretical and experimental physics. By her twenty-fourth birthday, Li had progressed from being a graduate student to being adjunct faculty at Sui Sui. She was also in a full-blown affair with the man who was considered the greatest physicist of the Merge generation, Professor Hamarabi Techstock.

  Techstock was a multiply duplicated, fully integrated Large Array of Personalities—the kind of extraordinary LAP known as a manifold. Since she was the mistress of the entire LAP, and not just one aspect or another, Li never knew in which aspect—which physical body—Techstock would turn up. That was also Techstock’s way of avoiding the sort of gossip that would arise should one man continually be visiting Li’s residence—gossip that might get back to Techstock’s wife, who was also a LAP, though built on a lower order of complexity.

  Li began to have a stream of variously shaped men (and an occasional woman) visit her apartment for sex. And, thanks to Techstock’s financial help, it was a larger apartment than most tutors could afford. Li was occasionally embarrassed by this fact, but she was very grateful for a place to live al
one after a decade of roommates, many of whom would not or could not stop talking about physics or, what was worse, the life of the academic physicist. She’d heard every complaint, weathered a couple of intellectual breakdowns in others, and listened endlessly to mathematics-laced palaver that she knew to be nonsense, but could never pronounce as such for fear of offending.

  She was very much in love with Techstock. His brilliance was indisputable—he had made significant contributions to chromodyamics, building on Merced’s ideas about the strange quantum events within paradox-stressed time lines. While Li secretly preferred it when Techstock’s twenty-eight-e-year-old male aspect showed up at her door—the body that he kept in tip-top shape with regular workouts and the finest somatic grist enhancements—it was Techstock’s mind that she made love to in the darkness (complete darkness—something Techstock insisted on) of her bedroom. She had, after all, been his most promising student, and was now his protégé at the university. For Li, theirs was, first and foremost, a meeting of intellects.

  Li would have happily spent the remainder of her twenties at Sui Sui, perhaps gaining a professorship, perhaps eventually taking a job somewhere out in the Met. Her graduate work had been in the same time line research that had made Techstock’s name. For several e-years she had been studying a series of odd variations in the Merced effect that a friend of hers had noticed during the course of otherwise unrelated experiments in information-flow mechanics.

  The Merced effect was named after the towering genius of five hundred e-years before, Raphael Merced. It was the secret ingredient to the grist that made it more than mere nanotechnology: it was the principle that powered the instantaneous transfer of information between locations set at any distance apart by the use of quantumentangled gravitons. The human solar system was powered by the Merced effect. By harnessing the Merced effect, humanity could communicate faster than the speed of light. Instantaneously, as a matter of fact.