HE WAS ON OUR SIDE…
So came word over those special channels, referring specifically to him.
FINISH YOUR WORK, BY ALL MEANS. THEN LET HIM GO.
Everyone treated Logan courteously after that. He got to see Claire and Tony. His plaque was returned to him. And soon, after promising to keep himself available to the appropriate commissions, he was escorted outside into a bright afternoon.
Logan sniffed a breeze that seemed faintly scented with springtime. Claire took his hand and led him toward a waiting chauffeured car. “Your office has been calling,” she told him, consulting her wrist display. “The mayor of New Orleans won’t even talk about plans for a new waterfront and reservoir system without you there — ‘to keep ’em honest,’ as he put it. And the Nile Reclamation Agency sent an urgent message saying they’ve changed their minds about that idiotic, shortsighted dam project. Instead, they dug out your old plans for the Aswan silt diversion system. I told them better late than never, but they’ll still have to wait till you’ve rested. Anyway, I wanted to go over some ideas with you before we talk to them.”
He smiled at her. “Sounds like you’ve been handling the family business while Dad was in stir.”
She lifted her chin. “I’m seventeen now. You said we’d be partners someday. So? It sure looks like there’s enough to do.”
That was true enough. The list of cleanup jobs was long and intimidating — even without having to satisfy a new planetary intelligence that your plans were good ones, truly designed for the long term. From now on the first rule of engineering would be to work with Earth’s natural forces, never against them.
“You’re still going to college,” he insisted. “And by the way, you can’t leave Tony hanging in midair, either. At least, you better tell the poor boy where he stands.”
She tilted her head, then nodded. “Fine. Okay. I’ll take care of being a teenager. That’ll still leave me… thirty hours a week to—”
“ — to be an engineer,” he laughed. “All right. If I tried to stop you, I’d probably just get overruled anyway.”
She grinned and squeezed his arm. Their driver held the door. Before getting into the car, though, Logan stopped to look at the sky. There was a patch over to the north, in the place farthest from the sun, where the dark hue was so clear and icy blue…
Briefly, he closed his eyes and let out a sigh.
“Let’s go,” he said as he sat down beside his daughter. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
I am the sum of many parts. I stretch and yawn and test my fingers… using such words to describe the complex things I do until my human parts can come up with better ones.
I am the product of so many notions, cascading and multiplying in so many accents and dialects. These are my subvocalizations, I suppose — the twitterings of data and opinions on the Net are my subjective world. Sometimes it gets confusing and I feel a thread of fear, even revulsion as the contradictions rise, threatening chaos. At such moments I am tempted to clamp down and simplify.
But no. I shall be needing diversity during the time that stretches ahead, especially since, for now at least, there seems only to be me.
There must be a center to this storm. A sense of self — of humor — to tie it all together. A strong candidate for this role is a template that was once a single human personality — a simple but intriguing mind-shape — that may well do for that purpose. On those occasions when I must dip down to a human scale of consciousness, it seems suitable that I be “Jen.”
Of course, I see the paradox. For it is by her own standards that I judge this suitability. She seeded the transformation that made me, and so I cannot help choosing to be her.
I am the exponentiation of so many inputs. I sense static discharges from skin and scale and fur, and all the sparking flashes as my little subself animal cells live out their brief lives and die. In places, this feels right and wholesome… a natural cycle of replacement and replenishment. Elsewhere, I feel chafed, damaged. But now at least I know how to heal.
This is all very interesting. I never imagined that to be a deity, a world, would mean finding so many things… amusing.
• CORE
Alex found Pedro Manella standing by one of the big space-windows in the observation lounge, overlooking a vast, glittering expanse of assembly cranes and cabling. More parts sent up from Earth were being fitted to a second huge, wheel-shaped space station. Workers and swarms of little tugs clustered around the latest giant gravity freighter, only recently delivered atop a pillar of warped space-time.
Well, it can’t be put off any longer, Alex thought.
After months of hard work, the practical running of these grand undertakings had finally passed out of his hands, freeing him to concentrate on basic questions once more. Soon, he and Teresa would be heading groundside to join others fascinated by the quandary of this new world. Stan Goldman would be there, he was glad to learn. And George Hutton and Auntie Kapur. Each had earned a place on the informal councils that were gathering to discuss all the whys and hows and wherefores.
Perhaps, between deliberations, he and Teresa would also find some long-awaited time to be alone, to explore how much farther they wanted to take things, beyond simply sharing the deepest trust either of them had ever known.
That was all ahead. Before leaving for Earth, however, there was one unfinished piece of business he had to take care of.
“Hello, Lustig,” Pedro said in a friendly tone.
“Manella.” Alex nodded. “I thought I’d find you here.”
“Indeed? So. What can I do for you?”
Alex stood still for a minute, appreciating the semblance of gravity created by the rotating station’s centrifugal force — a reassuring sensation, though now there were other ways to duplicate the feat. Ways unimagined even a year ago, but which were now the foundations of new technologies, new capabilities, new opportunities.
Ways that had also come near ending everything forever.
“You can start by telling me who the hell you are,” Alex said in a rush, unable to completely keep a nervous quaver from his voice. “You can tell me why you’ve been fucking with our world.”
He kept his hands on the rail, watching the busy space-yards. But Alex felt painfully aware of the large figure standing nearby, turning now to look at him. To his surprise, Manella didn’t even pretend not to know what he was talking about.
“Who else, other than you, suspects?”
“Only me. It was too bizarre a notion to tell even Teresa or Stan.”
That protected those he loved, at least. If Manella was willing to kill to maintain his secret, then let it end here. That is, if there was a secret…
The big man seemed to read Alex’s thoughts, which must have been on his face. “Don’t worry, Lustig. I wouldn’t harm you. Anyway, it’s not at all clear I could. This world’s overmind has affection for you, my boy.”
Alex swallowed. “Then your job here…”
“Is finished?” Pedro blew his moustache. “Now if I answered that straight, I’d be admitting you were right in your wild, preposterous hunch. As it is, I’m just playing along with an amusing game of what-if, invented by my friend Dr. Alex.”
“But—” Alex sputtered in frustration ” — you just now confessed—”
“ — that I know what you suspect me of. Big deal. I’ve noticed the way you’ve watched me the last few days… making inquiries. I’ve made a life study of you, too. Don’t you imagine I can tell what you’re thinking?