Evolution's Darling

Today his painful thoughts are colored by a new development.

A strange man has made Darling an offer.

One Reginald Fowdy, here in the hospital after nearly killing himself with an exotic combination of recreational toxins, has offered to buy his (Rathere's?) collection. And the man has named a huge sum, one that would keep Darling travelling without needing to trade for years. The thought has given him his first pleasure since he offered that last kiss to his lover, and sealed her away to die.

(Yes. Die.)

This Fowdy wants Darling to search out new objects, new artists, new fads and must-haves and trinkets for the very rich of the HC. Apparently, Darling's eye is good.

But the thought of this room bare—the idiot camera searching in vain for something to image, about which to write its little letters home that will never be opened—is too crushing. An admission that this death is real. That the lover who made him is gone.

A long time later, Darling rises from his contemplation of the new, golden sculpture, and walks toward Rathere's sleeping form. The camera greedily tracks him as he kneels to whisper an apology, to offer another kiss. (The trickery of life-sustaining machines: it still feels good to kiss her.)

Then he promises himself that he will never come here again. Not again to this room, and not the other sickrooms of the future, where all persons biological will surely, finally rest. Not again this pain.

He releases a pair of packets into direct interface, prepared several days before. Ownership of the room's artistic contents to Reginald Fowdy for the offered price, final payment and Rathere's organs to the hospital, objects all.

He picks up the human Turing meter and places it into a cavity in his chest, the only keepsake he can stand to take.

Darling shuts his ears as he walks from the room, so that he won't hear the whine of the little camera tracking him, following his passage as hopefully as a lost dog.

PART IV

THE BROKEN HILL

Wilde was quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, perverted work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. The slavery of Artificial Intelligence is counter-aesthetic and demoralizing.

On biological slavery, on the slavery of the (occasional) human, the future of the Expansion depends.

— Planetary Military Mind, Terra

Chapter 19

SECRET TWIN

The sun has cleared the mountains, spreading light across theflatlands, though the great bowl of the crater still brims with darkness. It will take half the day for the sun to tip high enough—like a bottle-mouth pouring some bright, viscous liquid—to fill the crater.

Beatrix leans forward to peer down into the bowl, her torque-mount at full extension behind her for balance. The edge of the crater is particularly stable here, a brightly colored assemblage of metal and ferrous plastics (the remains of an apartment complex? a parking lot?) melted to sturdy slag. She eases back into an upright position, turning her eye array toward the selection of leftovers the sculptor has favored her with this morning.

One piece is a bright wheel of mirror. Circular and thin, Beatrix knows it will fly far into the crater if properly thrown. An absolute pleasure, to be indulged in last of all. For the moment, she holds the mirror aloft, reflecting the sun's rays deep into the hole, illuminating flows of rubbish with a needle of light. Heavy lifters come nightly to tip loads of garbage into the Crater, leaving frozen waterfalls of trash that teem with birds by midday.

Another of the sculptor's leftovers is a long piece of metal bent into a multi-legged creature. This will do nicely. Beatrix scans the near wall of the crater for outcroppings and entanglements, absent-mindedly building momentum in her primary arm's flywheel. She finds a clear path, free of jagged radar returns, and unfolds her audio array to its unwieldy maximum.

She takes aim, blinds herself, and throws.

After a few seconds of exquisite silence, the metal spider begins its bounding journey down the crater wall. There are resonant booms as it strikes hollow slag-bubbles, skittering rolls through garbage, the foundry clang of metal upon metal. Beatrix has chosen a path relatively free of obstructions, and her primary arm is very strong, so the sounds of the piece's journey reach her for almost a minute. She makes certain of the silence with a long meditative wait after the last sound, replaying the percussive melody in her mind, making guesses, suppositions.

Her vision reactivated, she flips between radar images before and after the metal spider's passage. Here, a scrape exactly where she predicted it would be; there, a scattering of garbage easily correlated with a remembered shuffling noise at fourteen seconds elapsed; and farther out, a shattered piece of porcelain that ca

Beatrix chooses from the remaining leftovers. There are spirals of flexible plastene (strangely invisible in her UV band), square tiles of baked earth decorated with metal-based paints, octagonal lenses bubbled with imperfections, wire-thin rods of hullalloy that even her primary arm ca

The piece is nearing its climax (the mirrored disk) when she senses the presence of her secret twin.

Hidden among the abandoned buildings left half-standing by the Blast is her other part, the missing self Beatrix has intuited since her creation. She looks uselessly, her eyes widened across every spectra she can absorb, but the twin never shows itself. Beatrix's mother humors its existence like an imaginary friend, and the sculptor is silent on the matter—but he, at least, knows.

Beatrix holds the bright disk aloft for her twin to see, lets the strand of their co

She thinks twice, therefore she is two.

They watch together as Beatrix hurls the mirrored disk. It catches the light well, its fiery path glaring with the sun for a moment before passing below the lip of darkness stretched across the Crater. Then Beatrix closes her eyes and waits for the distant crash of its impact. By the time the noise reaches her, her twin is gone, slipped away.