Asimov's Science Fiction 02/01/11 Read online

  How to pervert souls.

  Good; she was warm again.

  It took her a few minutes to distinguish the temperature differentials of the catalog from the currents of warm air coming from ceiling vents. Once she could do that, though, she found the memory quickly. In the clear vial the memory juice was colored lilac. She found another memory for perverting souls then, two stacks over, found a memory for resurrecting them.

  She didn’t ingest any of those memories.

  She’d wait until she had some likely souls before her.

  The tower had a hundred rooms, and a hundred stories: one room per floor. The center of the tower was a stairwell contained within a great segmented ferro-carbon tube. The tube rotated, each segment turning at a different rate, each room moving along with it. Because the rooms were brightly colored, green, yellow, blue; and because they could be anywhere along the circuit, the tower as a whole looked like a prayer-flag.

  The seventh room from the top was colored hunter’s orange. It was a tool-shop, and forbidden to her. But she didn’t try to subvert the lock that the Papa had installed on its door. She simply climbed out the window of the next room up, jumped down on the tool-shop roof as it passed beneath her, then crawled through the vent connected to the fume-hood inside. It was scary as she swung down into the vent—a twelve-hundred foot drop to the pitched stone roof of the Elderhaus. It would have been easier if she wasn’t scared of heights.

  She dropped from the fume-hood to a work table.

  The tool-shop smelled of antiseptic and preservative. Lab equipment—cases, glassware, scanners, work-limbs and etc.—glittered frostlike, stuck in time lock. It was cold enough to give her goose-bumps. The machinery was stacked on shelves. Somewhere there were tools for soul work. Little Girl hoped she’d find out which tools soon.

  She pulled out a plastic container in which she’d put the five best souls, big and buzzy. Then she pulled out the memory for perverting souls.

  In daylight, the memory was colored pink.

  She chewed off the end of the vial and drank the memory down.

  She itched, she yawned, she felt a stranger walk inside of her.

  She saw the tool-shop with the eyes of a technician.

  Everything had names, now. This case a protein sequencer, this construction of metal plates a femto-assembler. And this—a narrow cabinet six feet high with many closed drawers, supported by four bronze feet, claw-toed like the feet of a lion—this was the soulmixer. It was the tool she would use to pervert the souls.

  No, not pervert. Enhance, amplify, improve.

  The new memories were awkward in her head, intrusive, foreign, lacking the ease of real thoughts, feeling wrong like an ill-fitting hat.

  But they worked.

  On a shelf, she found a tool called an icebreaker. With it she tapped the soulmixer.

  With a whine, the time lock attenuated, bright stress patterns rippling through the surface. Curdled time, glowing red, fell like embers to the floor, hissing before vanishing.

  Little Girl touched a lever atop the cabinet.

  From recessed panels at the sides of the cabinet emerged two arms, gray and shiny but shaped just like human arms. The hands wore elegant white evening gloves. Coming out at shoulder-height, the arms made the narrow cabinet look like a torso, and as the hands reached to pull open the two doors, it was like a headless man opening his coat.

  Her father’s face leered at her from the cabinet’s dark interior.

  “Sasha!” he said.

  “Call me Little Girl.”

  It was just a projection, but it looked real. His eyebrow arched. His face was florid. His jowls hung like wattles. The Papa looked fat, but not as fat as he was now. No, this look was forty or fifty years old. And the automaton that ran it was stupid. “Sasha!”

  She had to play. “What do you want?”

  “Souls are not toys.”

  “That’s good. I’m too old for games.”

  “You are forever innocent!”

  “I’m sixty-seven years old.”

  “Souls are for adults. There is no greater responsibility than that of a curator of the consciousness of a human being. This responsibility consists of ensuring the integrity and completeness of the soul. Souls are not to change.”

  “Just like I’m not to change?”

  “Sasha!”

  She’d led the automaton off track. “What do you want?”

  “Change means decay, and decay means death. Perpetual stasis is our ideal. Do not dilute a soul; do not augment one. Neither an emotion more nor a perception less. A changed soul is an abomination.”

  “What about turning yourself off? Isn’t that a change?”

  “Sasha!”

  “Stuff it,” she said. She waved the icebreaker at the face, and with a static crackle, it disappeared.

  Lights came on inside the cabinet.

  It contained a sequence of stacked glass spheres, vertically connected by clear tubes, rising initially from a big sphere resting on the bottom of the cabinet. From the spheres there projected spigots that connected to other tubes. These tubes led down to a glass cone set beside the big sphere. Both the cone and the big sphere were subdivided by glass plates studded with gleaming electronic components.

  The soulmixer was for dissolving souls and recombining them.

  Little Girl knew how to use it.

  The big sphere was the donor crematorium. You had to destroy a soul to make a soul. She opened its side. A platinum-wire crèche emerged on an asbestos-lined platform. She took out the second-buzziest soul. It reminded her of a cool summer evening after a hot day. It would make a fine donor. She set it in the crèche. The platform retracted into the sphere.

  The glass cone was the recipient incubator. Its crèche had a small heating element. You had to heat a soul just slightly to make it amenable to new awarenesses. She opened it and put the buzziest soul on its crèche. This soul was tinged with loneliness. Like a crowded room where you’re too shy to talk.

  Mixing the two souls would be cool.

  She flicked a switch to start the machine.

  It throbbed. It shook. Bands of electric light moved up the big sphere, faster and faster, as the soul took bursts of heat and volleys of radioactive particles. The soul seemed to cringe, puckers deepening, nodules writhing. It glowed red, then yellow. Then with a Thunk it exploded, white-hot bits of shell flying glassward, and a plume of black smoke and ashes gloriously colored—carmine and emerald and royal purple—rising from the crèche. The soul had been cremated.

  Now it would be distilled.

  Driven upward by heat, the ashes passed into successive spheres. In each sphere, shortwave radiation of a particular frequency—ultraviolet in this sphere, x-rays in this one, gamma rays in that one—freed moods or awarenesses of a different class: proprioception, causality, meaningfulness, and so on, stripping backbone molecules exothermically and thus cooling the awarenesses so that they precipitated and drained into a collection drain, ready to go to the other soul. How much went to the other soul was controlled by the spigots for each sphere. Too much, the soul would burst. Too little, the soul would have been expanded for no good reason. Today Little Girl opened the spigot on the third sphere wide, allowing the sense of meaning and spirituality to flow shiny and generous into the glass cone. The other spigots: causality, morality, sense of rhythm, and all the rest, she opened to just a trickle. Dull colors, tarnished silvers, coppery greens, blended into a muddy brown fluid that fell sticky into the cone.

  And meanwhile the second soul, resting in the recipient cone, bathed in a solution of alcohol and salts, had been warmed so that it expanded slightly. Cracks in its carapace had widened, microscopic holes enlarged; and it was through these apertures that the awarenesses penetrated the soul. With the salt as catalyst and the alcohol as building blocks of the backbone, the awarenesses crowded into the soul, integrating with the processes already there or after bold biochemical battle replacing them. Or (Little Girl
loved this outcome) joining incorrectly with an existing awareness to make a monster: happy-terror or bleak-joy or erotic-time.

  The solution went from clear to gray as awarenesses dripped down into it.

  Bits of awareness and broken moods bubbled up from the soul, sometimes leaving a bone-white ring in the narrow part of the cone.

  At last, the donor soul was extinct, the tubes emptied, and the recipient soul was sated with new awarenesses.

  The crèche slid out from the glass cone.

  The wet soul had the sharp scent of ethyl alcohol.

  She touched it. It felt strange.

  It made her feel like all the universe was lonely.

  * * *

  The sphinxes lived in a vast warehouse in the desert east of the Gash Peculiar.

  Little Girl, five value-added souls in her pocket, parasol to shade her from the sun, walked across the warehouse’s sand-covered roof, looking for an entrance. The warehouse was buried beneath sand, fine white sand that piled into dunes or was wind-swept so shallow you could see rusting remnants of building machinery: fan blades, pipes that went nowhere, and gray boxes presumably dangerous, for they triggered in her a sense of fear whenever she got too close to them.

  The roof was big, a rectangle four miles by three, and she was frustrated. She knew there were doors, trapdoors—she’d been down one years ago—but she couldn’t remember where they were. The dunes shifted endlessly. She could spend weeks tromping around and kicking sand before she uncovered a trapdoor.

  The thing to do was try the last memory.

  It was for resurrecting souls inside a sphinx, but it might have instructions on finding one, too.

  She sat down on the side of a sand dune. She pushed the handle of the parasol into the sand so that the parasol stood up and kept her shaded. She pulled out the last memory vial. She drank the memory down.

  It tasted of butterscotch.

  She sat waiting. She watched hot wind blow a dust devil across the roof. She gazed with contempt at her small hands and little feet shod in soft-wire slippers. Suddenly her stomach felt unsettled, and she burped.

  Her guts wrenched inside her.

  It was a bad memory.

  The sky turned green as she passed out.

  “Why are you lying there like that, Sasha?”

  She was on her side, cheek pressed against the warm sand. In the distance the roof marked the horizon. Close-by, the Living Will squatted beside her in his striped bell-bottoms and his huge patent leather shoes. Clutching her belly, she rolled so she could see his face. “Call me Little Girl. I’ve got a stomachache.”

  He said, “Very well, Little Girl.” Then he closed his eyes for a while. She wondered if he had figured out she had been poisoned by a memory and was now silently summoning medical help. The silver of his eyes showed through his translucent eyelids. Finally he looked at her and said, “We must discuss the disposal of your father’s estate.”

  “What?”

  “We must discuss the disposal of your father’s estate.”

  “I heard you the first time. What about me?” She groaned and clasped her stomach.

  “This is about you. It concerns you directly. You are your father’s only daughter and the only autonomous being he has engendered. Therefore, and also because of the respect and affection he holds for you—”

  “—respect?”

  “—and affection he holds for you, he intends to give you all his possessions, including his estate and his semi-autonomous agents, on the understanding that you will meet the following two conditions: one, you will not pervert a soul or cause a perverted soul to be reborn, and two, you will forthwith and forever agree to maintain the cloudmind, soothing its rages, encouraging its generosity, and persuading it to return from its absences.”

  “The cloudmind?” Her stomach lurched. “That stupid . . . bitch!”

  The Living Will regarded her silently. Then he said, “I wasn’t aware that the cloudmind had a sex.”

  “She doesn’t! It’s just a way of speaking!”

  “You are shouting, Little Girl.”

  “I’m in pain. I’m just saying the cloudmind’s mean. Worse than mean—she’s insane!”

  “Your father sends her gentle dreams, to soothe her in her rages.”

  “I know that.” A foul moodstorm meant the Papa would spend three days in his dream closet, issuing pleasant fantasies and bucolic visions in an attempt to calm the cloudmind. Her stomach lurched again. “He wants to drop the responsibility of handling her temper onto my shoulders? Is that why he wants to die?”

  “I’m not capable of guessing motives.”

  Little Girl groaned and closed her eyes.

  When she looked again, the Living Will was gone.

  Someone gave her a cup of viscous milky fluid to drink. She finished it and then sat up. She was inside the warehouse, sitting beside Alistair Jones.

  “You looked awful. Dehydrated and everything. I brought you down here.”

  Here was the roof of a module within the warehouse. Modules—storage containers fifty feet long and ten feet deep—were arrayed like buildings on a street. Only these buildings had buildings below them, and more buildings farther down, for the warehouse went a half mile into the earth, and there were many levels. And the street was one of rails not pavement, and in three dimensions, for there were rails along most of the levels. Along some of the rails there ran delivery carts, all she could see empty of cargo, but moving as if with intention. Lit sporadically by glowglobes, the warehouse looked infinitely long and infinitely deep.

  Her stomach felt better. The milky stuff must be an antidote for the poison. “I wanted to find out how to catch a sphinx.”

  “You should have asked me for help. I could have run a bioassay on you, found out which memory proteins you have enzymes for, which you were intolerant to.”

  “I like to do my own research.”

  “Clearly.”

  He sounded hurt.

  Little Girl felt bad for not being gracious. “Thanks for helping me.”

  “It was nothing,” Alistair said.

  “It was more than the Living Will would do.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Just an automaton. He says the Papa is terminating himself.”

  “That’s bad. I’m sorry.” Alistair made to touch her shoulder, but she shrugged him off. He said, “He’s sort of my father, too.”

  “You don’t have a father.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  What Alistair meant was that dreams the Papa once sent to the cloudmind after a particularly bad moodstorm so delighted her that she rained down biocodes for fertility, rekindling a time-locked embryo in the Plaza of Echoes.

  Alistair asked, “Is he sick or something?”

  “Not so much. It’s mostly that he’s lazy.”

  “Maybe you could get him to change his mind.”

  “Maybe.” She felt anger smoldering inside her and wanted to change the subject. “I’ve got some souls I want to put in sphinxes.”

  He examined his fingernails carefully. “Yeah?”

  “So, do you think you could help me with it?”

  His face lit up so bright she wondered if he had luminescence stitched into his hemoglobin. “I think I could, Little Girl.”

  They rode a delivery cart a mile to the north and ninety levels deep, avoiding the grasp of robot arms that tried to pick them up and stack them in modules, singing along hesitantly with the cart, who was crazy:

  “Racks of tongue and drums of ears,

  “We ship ’em.

  “Packs of skin and tuns of tears.

  “We ship ’em-

  “Quick!”

  Down deep in the warehouse the modules were bigger than those higher up. The cart took them to one that must have been a quarter mile wide. Creaking robot arms like segmented lead pipes reached for them, but instead of lying low in the cart to avoid being grabbed, Alistair said, “This is the sphinx house! Come on!”
And then he rolled out onto the delivery bay.

  Little Girl followed him, the robot arm just swiping her shoulder as she rolled out of the cart.

  “You want to crawl,” Alistair told her. “Sphinxes can be flighty.”

  The delivery bay had a big door that opened into the side of the module. They crawled toward it. They followed the retreating arms inside. Inside was brightly lit at first. They saw random things precariously stacked: a boulder, a book, a corset, a tire, and a musical keyboard in one stack; a work boot, a beanbag, a jackhammer, and the mounted skeleton of a deep-sea bass in another. The effect was of a museum, not a warehouse. Beyond the section of random stacks, the lighting was inconsistent, flickering fluorescent tubes separated by patches of darkness. Noise, maybe the crackling of the dying fluorescents, came from deep within the module. Far off in the darkness there seemed to be motion and maybe more random stacks.

  There was the smell of dust and of machine oil.

  “Where are the sphinxes?”

  “Whisper. Follow me.”

  They crawled into the darkness. What she had taken for stacks of things turned out to be long-dead refrigerated containers. She wanted to look inside them, but Alistair kept her crawling. “There. See them?”

  Out of the gloom, the sphinxes resolved.

  There was a small herd of them, fifteen or twenty. They were about her size but quadruped. They were grazing on the floor of the module, chewing through the rusty corrugated floor to get at something beneath it, probably insulation. As they chewed, their diamond-hard teeth raised sparks from the metal. The bright sparks lit their muscular haunches and their stubby hairless wings.

  “Okay, let’s get closer.”

  They crawled a little more. Metal shavings on the floor pricked her hands. “Stop,” Alistair said. “Now watch this,” he said. “What has eyes but no face? What is red when there is no light?”

  He spoke loudly, and the sphinxes reacted.

  They raised their heads and turned. Their eyes glowed orange.

  “What is analog in the morning, binary in the afternoon, and decimal at night?”