IGMS Issue 15 (5 page)

Deep within a comet that slipped through the empty space between Neptune's orbit and the Oort Cloud, Fadid broke two hundred years of concentration to answer an ancient subroutine. The subroutine's message: Lo'ihi breach anticipated in the next week. Fadid took the mental equivalent of a deep breath and synthesized a transmitter, but what could he say? More than twenty-five hundred years had passed since Kabime last responded to one of his calls.

Fadid's increased mental activity alerted one of the comet's other resident artists.

"What do you think you're doing?" Levitz-Prolific said. Though Fadid shared a processing core of three cubic micrometres with six other sentients inside the comet, Levitz-Prolific made the mental space seem infinitely smaller.

"Go back to your poem equations," Fadid said as he completed the amplifiers on the communicator.

"This is a composition retreat," Levitz-Prolific said. "Communication with the outside world is for emergencies only. I don't care how famous you were --"

Fadid squirted his message across the vacuum: "Kabime, I'm coming home. Lo'ihi will be born this week."

The message would take ten hours to reach Earth. It would take even longer to beam his personality home and the transmitter he'd synthesized had neither the capacity nor sufficient encryption to accomplish the task. Only the emergency transit beacon had that kind of power. He'd need help from the comet's other artists and a share of their processing power to operate the beacon.

Fadid sounded the general alarm.

Five other personalities pulled out of their respective composition states.

"I'm in the middle of narrative labour," Hawthorne Maythorpe said, the retreat's leader. "Your interruption risks still birth. Our workshop isn't scheduled for another fifty-three months."

"Apologies," Fadid said. "You'll believe me when I say I have no choice. I need to return to Earth."

"No one can leave until the comet's returned to its perihelion," Levitz-Prolific said. "We signed a contract."

"Shut up, LP," Hawthorne said. "We have an emergency transit beacon for a reason. What's the emergency?"

"Lo'ihi is about to breach."

"The Hawaiian sea mount?" Levitz-Prolific said. "You've interrupted my creative genesis so you can go sightseeing?"

"If you had a face and I a hand, I'd slap you," Fadid said. "Almost seven thousand years ago, I made a pact with someone: if we were both still alive when Lo'ihi breached, we would merge. I've been monitoring the volcano since then, and it is due to rise above high tide in the next few days. I'm still alive. I intend to return to earth to see if she lives too."

"Let me guess," Hawthorne said. "Your ancient muse Kabime is the one with whom you made this pact. I'll lend you my mind for the transit. How about the rest of you?"

The other four personalities grumbled their acquiescence.

"My poems don't derive themselves," Levitz-Prolific said. "I refuse to bend a mind as sublime as mine to such a moronic task ."

"I vote we send Levitz-Prolific back too," Hawthorne said.

The grumbled agreement from the other four personalities was much more enthusiastic this time.

"No!" Levitz-Prolific said. "I paid my dues just like everyone else."

Fadid shut out the poet's pleadings. The rest of the personalities put their minds to the task of packaging Fadid and Levitz-Prolific for transit. While his lesser subroutines were encapsulated, Fadid logged in to an external view port. Beyond the cloud of ice and dust that surrounded the comet, Sol was but a bright star, the planets recognizable by the orbits in his memory. The comet was a lonely place, far from in-system distractions, and the perfect venue to craft his culture opera.

When completed, the culture opera would be unique in the artistic accomplishments of the solar system. For the last two hundred years, Fadid had crafted a virtual world that consisted of a continent-island adrift in a vast sea. Boat-loads of refugees from a distant planet wrecked on the island, and it was their songs that would make the opera. The inhabitants were not yet sentient -- Fadid would invoke the spark of sentience in them when he was ready to perform the opera, and set the island's inhabitants free to live their virtual lives, or migrate into the real world as they chose -- but when they gained sentience, they would live their lives through song. Every conversation would be sung, every private thought accompanied by harmonies of doubt and hope. Their great laments would be for the old planet, the homeland to which they could never return but to which they ceaselessly dreamed of returning.

Those same laments were Fadid's. His lost homeland was a woman, Kabime. But there was a difference. With Lo'ihi about to rise from the sea, he'd been given a second chance to return to his lost home. The unfinished culture opera could wait.

"Will you merge with your muse if she still lives?" Hawthorne said over a private band.

"I can't," Fadid said. "I would lose myself. But I have to go back. She hasn't spoken to me in millennia; this may be my last chance."

"Good luck then," Hawthorne said over the public band. "And good riddance to you, Levitz-Prolific."

The remaining sentients fed Fadid and the protesting Levitz-Prolific into the emergency transit beacon. Fadid retreated to a low-level subconsciousness for the transit. He hated the scattered feeling that came with personality transfer.

When the transit completed and his personality reassembled, he joined the long queue at the Hilo transit station in Hawaii. He wasn't the only one here to see Lo'ihi born. Fadid realized he was whistling one of the themes from his culture opera. He hadn't been this excited in centuries: Kabime could be waiting for him, and to make this fine day even better, he no longer had to share processing space with Levitz-Prolific.

The transit authority apologized for the wait, then showed Fadid the rental models that remained for sentients wishing corporeality: several drones, a humpback whale with a steering problem, a school of fish the authority assured him wasn't bait, a variety of gulls and sea birds, and finally two human-types. The first was a post-menopausal woman who'd been modified for flight, but the authority informed him the tattered wings couldn't carry the model's considerable weight. The second was a young adult male type that bore a strong resemblance to a body Fadid had inhabited for several years during his initial romance with Kabime.

"We haven't had the chance to clean that model, sir," the authority said. "It carries several social diseases that could make your trip uncomfortable."

"Nothing a trip to the autodoc won't fix," Fadid said. "Give me a discount and I'll take it."

The transit authority reconfigured the young male's programming so that only Fadid's base code -- the digital signature that formed the back-bone of his personality -- could operate the rental body's myriad functions, and then Fadid transferred into the body.

He promptly sneezed.

It felt good to be flesh again. He wiped the previous renter's nano-mites from his upper lip and put on the tourist-standard clothes neatly folded beside the stasis coffin. He stretched and followed the steady stream of new arrivals -- drones, sea-birds, a stinking monk seal that pulled itself along its belly -- down the corridor that led to the Old Hilo Town slideway.

When he slid out of the transit station, the slideway pulled him toward a field of granular a'a lava rock dotted here and there with stunted trees and sparse grass. The black rock marked the spot where Hilo used to stand. Thirty-five hundred years earlier, Mauna Loa had erupted, and when the lava flow destroyed every barrier Hilo's civic engineers erected to redirect it, the civic engineers coated the city in a thermo-transmitting nanofilm. As the lava engulfed the town, the nanofilm transmitted heat away from the mostly wood buildings and into the ocean. When the steam cleared, Hilo survived, though buried in rock.

Fadid hadn't returned to Hilo since the eruption, and now he scanned the lava field for the Grand Hilo Hotel. A few buildings poked out of the black wasteland -- the twin spires of the Second Kingdom Palace, the five-pointed steeple of a shrine devoted to an archaic THC ministries holy site, and the roof of the original police station -- ancient buildings that had withstood subsequent earthquakes and eruptions thanks to their protective igneous shell, but if the Grand Hilo survived, it remained below the high lava mark. Millennia earlier at the Grand Hilo, he and Kabime had made their pact. That day had proved another high lava mark: in the years that followed the pact, their relationship cooled until it was nothing but dull rock.

The slideway dipped into an elliptical tunnel in the a'a rock and dumped him in Old Hilo Town proper. Where the slideway ended, dozens of gorgeous young human-types who all wore the same blue and white naval uniform formed a phalanx to intercept the new arrivals. A banner hung over the entrance, in the same blue and white naval theme: "Clairvoy Realty Welcomes you to Hilo." He tried to dodge through the uniformed humans, but he saw Kabime's face everywhere in the sea of beautiful young people, they reminded him of bodies Kabime had worn during their centuries together.

"Interested in owning part of the newest Hawaiian island?" a woman said who had the eyes Kabime had worn during their year-long Antarctic trek.

"Ka?" he said, though he knew the girl couldn't be Kabime. She sounded nothing like the woman he'd loved.

"We use English here," the girl said.

"Sorry," he said, then he realized what she'd asked. "How can you be selling land that doesn't exist yet?"

"Clairvoy MacAvoy will stake the first claim to Lo'ihi when it breaches," she said. "He'll be selling what he claims to the highest bidder."

"What if someone lays a claim before this MacAvoy?"

"Where've you been the last hundred years?" the girl said and laughed. "First of all, it's Clairvoy. He doesn't go by his family name. Second, well, why don't I just show you. Will you share perspective with me?"

He consented and a perspective window opened between them that showed a gull's-eye view of the steaming ocean.

"Lo'ihi is only a few metres below the surface," the girl said. "At the rate the lava's solidifying, our volcanologists predict breach sometime tomorrow afternoon or early evening. See those sharks? Those are Clairvoy's. The drones too. He's had a security crew at Lo'ihi for the past twelve hundred years. For the last hundred, only the volcanologists have been allowed to the sea-mount itself. No one will stake a claim before Clairvoy."

The sharks looked impressive, as did the scores of hunter drones that floated a few metres above the surface. Zeppelins and lattice-wings patrolled the upper elevations, but it was what swarmed around the sharks that terrified Fadid. He'd seen sentient-hunting krill in action during a pirating incident in the Philippines. One of the pirates had fallen into krill-laden waters, and the arthropods devoured his body in minutes. It took months to extract the pirate's sentience, which the krill had put into forced stasis, a pseudo-death that left the mind trapped unaware within itself. The waters around Lo'ihi frothed with the tiny arthropod hunters.

"He's sure that's enough?" Fadid said.

"Nothing short of a nuclear strike will take Lo'ihi from Clairvoy," the girl said. "You can buy your share of the new island at the auction tonight. Will we see you there?"

"That depends on the
hors d'oeuvres
," Fadid said, and pushed past the girl.

He had to find Kabime, if only to have someone to share in the joke. This Clairvoy had enlisted an army to guard his Lo'ihi, but Fadid and Kabime beat him to the punch six millennia earlier.

Fadid strolled beneath ancient Japanese fishing bulbs that lit Hilo's lava tunnel streets. After Mauna Loa's great eruption, the civic engineers tunneled through the black lava rock to expose the buried buildings, and those tunnels now formed Hilo's streets. As he walked, hawkers offered him tours to Lo'ihi by whale, squid, blimp, and ornithopter. He ignored dozens of other junk-merchants, save the merchant who sold him a bottle of papaya wine, which he drained before he arrived at the Grand Hilo Hotel. The hotel was full, but Fadid offered the clerk a bribe large enough to evict the current tenant from the room he and Kabime had shared during his last visit.

When they'd stayed at the Hilo Grand those millennia past, the room had offered a stunning view of the rain forest, ocean, volcanoes, and the lazy city. The room offered to recreate the views, but Fadid preferred the black rock that now filled the windows; he could live in his memories instead.

Kabime had first suggested they merge in this room, to which Fadid had originally agreed. It was only after the two of them finished constructing the processing cores in which their new, combined personality would reside that Fadid had lost his nerve. He loved Kabime, but he would lose himself by melding his personality with hers. In this same room, he'd told her he couldn't merge, and had proposed the pact instead: if they still lived when Lo'ihi rose from the sea, they'd merge then.

As he had those millennia past, he still couldn't bear the thought of losing himself, but neither could he bear the thought of life without Kabime.

He checked his messages. One from Hawthorne, a few from fans of his music, and a brief text note from Kabime. Her first response in centuries. His body grew warm at the thought.

"How's the view?" Kabime's message said. "If I know you, you're sitting in our old room in the Grand. Always the sentimentalist, weren't you Fad? I can't believe you came back. In fact, I won't believe it until I see you. If you have returned, meet me tomorrow at the north end of the Bayfront Beach. I'll be in the water past the north point."

The message ended with an encrypted code to which he could send her a direct message. Before he quite realized what he was doing, he connected to her over a private band.

"I said tomorrow," she said. She sent text only, but he could hear the way she spoke the words. Still, he didn't know what to say. How long had it been since their last conversation? He'd composed decades of poetry, songs, operas, librettos, soundscapes, and eulogies that mourned the loss of the love they'd had, but now that they were connected, words escaped him.